With Internet penetration now exceeding 70 percent nationwide, the new digital majority of citizens are demonstrating a willingness and appetite to do business with their government online. In a recent major report, "Citizen 2010: Leading for Results, Governing Through Technology," the Center reported: "The use of online government in the United States now stands at 43 percent, an increase of nine percent in just the last 12 months. In selected program areas, up to 79 percent of users have chosen the Internet over other channels in accessing government information and services."
City governments recognize the value of the Internet and are developing innovative applications. In fact, cities are in a unique position to develop cutting-edge applications. They traditionally have a more direct relationship with citizens and are expected to deliver a broad range of services.
"I think local government is right there where citizens need us -- where we have a direct impact on citizen delivery of services," said Danny Murphy, chief information officer for the city of Phoenix, in a recent interview with the Center. "I think at the state level it is a little bit more policy-oriented -- and a lot more fragmented working with lots of different elected officials, than what we have locally." As a result some innovative applications have been created, including Web-based maintenance and service requests, property and land-management systems integrated with GIS components, automated inspection-request systems, online parking-ticket payments, online records searches, local online election results, and much more.
City leaders are also making these accomplishments during a time when funding resources are tight and under tough scrutiny. According to Citizen 2010, "In an era of scarce public resources, digital government holds particular promise in helping public entities execute more effectively in producing priority-driven results."
Over the last few years, city IT leaders have become accustomed to working with scarce resources. Instead of hampering new digital government projects, it has fired their ingenuity. Steve Shiver, county manager for Miami-Dade, said you must justify projects by "tying them up in the backroom and doing whatever it takes to find the funds. We are working to emphasize the importance of technology and educate our elected leadership to a degree that would emphasize technology in improving the way we deliver service. We are in an environment of finite resources. Of course, as a government, some say we can just raise taxes, but that has not been the history here in Miami-Dade. Our elected leadership has chosen to hold the line on our tax rates and that creates a burden on us, and in fact, mandates that we do more with less every single year. With technology we are able to drive our transactional costs down to the point that allows us to deliver improved service at a better cost, making our argument for us."
This strategic thinking combined with some creative technical skills has pushed city e-government applications to where they are today. Many cities across the nation are doing quite well, as evidenced in the results of the Center's Digital Cities Survey which found that some cities more than others have aggressively pursued digital applications. The survey invited mayors, chief information officers and city managers at over 300 of the nation's cities to participate. The survey grouped cities into three categories based on population: More than 250,000, 125,000-250,000, and 75,000-125,000.
The winner in the first category (250,000 and above) was the city of Honolulu, Hawaii, where the innovative director of the Information Technology Department, Courtney Harrington led the charge to bring services to the citizens. Harrington has been the driving force behind projects such as City Hall in a Suitcase, recognized by the Center's Best of Breed program. Harrington's creative idea was to take a laptop, a battery-operated inkjet printer and a cellular modem and put them in a suitcase. The suitcases are taken to gathering places, such as holiday picnics, senior centers and more. Citizens have on-the-spot service where they can pay water bills, register to vote, or do any other forms-based city business.
Not only does the system deliver government services right to the citizen's doorstep, it was launched on a very small budget. Harrington said, "The whole idea to launch the project took 72 hours from conception to implementation. I went to the mayor, told him about it, put the equipment together -- and that was it. The best part is it cost us practically nothing. We just reapplied equipment we already owned."
In 2002, Harrington's efforts continued to pay off. "We're doing a lot of homeland security work," said Harrington in a recent interview with the Center. "We have also looked around for certain projects and invented some technology ourselves. We use a lot of geographic information systems (GIS) and geographic positioning systems (GPS). We've got one project where we've equipped our emergency services vehicles with GPS. We are writing the technology to bring the information in real-time GIS to the vehicles to make them work in conjunction with the Emergency Operating Center so that they can both read the information on the map and see where they're going. We're also working on providing real-time weather and rainfall information to overlay on the map as well."
Another one of the first-place winners, Roanoke, Virginia, recently launched its own innovative IT project, called the E-Council. The e-Council project, which cost approximately $30,000 to develop, uses a workflow engine to track document revisions as well as imaging and the Internet. Reports are entered electronically and managed by a workflow system that allows reviewers and editors to approve information electronically. Final reports flow into the imaging system, which is available for full search/retrieval via the Web.
