CivSource spoke with Arul Isai Imran, product manager for the app about what services it provides for workers in the field. He explains that by using the app on any iOS enabled device, workers in the field will be able to upload inspection and investigation reports, interact with GIS data and annotate field images.

“Previously, when you had workers out in the field, a laptop can be too cumbersome or smart phone access too difficult without an interface. We’ve created this to get around those issues and provide more flexibility,” Imran said.

The feature set is designed to automate repetative tasks. Workers that repeat the same kinds of comments on reports can save these into the application and create a list to choose from rather than adding comments manually each time. The application also supports GIS data allowing workers to annotate specific addresses. All data created and submitted in the field can then be uploaded instantly to the system in the main office or department.

So far, the company has had over 100 downloads of the application preview in the iTunes App Store. Anyone can download the app to try out the features. Imran explains that this preview version allows users to get comfortable with the application and also provide feedback on needed features. If an agency or offices wishes to link the app to their main system, they can work with the company to onboard.

The company will also be making tools available for developers who wish to build onto the app or develop their own and plans to hold a developers conference in March. Versions are also being created for Android and Windows smart phones and tablet devices.

According to Doherty, state and local governments are running out of temporary fixes to tight budgets. “States have really gone as far as they can go with temporary measures like furlough days, layoffs. It is becoming critical for officials to look at larger issues like IT, infrastructure, health care and how to make changes in outdated systems and business processes that can’t effectively meet demand.”

IT services are still providing significant opportunities for state and local governments to improve service delivery without asking for a large budget allocation. Doherty, notes “IT consolidation including both data and call centers, can achieve immediate cost savings without interruptions in service. This can also be the gateway into cloud services through virtualization.” ACS Government Solutions recently completed a contract establishing a private cloud unifying Florida’s public email systems, a move which saved the state $15 million.

It’s no secret government IT systems are cumbersome and out of date. With many legacy systems that are in some cases 20-25 years old even small upgrades can have a significant impact. “Governments really need to approach this from a business process perspective,” Doherty says. “When you’ve got systems that are 25 years old, you’re also running processes that are 25 years old. You’ve got to take a total approach looking at IT, process, people and how to bring these systems online in a way that reflects modern requirements.”

Shared services, an approach many in state and local government circles have been talking about for years is also finally being examined in a real way. “The conversations around shared services are starting to happen at senior levels now,” Doherty says. “The difference between then and now is that they are having real conversations at a high level about how to approach this. So it’s starting from the top. Before you wouldn’t even see it at the county level and now you are – that’s the result of top-down conversations.”

Cross-jurisdictional collaboration models are also being examined in order to further extend the reach of shared services options beyond single agencies or areas. Doherty emphasizes that all of these models need comprehensive planning, “consolidation needs an endgame plan. IT needs an endgame plan. You’ve got to have officials ready to say ok why are we doing this, how are we managing the people, what is the result?”

By approaching this from a business process management perspective states can adopt a more unified approach that looks at all of the moving parts from hardware to labor.

Nowhere is this more necessary than health care. Health care and human service costs are spiraling out of control for states as demand increases and new federal requirements increase pressure while budgets continue to go down. But there are ways states can start to regain control. Again Doherty, “States need to take the funding available from the federal government for health care, medicaid, case management and get those systems upgraded. The need is there, the demand is growing and its going to become a critical service delivery issue.”

“Of course that also brings up mobility. You’ve got caseworkers in the field, other officials increasingly in the field and mobility is allowing for that. But, states are going to have to address that as well, there are device considerations, security considerations, documentation requirements.”

Doherty notes that in hard political climates getting buy in from everyone needed to make the decisions is difficult. But modern demands coupled with immediate cost savings already establish the business case for why these changes are necessary. States can also learn from enterprise best practices to implement business process management plans that are already road tested.

ACS Government Solutions recently won a contract with the state of Texas using this combined approach. “We leveraged knowledge and skills from our commercial groups to bring additional value to our bid there and the commercial/public sector combination really created value for Texas.”

According to Doherty, including lessons learned from the commercial space and coupling them with public sector focused performance metrics can create value. “In the private sector, once something is done you can move people around, that’s something you don’t typically do in government. So we’re willing to have those conversations, we’ve developed a labor process for our government clients that does that. We think performance based contracting is key in providing value for our public sector clients and creating better contracts overall.”

