Wednesday, 29 February 2012
About | Contact Us | Careers | Feed
RESOURCE CENTRE
Tax and Revenue Management: A government’s lifeblood
IT has provided the opportunities for governments to remodel the entire process of tax collection over the last decade. It is, however, a continuously evolving process and governments the world over need to constantly upgrade their tax systems to optimise their revenue workflows.
Unlocking Public Value
A recent SAP study confirmed that those organisations which adopt best practices in the areas of scope and adoption, process standardisation, technology and customer governance, do perform better, and do so as their best practice maturity increases.
Governments and Socialising
The advent of social media has seen governments hopping onto the bandwagon in a bid to further engage citizens.
Advertisement
Follow us on Twitter 
| Join us on 
Connected Government, Government Cloud
US cities using private cloud to share services
Aboard a private cloud, 10 cities in the US co-own a set of infrastructure to provide e-government services, which allows citizens to access all types of permits, perform regional job searches and register a business.
“In all cases, whether regarding the backend joint processing on human services grants or a regional GIS mapping portal, we are driven to be customer focused,” said Brenda Cooper, CIO of the City of Kirkland, in an interview with FutureGov Asia Pacific.
The value in these shared services is that citizens have a single sign-on point for all kinds of information.
According to Cooper, if ecitygov.net had not happen, then every park and recreational area would require a different ID and password.
Started in 2002, ecitygov.net is hosted on a private cloud and managed by the City of Bellevue, a rapidly growing city with a current estimated population of 126,000.
“Back when we started, there wasn’t a public cloud available. And we wanted the infrastructure to be in one space—it is more efficient that way—hence we hosted the cloud in the largest city of the group and let them manage it because they have the most skills,” explained Cooper.
Cooper went on to explain that some of the cities would struggle to provide their own e-government initiatives due to their size.
“They will lack either the money or technical know-how to build and manage e-services,” she said.
“Some of the cities involved are so small they don’t actually have any tech staff.”
The only way some cities with low resources could deploy e-services to its citizens was through participation.
“It wasn’t the technology or monetary savings, but people in different cities started working together and before we knew it, we had a huge network of people working on this project for eight years,” said Cooper.
“These relationships are more valuable than the money that we save. Right now, we have agreements between the cities to share more information.”
From only two applications in 2002, ecitgov.net has grown such that the project has now hired an executive director and two project managers.
“We’ve also added more lines of business,” Cooper said. “It used to be only for issuing permits, now we have GIS involved and we’re beginning to pull in city planning.
“Over the next year or two, we will be taking e-permits for almost everything.”
Rate this article
Add your comment
Most highly rated
Better learning with web 2.0 and virtual worlds
In a visit to Ngee Ann Secondary School yesterday (22 July), FutureGov found students deeply ...
Students take a green stance with social media
Ngee Ann Secondary School’s students are on a bid to “change the world” with ...
Will Facebook profiles replace govt web sites?
It’s all the rage for ministries and agencies to have a Facebook pages these ...