Council members also use laptops during council meetings to access the electronic agenda. The system has improved efficiencies internally and improved services externally by changing the way the city does business, with the elimination of paper and reduction of the timeframe for approval processes. The e-Council uses a Microsoft Word template to format and deposit the document inside the workflow engine. The document stays in its native Word format and the user can apply the workflow engine's intelligence to select one of 15 logical processes (e.g. accept, approve with problems, etc.) at every stage of the process.
Cox noted that as each person puts his or her comments on the document, they appear in an assigned color code. When the user slides the cursor over one of the comments, he or she can see the date and time that remark was made. "And it always goes back to the author before the final signature," said Cox. "The final signature is dropped in and then the file is converted to a PDF that cannot be altered. We then e-mail and route it to the City Clerk's Office and it's put into the meeting agenda package. It's a 100-percent paperless process all done via the computer."
Another innovative city is Colorado Springs, which ranked 6th in the survey. Colorado Springs Fire Department staff members were the innovators behind the e-government application, called FireWise Colorado Springs that was recognized in the most recent round of the Best of Breed. Firewise is a quintessential e-government application -- one that offers a specific service just for the benefit of citizens.
FireWise was developed through the Fire Department's Wildland Risk Management Office and is designed to create an awareness of the wildfire danger and inform homeowners about how they can reduce their threat from wildfire. The program, which uses ESRI software, features an interactive map that covers the 64-square-mile area of study and 44,329 addresses. It also provides a wildfire hazard rating system that allows homeowners to access their individualized parcel's rating and that of the overall neighborhood. In addition, the site has mitigation information on reducing risk and engaging the public in taking an active role in creating a safer wild-land environment.
The program was constructed using a Federal Emergency Management Administration/United States Fire Administration grant of $189,000 that covered the IT piece of the implementation, materials, printing, the public process and more. Dave Blankenship, senior GIS analyst with the Colorado Fire Department, was specifically hired to spearhead the project's development and help create what he calls "the wild-land urban interface" that helps collect information, such as roof and siding types, vegetation density, water supply, driveway entrance indicators, response times from historical data and fuel (firefighter talk for things like vegetation in combination with pine trees or scrubs oaks or grass).
Blankenship and his team began meeting with homeowners' associations, neighborhood groups and other interested organizations. At these meetings, they urged people to visit the Web site and use the information. In addition, wall-sized maps from the website were used at the meetings to engage the audience in discussing the neighborhood's risk ratings. Once homeowners completed suggested changes or improvements to improve their ratings, they were encouraged to contact the FireWise office for a new site evaluation to update their hazard ratings on the Web site.
A unique infrastructure project that was created by the city of Tacoma, Washington, which ranked 10th (125,000-250,000), is the CLICK! Network. It began construction in 1997 and connected its first cable customer in 1998. Since then, the utility has used the network to test reading specialized industrial meters; started testing "smart meters" that integrate standard electric meters with built-in cable modems; implemented distribution automation; opened its network to multiple Internet service providers, which in turn sell high-speed, cable-modem Internet access at the retail level; provided a city-owned institutional network; and provided franchise fees and gross earning taxes of $1.2 million to the city of Tacoma's general fund.
"We built the network to meet telecommunications requirements of the competitive electric market and that involved making our system more reliable by being able to control it better, because we know what is going on throughout the entire system," explained Dana Toulson, telecommunications and general manager at Tacoma Power. "It enables two-way communication with our customers as we can read meters remotely and see usage. We can also disconnect and reconnect them very smoothly without having to send someone from the central office out to do it."
Building this connection between city personnel and citizens is exactly what the city and county of San Diego, California -- which ranked 15th (250,000 and above) -- intended to do with its Synergy Project. It allows users to submit a street repair request online (potholes, streetlight, traffic-light repair, graffiti, etc.) using either traditional text entry or by using a GIS viewer to isolate specific geographic areas. They can go right online and directly access the SAP work management system to see the status of their submittals.
"We felt we needed to answer to our customers better," said Liz Mueller, information systems manager for the Synergy Project. "We felt we needed synergy or a way to share information with our crews so they are not out paving the street when the following week another crew is going to be out digging up that very street. So, we realized we needed to become 'synergists' and began working to bring the Synergy Project together."
All of these projects are excellent examples of how cities across the nation are becoming digital enterprises to help their citizenry get their business done. As Citizen 2010 stated: "Finally, if e-government was about improving service to the citizen, digital government is about meeting the citizen at work, at home and in the new public square by (or before) 2010."
The reports mentioned above are available by contacting Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein!.
Quelle: Center for Digital Government