Upon entering office, County Executive Kamenetz worked with the Office of Information Technology and the Office of Budget and Finance to determine technology projects that would “provide innovation, efficiency, cost savings, consolidations, vacancy reductions and better serve public safety – all of which could be realized within a six to eighteen month time frame.”

According to a report compiled by OIT director Rob Stradling, twenty-three projects met these criteria. Spanning county government from the police department, code enforcement, office of information technology, public health and the environment, these projects represent around $5 million worth of IT investments – all of which will be recouped within the next three to five years, officials said.

“We delved into agency workflows and came up with ways to take advantage of technology to streamline our processes, reduce duplication of effort and provide instant access to information among related departments,” County Executive Kevin Kamenetz said in a press release. “This translates into real savings in dollars and time for our agencies as well as the taxpayers we serve.”

Many of the projects will help improve public safety including an electronic citations system, an online field-based reporting platform, a new central 911 center, a new crime tip system called iWATCH, and a shared enterprise booking project between the county’s police, corrections and sheriff’s to process offenders from the point of intake to release.

OIT will also have a number of projects to implement, including a broadband fiber project that will deliver high-speed internet to county operations including public safety, healthcare, education and job creation. OIT officials say the new fiber optic network will eliminate most of the need to rely on third party providers who charge for these services.

Among some of the broader projects slated for implementation, Baltimore County is going to install a new permits, approvals and inspections solution from Accela that will automate the business processes around building, electrical, plumbing and miscellaneous permits and their associated inspections. The outward-facing platform will be able to have e-permitting capabilities so that home improvement projects can be applied for, tracked, and paid for online. This project will be joined by a related Land Management solution that will tie into the county’s GIS system to coordinate and track the subdivision and development review and approval process.

According to county IT and finance officials, cost savings for these technology investments will have dividends reaching down stream for years to come.

“These technology advances are beneficial from a fiscal perspective and they will clearly make it easier for our residents to interact with their government,” Baltimore County Council Chair John Olszewski, Sr. said.

For a full list of the projects, click here.

Through the various suggestions in the Debt Commission’s plan, deficit spending would be reduced by about $4 trillion over the coming decade. The BPC estimates that its plan would reduce the debt to below 60 percent of the economy, while balancing the primary budget – everything other than interest payments – by 2014 if its provisions were followed.

As of January 1, 2011, the US Treasury reported that the National Debt was just above $14 trillion dollars and the projected 2010-2011 deficit is around $1.4 trillion.

So how does this compare to the states? And what affect would federal belt-tightening have on the states’ fiscal outlook?

CivSource spoke to two leading experts on what federal debt reduction means for state and local governments, one of whom sat on BPC’s Debt Reduction Task Force. In speaking with Deloitte’s Robert Campbell and Accenture’s David Wilson, both saw the federal debt crisis as an opportunity to address inefficiencies and a chance to restructure the federal-state financial relationship. But they also warned of real dangers awaiting those states that are not diligent in their fiscal management.

“In the Bipartisan Policy Center discussions there was a fair amount of consideration given to consequences of prospective recommendations on the states,” said Mr. Campbell, who is the US State Government Leader at Deloitte LLP. “There was a fairly broad recognition that we needed to be careful in addressing the federal deficit and federal debt level, not just kicking the ball down the line in a way that creates unintended consequences for state and local governments.”

Heading into Fiscal Year 2011, 41 states had to reconcile nearly $84 billion in budget gaps. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) says that fifteen states have reported new FY 2011 gaps totaling at least $26.7 billion, on top of the $84 billion already resolved. NCSL estimate more than two-thirds of states (33) project budget gaps in 2012, tallying over $72 billion.

Of course, states are not able to run deficits, so that number will have to be reconciled through more spending cuts or tax increases.

Mr. Wilson, managing director of Accenture’s Canada and US state and local government practice, pointed out that some 30 percent of state budgets are federally funded. “What will happen to this flow? A lot of money that flows down [from the federal government] has not encouraged efficiencies, in fact, it has encouraged the opposite.”

Mr. Wilson says government leaders need to figure out how federal dollars can motivate and incent collaboration, not create competitions that duplicate solutions and programs. “There are a lot of management practices that have been adopted widely in the private sector that have not been in the public sector,” he said. For example, Mr. Wilson mentioned shared services as an idea that is ubiquitous in the private sector, yet remains a novelty among government enterprise.

“We need a Marshall Plan for government that will get into every single process area and activity to understand the most efficient way to deliver services. There’s real money – 20 to 30 percent of spend – that could be saved.”

