Page 40 - FCW, November/December 2019

Processes
That approach saved the city on installation costs and earned it the distinction of being the only community
P ublic Sector Innovations
per week, and the city auditor saved $2,000 in annual maintenance costs by replacing
a case management system with a secured central repository. The fire marshal digitized almost 21,500 documents on underground fuel tanks dating to the 1930s to speed responses to Freedom of Information
Act requests from property owners and contractors.
EugNet
City of Eugene, Ore.
Like many cities, Eugene, Ore., wanted Enterprise Content to implement a fiber-optic network, but
costs threatened to derail the plan — until Management Initiative officials had an idea: install the cables inside
During a pilot test of EugNet, three revitalized buildings were connected and now have gigabit internet service for $100 a month. That’s in line with a project goal of attracting more telecommunications competition to support and grow the large software industry in the city, which sits between the technology hubs of Seattle and San Jose, Calif.
“We couldn’t offer competitive telecommunications service, and so we worked to build a publicly owned dark fiber infrastructure so that we would create that competitive landscape to attract more” internet service providers, Fifield said. “It’s definitely solved the problem. It turned out [that] competition works, and by having the dark fiber, which any ISP can lease and offer services to businesses, we’ve seen prices generally come down by about half, but speeds have increased by a factor of 10.”
The plan is to connect about 125 more buildings, which Fifield said could speed the downtown area’s comeback. Buildings there are at a higher occupancy level than they have been in years, she added.
“The point of innovating isn’t just to innovate for innovation’s sake,” Fifield said. “What’s the ultimate goal? The ultimate goal of this was to grow our local economy.”
GrantSolutions Recipient Insight
Department of Health and Human Services
With fewer staff and resources available
to oversee more than $770 billion in increasingly complex federal grants, opportunities for waste, fraud and abuse grow. And with federal grant-making agencies subject to changing regulations and saddled with stovepiped legacy systems, those vulnerabilities can multiply.
As a result, more than 40% of all grant dollars are spent on administrative and compliance activities, taking resources away from critical research. Coordination problems also mean that grant applicants and recipients often must submit the same documentation to multiple agencies.
to Modernize Business existing electric conduits.
City of Norfolk, Va. to have installed fiber this way, said Anne
After years of maintaining storage space to house boxes full of paper, the Norfolk, Va., Department of IT has digitized its business processes with Laserfiche’s enterprise content management software.
The business process automation tools have enabled the department to create
50 new workflows at half of the city’s 24 departments so far. Benefits include better analytics and security as well as the ability to use electronic signatures and barcodes with zone optical character recognition that can automatically populate fields.
In one case, the city streamlined the onboarding of new employees by integrating the human resources department’s Oracle PeopleSoft applications into Laserfiche. Now, when individuals join the city’s workforce, they automatically receive an email message with a link to get started
on approvals for computer equipment and building access.
The former system, which was 15 years old when it was replaced, consisted of one physical server that stored the applications and database. Now the department has six servers and a separate database server.
The city treasurer’s office automated 14 business processes, saving 51 labor hours
Fifield, economic strategies manager at the Planning and Development Department. Her team estimated that installing the network the traditional way would have cost over $8 million. Instead, the network was completed for less than $2 million, she said.
38 November/December 2019 FCW.COM