Boston’s 311 hotline is getting a major overhaul behind the scenes, as the city replaces a 2008-era platform with a modern constituent relationship management system that plugs directly into asset-management tools. Officials say callers and app users should notice familiar menus and phone prompts, while most of the hard work, including routing, work orders and data handling, moves into a cloud-native stack meant to move requests faster.
Why the overhaul happened
Boston Chief Information Officer Santiago Garces says the aging 311 platform had “started to serve so many different purposes” that it lost the clean architecture needed for reliable upgrades and maintenance. Garces told InformationWeek that a previous multi-year replacement effort under an earlier administration ran for nearly four years, cost far more than expected and still did not deliver a working rollout. This time, the city is leaning on a milestone-driven, agile strategy that is designed to ship incremental value instead of betting everything on a single, risky cutover.
What the city is building
The new backbone combines Creatio as the CRM hub with Cartegraph for managing Boston’s physical assets, which allows a single 311 case to be tracked from intake all the way to the crew that repairs it, according to Boston.gov. A Creatio customer case study says the platform already handles roughly 1,000 cases a day and reaches about 675,000 residents, and credits no-code tools for speeding up iteration. City technologists say closer integration should cut down on misrouted tickets and make status updates clearer for residents and frontline crews.
How the rollout works
Project teams split the job into targeted milestones. Informational inquiries, which made up more than half of 311 call volume, went into production in under three months, and Garces estimated that about 40–60% of planned functionality is already live, he told InformationWeek. Garces compared the migration to “almost like open-heart surgery,” since teams are rerouting case flows away from the legacy system while keeping public-facing forms and phone lines looking the same. The agile setup also let the city reshuffle priorities, delaying streets-and-highways components until after winter while speeding up parks-related work before spring.
What residents will notice
For residents, the promise is shorter handoffs, clearer status messages in the BOS:311 app and fewer requests bounced between departments. The Creatio write-up notes that Boston plans to explore AI-driven routing and agentic automation on top of the new platform, while implementation partner Keen360 describes the overall program as a phased, cross-department rollout that reaches early deployments through 2026. Throughout all of this, city teams emphasize that the 3-1-1 phone line and online channels stay open and usable during the migration.
What to watch next
The full overhaul is expected to wrap up by mid-2026, and the city has published guides detailing how data will transition and how open-data feeds will change as milestones go live. Residents and civic watchers can follow Boston Digital Service updates to track which service types have moved onto the new platform and when additional features roll out.
