“You want to be open and want to be smart” was the refrain heard most often by Robert Bell,founder of the Intelligent Communities Forum (ICF). Bell visited Ohio’s state capital this week to see for himself whether Columbus deserves to be named the ICF’s most intelligent city of 2013.Columbus was the only US city to make it into the top seven. The cities will have to wait until June to learn which of them will take the palm.
Government entities are more and more interested in using big data to solve a whole series of problems, create greater efficiencies and save money. As this article indicates however, there are some serious obstacles remaining that make the effective use of big data by government difficult. Obstacles discussed include the lack of qualified personnel to analyze data, the profusion of unstructured data, the difficulty of combining it with structured data and the need to forge agreements between and among diverse public (or even between public and private collectors of data) in order to combine diverse data sources. One example of the synergies that could be realized by such agreements is the combination of car theft data with weather data that revealed to the Memphis Police Department that more cars were stolen when it was raining. Despite these obstacles however, there can be little doubt that governments at all levels must engage more with data in order to drive more effective decision making so the drive to accumulate, store, access and analyze big data will only become more urgent as time goes on.
A new study indicates that while drones can offer many advantages to a variety of government agencies the privacy issues surrounding them must be sorted out before they will be accepted by the public. With an estimated 30,000 drones expected to be in operation by 2015, and with no certificates of authorization required for the civilian (non-governmental) use of drones, the potential for information gathering about even the most innocent civilian activities is massive. The Age of Surveillance is about to begin in earnest with government and law grossly unprepared.
All 50 states now post the details about state spending online a sharp increase from 2010. It is interesting to note that certain states with a bad reputation for corruption receive good to excellent scores including Illinois with an A-.
Replacing paper forms with new digitized forms is a new cost-effective way of streamlining services and saving staff time and resources. Should your agency look at evolving simple new forms that can replace several older ones and be digitized from the outset?
Enterprise Content Management creates a path for the transformation of paper based processes to electronic and digital processes. The infographic included here will give you an excellent way of charting just how far you have come in using ECM in your agency. If you are lagging in the use of ECM do you have the resources to bring about the transformation internally or do you have to turn to consultants?
A hypothetical product might include something to solve the city’s parking problem: As more people who Innovation councils like the one newly formed in Palo Alto, are designed to bring the expertise of executives in the high-tech sector to bear on making government work more effectively and at lower cost. One exampe of a problem waiting for a solution is that “drivers to the city’s downtown area are unable to find parking spaces, they park in nearby neighborhoods. If an individual or company is interested in civic innovation, a solution can be co-created with the municipality by looking at the issue mathematically, analytically and with various data sets.” Could your city/county benefit from forming an Innovation Council?
According to this perceptive article, the police have lost their reticence about trolling social media for evidence of criminal activity. A useful graphic included in the article tells us that 80 percent of the police include surveillance of social media in their crime fighting efforts. The graphic also breaks down usage and indicates that Facebook is the most used social network among law enforcement.
Is the teen pregnancy game something that a county health department could adopt for its clients? It would seem so since it appears to be designed to be universal (proms are everywhere as are choices to hang with friends or tend to the pregnant GF). But first health departments need to be aware that it exists and few really pay that much attention. Perhaps that should be one of the things that consultants do:make their clients aware of resources that are already out in cyber space.
Teens are becoming the harbingers of the new age of mobile internet use. According to a new report by Pew Research, some 78% of teenagers between 12-17 now have a cellphone and of these 37% have smartphones. Increasingly teens are moving away from stationary connections to the Internet to connections that move with them wherever they go. The implications for social service agencies that work with teens are as clear as they are for companies wishing to sell to teens: optimize your website for mobile and/or create an app that can be accessed by mobile devices of whatever operating system.