In a forthcoming study by Accenture, several business and governance strategies are highlighted to illustrate where savings can be achieved. Many practices include cross-jurisdictional collaboration and shared services, but one area where states could benefit from federal leadership and reform includes the grant management process.

One example comes from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s HIT Policy & Standards Committee, which has created an “Enrollment Workgroup” as part of the national health reform law. The Enrollment Workgroup is working to help the federal and state governments align eligibility and enrollment processes so the right benefits are delivered to the right individuals in less time.

Similarly, the Office of Management and Budget has been directed by Congress to find and correct improper payments, such as federal grant payments to improper vendors or for improper purposes. OMB and many states are betting strong state ERP systems and analytics could go a long way in helping states identify and stop improper payments. There is a rationale for the federal government to help states implement such approaches, as the budget savings would be significant at the state and federal level. According to one study’s estimates, released last year, states lost $67 billion to waste, fraud and abuse in 2010, which is nearly 80 percent of all federal benefits spending at the state and local levels.

“When you see how much of our economy is consumed by government operations, you see what an efficiency drag it is on our country,” Mr. Wilson said. But he also acknowledged that making government operations more efficient is hard to because the natural competitive nature of the private sector doesn’t exist in government. “That’s the root of the problem. The only lever we have is this deficit crisis. We have to use this crisis as an opportunity to operate more efficiently and effectively.”

“We need to look at this holistically, not just at the federal level,” Wilson concluded. “[Deficit reduction] needs to be coupled with a restructuring and reform of government operations.”

IBM has developed a central intake system for handling work requests and ongoing maintenance across city government, replacing a paper-based tracking process.

“Corpus Christi is evolving into a more sustainable city — one that has intelligence, foresight and accountability built into the way we manage the services we provide our citizens,” said Steve Klepper, an administrative superintendent for Corpus Christi. “Working with IBM, we have the real-time status of city services, automated work orders and an overview of city’s infrastructure to better manage our resources, as well as better maintain the city’s mission-critical assets.”

Through the centralized management process, the city will be able to monitor and analyze the status of tens of thousands of physical assets such as its water mains, traffic lights, bridges, park lawns, fire hydrants, garbage trucks and storm water ditches using IBM Maximo Asset Management software, the company said.

Central to this reorganization is the rollout of a citywide “One Call Center,” which generated more than 45,000 electronic work-order requests from across the city. Previously, staff could not accurately track how long it took to respond to and fix problems because citizen calls were routed to the appropriate department and recorded on index cards before being entered into a spreadsheet. And although the city had already established a geographic information system (GIS), work orders were not interfaced with this system, so departments couldn’t spatially analyze work requests to determine whether a customer request represented a site-specific problem or an area-wide issue that would require more support.

“Corpus Christi is setting the bar for how municipalities can use technology to gain intelligence into their departments and systems to operate more efficiently and provide residents with a better place to live,” said Guru Banavar, IBM CTO for Smarter Cities. “Working with IBM, Corpus Christi city managers are operating smarter and managing their work and crews better.”

The company hopes that the cloud will improve municipal operations, increase online service delivery and transparency while also providing integrated data analysis. IBM worked with the New York Conference of Mayors (NYCOM) and the Michigan Municipal League (MML) to pilot the Municipal Shared Services Cloud and help each organization streamline its services.

IBM will allow independent software vendors to access the cloud to provide services to local governments. Municipal officials will then be able to select the software that they need to offer services ranging from citizen portals and tax processing to internal workflow enhancements. Applications will work independently, but when delivered together, they will be automatically integrated by the platform. Multiple applications will link seamlessly supporting data sharing and event handling. The IBM Municipal Shared Services Cloud will be available through IBM Global Technology Services.

“On the national level, there has been a lot of discussion about consolidating local governments. This technology will enable governments to share services as if consolidated, to foster efficiencies and more effective services,” said Robert W. Elliott, former Mayor of Croton-on-Hudson, New York and former Deputy Secretary of state of New York.

Common Cents encourages city employees to submit operationally focused ideas that will lead to immediate cost savings or allow for budget cuts. Employees can submit their ideas along with their name or anonymously. The ideas are then vetted through several senior officials for their feasibility and quality, with the best ones being submitted for final review and potential inclusion in budget decisions. At the end of the process, employees who submitted ideas that made it to the top and included their names were given special recognition.

