E-Gov Savings

Municipal governments are faced with the seemingly unsurmountable expectations of being more transparent than ever and delivering more services to the public while spending fewer dollars. With the right mix of restructuring and increased reliance on technology these expectations can be met. It will not be an easy, yet every government agency is faced with making the transition or facing increasing criticism from their constituents. Phil Bertolini, in an article in the Government Finance Review titled Running the Government Race: Reaching the Finish Line with Technology, discusses the issue from various perspectives.

Bertolini states that agencies can no longer implement traditional strategies of merely cutting costs or increasing taxes. Such behavior will come up short in continuing to provide their current services, let alone increase the offerings that the public is clamoring for. The private sector is preoccupied primarily with profit, while government is concerned with service delivery and the prudent use of taxpayer money. The bottom line in both cases is dollars and cents. The preponderance, 80 to 90 percent, of all government, budgeted payouts is related to employee salaries and benefits. The trimming has to begin in this area.

Proper technology investment will result in reduced staff costs. However, merely reducing staff can place all services to the public in jeopardy. Governments must change the way they do business, says Bertolini. Improving services must remain their main goal, even if their coffers are becoming shallower. Technology is a tool that enables governments to do things differently. Technology allows automation of tasks, freeing up funds from salaries to employees who were manually entering data, answering questions and receiving payments.

Using the case study of Oakland County, Michigan, Bertolini points out that simply automating antiquated business processes and services does not create the significant wins desired. Municipal governments must rethink how they due business with the public and make use of modern e-government applications that can be easily accessed and understood by the public. These applications need to be offered for both computer and mobile device platforms.

We are in a new cost-cutting era of governance, yet there is the opportunity to make those cuts and increase services to the public. So, as experience has showed us, managers should spend many hours with their IT staff and private vendors to strategically place modern technology at the forefront of the delivery of their services.

311 in the News

The use of a 311 phone number to assist municipal governments to serve their citizens is not new, and agencies are now able to use the data collected to start tracking trends. As Chicago's Mayor Daley hands off to Rahm Emanuel, some are saying his greatest legacy is the 311 system he put in place. Knoxville, Tennessee's call system had a record 6,400 calls in one week during May. These are just a few of the news stories recently coming across the wire concerning 311 systems across the nation.

Chicago residences are witnessing a change of Mayor in May and many are saying that outgoing Mayor Daley's most important legacy will be the city's 311 system he instituted. In fact some see Daley as the “father of 311.”

The phone number 311 transformed how Chicagoans interact with their city government and set a president for many other US cities. Daley created Chicago’s 311 system in 1999 as a front desk and storehouse for city services, contact personnel, complaints, and citizens' service requests. The system tracks work orders resulting from the complaints. The system has improved the efficiency and productivity of city work crews.

Chicago’s 311 system's greatest success to date was literally leading the way in the halting of the West Nile disease. Monitors noticed a dramatic uptick in dead birds being reported through 311. The city mapped the 311 dead bird complaints and sprayed insecticides, removed standing water – a potential epidemic was addressed quickly and efficiently. This week, the city of Knoxville's 311 call center received a record of 6,400 calls. The call center was started in 2005 as a tool for residents to retrieve information about city services. The major factors contributing to the record week were people signing up for the city's curbside recycling program and people reporting storm damage. In the past, these two major events would have cost the city large sums of money, yet with the 311 center already in place, it cost a few hours of coding to create the forms to speedily collect this information.

The potential cost savings of these types of services can be significant, even for small to medium sized municipalities. And with the rise in mobile device usage, we can only expect this number to grow.

Mobile Phone Trends in Africa

African countries have been on the receiving end of many innovations throughout their history, however they are now employing mobile devises in ways that are making the rest of the world sit up and take notice, and maybe learn a thing or two.

Voices of Africa is a site that encourages young Africans to become local reporters. It consists of an outlet for news and a training program sponsored by Voices of Africa Media Foundation. These reporters, armed with nothing more than a camera and texting-ready cell phone, are bringing marvelous stories of accomplishments in local villages and are responsible for shining light on corrupt local politicians resulting in some indictments. The reporters see their role as providing “stimulating ( citizen) journalism, democracy will be served and this may stimulate good governance in Africa.”