In order to manage the process, Richmond utilized business process management software from Metastorm. The Metastorm application provided city employees with an easy-to-use interface to submit their ideas. When an employee successfully completed their submission, the application provided them a unique tracking number that they could use to follow their submission through the vetting process. The application also allowed for manual submissions for those employees who didn’t utilize the application. Gurdeep Bhatia, IT Manager for Richmond’s Department of Information Technology explained what city officials wanted in administering the program, “the goal was a seamless application with intuitive functions that also created a database for us and the employees so that we could review the data throughout.”

According to Bhatia, the application achieved those goals and also created a number of big wins including a reduction in the amount of paper used in the process and most importantly – the ability to manage the vetting process in a timely manner through the administration panel which built in action item lists. Implementation of the application itself was also done using existing IT positions and within the limits of the development team’s usual workday; leading to a two week time line for deployment. Subhashini Narra, the project leader also noted that overall implementation was much easier because the application doesn’t require a lot of complex development and the city was able to utilize its existing IT infrastructure.

Beyond the data, the Common Cents program had a significant impact on employee morale during what would otherwise be a stressful time. Chief Administrative Officer Byron Marshall said that through the program employees were, “more engaged with the process and felt empowered through the action of submitting ideas, knowing that they could actually be implemented.” Bhatia also noted that the program provided an opportunity to, “interface IT with employees in a context focused on collaboration and ideas,” a scenario that can be hard to replicate in other circumstances.

As for the results of the program, the city was able to realize $2 million in immediate savings and more may still be coming down the line – some of the ideas that were submitted were so large in scope that they wouldn’t fit within the window of time the city had to find savings before the budget meeting – these ideas are now under further review for potential future implementation. When asked if the program would continue, officials said that it was likely and that ideally the next round will take place further ahead in the budget cycle when departments could collaborate on ideas without also having to compile their budgets at the same time.

Currently, Wyoming has two separate communication systems managed internally by 14 separate agencies as well as by the central Information Technology Division which manages email systems for an additional 47 state agencies. The existing system made it nearly impossible to find contacts across agencies and also increased the amount of administrative work for agencies as well as the IT division.

The change is expected to save the state $1 million dollars annually.

The state set out to change the system two years ago through 30 state agencies, but a general fund appropriation in March of this year moved the project along significantly. Wyoming was able to send out the RFP, take bids and evaluate them on an accelerated timetable. “This is one of the fastest turnarounds from receipt of funding, to RFP, bid, evaluation and scoring of projects that I’ve ever seen,” CIO Bob von Wolffradt said.

Under a contract with Tempus Nova, the State of Wyoming will pay $5 million dollars to migrate e-mail systems to Google’s hosted email, security, e-discovery, encryption, and archive services and transition some 10,000 email accounts to the new services over the coming year. Another benefit of the new system is that cities, towns and counties will be able to use the State’s contract pricing and eliminate costly procurement processes and time if they choose, von Wolffradt said.

The offering is consistent with the recommendations of industry analysts on where health care administration is heading. According to Gartner, “Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) systems have garnered much interest among large and small health care insurers during the past couple of years as employer groups and individuals look for the ability to pay their premiums electronically.” Moreover, “health insurers should phase in all the components of EBPP systems — electronic invoice, invoice reconciliation, payment processing, cash management and analytics. Consider each of the components as “must have” capabilities to realize the full cost-saving potential.”

CSC claims that the software will allow health care billing and administration meet these needs while staying in-line with federal health care reporting requirements outlined in the new health care reform law. The software consolidates all data from every billing and revenue management process into a single workflow that provides internal reports as well as an external payments option for consumers.

The new positions at the center are expected to be high paying and draw on a variety of skill sets from technology to administration. IBM has already invested in another energy efficient cloud-computing data center in the area and appears to be creating a local hub for its offerings.

The company will also be awarded a Job Development Investment Grant from the state’s Economic Investment Committee. Under the terms of the grant, for each year that IBM meets its performance targets the state will provide 65% of the state personal income withholding taxes derived from the creation of new jobs. Should the company create the jobs called for under the agreement and sustain them for 10 years, the agreement could yield as much as $7.79 million in maximum benefits for IBM. North Carolina provides these grants to new and expanding businesses and industrial projects whose benefits exceed costs to the state.

“IBM has been a major employer in North Carolina providing thousands of skilled jobs for more than 30 years. We value this company’s ongoing commitment to North Carolina and Research Triangle Park,” said Governor Perdue.