In yet another innovative and powerful employment of cell phones, Fareed Zein, a Sudanese now living in Texas, has adapted and implemented a mobile-powered monitoring tool that contributed to keeping the January referendum vote in Sudan open and honest. "I believe technology is the equalizer," says Zein. His service is Sudan Vote Monitor (SVM), which is an adaptation of Ushahidi (Witness) that was mounted in the run-up to Kenya's referendum in 2010. As this video shows, Ushahidi is an open source program (free and offered for adaptation) that has played a vital role in recent elections and disasters around the world.


Kenya has begun using a system that will make it possible for consumers to use text messages to find out if a particular medicine was wholesome or counterfeit. Dr. Esther Ogara, Manager of Kenya's e-Health policy is publicly promoting mPedigree, that was implemented with great success in Ghana several years ago. Kenya, not unlike other African countries, is plagued by the prevalence of counterfeit drugs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLfNuyyora4&feature=player_embedded

All Africa News reported that Kenya began using PDAs back in 2001 to collect data in the field to determine the efficacy of the outreach effort for measles immunization campaigns. Red Cross personnel in various locations of the country, where week-long campaigns were underway, sent text messages to share methods that worked and those that did not so adjustments could be made, nation wide, at the end of each day. Normally, the campaign would be completed and various sites would write up their experiences and the recommendations shared five months later, hoping that the information would assist future immunization campaigns. They are using similar messaging to report all of their weekly and monthly utilization, disease surveillance and supply data into the district health system. This is very successful in both reducing the cost of the health information system by 25 percent, just for the data transfer, and reducing the time it took to get information - down from four weeks to one week.

These are just a few examples of developing countries innovative use of mobile devices. Study of such innovations can serve as creative seedbeds for cities and municipalities nationwide.

Implementation of the Open Government Directive

The public policy think tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) published a paper What’s Next for Open Government? by Daniel Castro in March of 2010 which is surveys and critics the implementation of the Open Government Directive delivered by the President Obama on his first day as President. Mr. Castor's discussion is useful in pointing out the various projects the Administration has set in place to fulfill the directive's guidelines, but it also offers innovative suggestions that municipal governments might make use of in their e-government initiatives. The directive called for “an un­precedented level of openness in Gov­ernment” through three pillars:

• Transparency
• Public participation
• Collaboration

The Administration took steps to publish government infor­mation online, upgrade the quality of government information, create a culture of open govern­ment, and produce policies that would enable open government. As a result, the volume of data presently available to the public is unprecedent­ed and the plethora of government blogs offers citizens more insights into the inner workings of government than ever before.

This transparency enables government accountability and heightens citizens' trust in govern­ment. A market research firm, Foresee Results, found in a 2009 survey of over 36,000 visitors to federal websites that “citizens who believe a site is highly trans­parent are 46 percent more likely to trust the overall government, 49 percent more likely to use the site as a primary resource and 37 percent more likely to return to the site.” Examples of the Administration's transparency are data and publications found on Data.gov (containing more than 118,000 datasets), Recovery.gov and USASpending.gov (tracking federal spending). Of particular interest to municipal IT departments might be IT.USASpending.gov that tracks federal spending on information technology.

In an effort to assist citizens understand and make use of all this data, the Administration has partnered with the universities to create FedThread.org, Public.Resource.org, and GovPulse.org.

An example of the Obama Administration's strides toward fulfilling the Public Participation segment of the directive was the hosting of an online town hall meeting on YouTube, and using various government blogs to collect comments on the meeting.

Prizes and competitions have been used to improve Collaboration with citizens. Over 50,000 caste their votes to determine the best Flu Prevention public service announcement (PSA) submitted by individuals. The winner collected a $2,500 prize. Also, the Department of Labor hosted a a “Tools for America’s Job Seekers” challenge that attracting over 16,000 individuals to review and rate job search and career advancement tools. The re­sults became a website, Careeronestop.org. Local governments seeking to initiate or improve their e-government offerings will do well to follow the themes of transparency, public participation, and collaboration.