Digital Communities Article 2010

www.digitalcommunities.com
Capitalizing on Collaboration
How Shared Services are Saving Local Government Budgets
By Todd Sander, Director of the Digital Communities program, with the assistance of
the Digital Infrastructure Task Force

2
LOCALGOVERNMENTSHAREDSERVICES
Economists have declared the Great
Recession dead, that, in fact, it ended
in the summer of 2009. Newspaper col-
umnists and bloggers sprang on the story
with headlines teeming with sarcasm
and ridiculed the announcement by the
private nonprofit National Bureau of
Economic Research. The incredulous
“The Recession Is Over. Yeah, Right” ran
in a Washington Post blog. The San Ber-
nardino Sun was skeptical: “Recession
over! Are you ready for some euphoria?”
Others were snarkier: “Thank Goodness
the Government Cured the Recession.”
Whatever the headline, the message
was clear: American citizens are not
feeling more confident about the nation’s
economic plight. It is easy to see why;
the scene remains bleak across the
country and the national unemployment
rate is still hovering near 10 percent.
It is a tough time to be in the public
service business. Many communities are
facing the same harsh realities as their
constituents — and may continue to
struggle with strained budgets for years
to come. A survey jointly conducted in
mid-2010 by the National League of
Cities, the United States Conference of
Mayors and the National Association of
Counties found that, from 2010 through
2012, local governments are expected
to lose nearly 500,000 jobs. Specific
examples show cities like Central Falls,
R.I., which has a deficit that’s 42 percent
of its budget and the city of Denver that
is looking for creative ways to tackle a
$100 million deficit.
There is a silver lining, though it
may be hard to see. The Center for
Digital Government’s paper, “Life After
… Regaining Your Balance, Surviving
the Reset and (Re)Building a Govern-
ment that Works,” noted that in moving
forward from the recession the public’s
work is likely to be done differently. The
“differently” alluded to in the paper refers
to a more collaborative type of govern-
ment where jurisdictions find strength
in numbers and a more efficient way
of governing through shared services
approaches. Bryan Sivak, chief tech-
nology officer of Washington, D.C.,
believes cities don’t just need another
cool software project. “What we need is
a way to share what we have with other
cities, and for them to be able to share
what they build with us.” Big changes
have to start somewhere and greater,
policy-neutral, technical collaboration
seems like a good place to start.
Capitalizing on Collaboration:
How Shared Services are Saving Local Government Budgets
Introduction
“What we need is a way to share what we have
with other cities, and for them to be able to share
what they build with us.”
– Bryan Sivak, Chief Technology Officer, Washington, D.C.

3
“This collaborative theme is the theme
I’ll highlight for Life After…,” said National
Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra.
“In almost every major domain, we’re
going to find ourselves with a much more
dramatic productivity imperative than we
face today because the long-term demand
curve for public services likely will exceed
our long-term revenue curve, at least as
it’s currently seen through the federal,
state and local ecosystem.”
Chopra seems to be on to something.
Difficulty can often spawn creativity and
in this case it seems extreme difficulty
has helped jump-start collaborative cre-
ativity in the form of local agencies and
jurisdictions battling buckling budgets
by sharing applications and services in a
“build it once and everybody use it often”
approach. (See Civic Commons sidebar
for more information.)
Local government leaders are realizing
that, not only do other cities and counties
share the same challenges in providing
increasing amounts of services to constit-
uents during tough economic times, but
they are providing the same services and
require the same applications and software
to get the job done. Agency leaders within
cities and counties are finding themselves
Shared Services or Bust
“You can go after the ‘Cadillac solution’ together.”
– Ken Price, Information Services Director, Littleton, Colo.
The Civic Commons
The newly formed Civic Commons group is an organization
that aims to empower governments to share technology for the
public good. Civic Commons is the brainchild of the nonprofits
Code for America, a Teach for America-inspired program for
the technology-minded, and OpenPlans, a group focused on
civic engagement and open source government software.
The organizations teamed up with Washington, D.C., Chief
Technology Officer Bryan Sivak to create Civic Commons —
essentially a repository of open civic code for governments to
access. “We consistently heard exactly the same thing — we’re
all working on the same projects,” Sivak said. So they decided
to create a place where these shared projects can be viewed
and discussed — the Commons.
A main section of the Commons is the “civic stack,” a shared
body of software and protocols for civic entities, built on open
standards. Currently included in the stack are iPhone applications like Citizen Reports, an app for reporting and requesting
service calls regarding city infrastructure, contributed by Portland, Ore. Also there is an App Store from Washington, D.C.,
where people can download or submit applications that use government data — things like parking meter locations,
emergency information and historic data. The group has U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra on board; he has
approved providing the Federal IT Dashboard to the stack.
Jennifer Pahlka, executive director of Code for America, described Civic Commons as a way to help governments share
software they have developed, and thereby reduce IT costs, foster collaboration and spur innovation.

4
in the same situation — other agencies
share their plight of reduced budgets
and staff with larger responsibilities and
increased workloads.
There is really no local government
department that is unable to benefit from
a shared environment. Ken Price, infor-
mation services director for the city of
Littleton, Colo., points to public safety,
roads and bridges, parks, libraries and
museums, among others, that can have
technological components — often costly
— that are ripe for sharing. For example,
most police departments utilize computer-
aided dispatch programs and a records
management system. “Every city that has
a law enforcement agency will have to
have the same technology infrastructure
in place,” Price said. “Some cities can
afford to have their own systems, but
some can’t. But if they can band together
and go after technology solutions, then
they might be better able to afford them.”
Some agencies may be able to afford
a system, but not the one that really fits
their needs. Shared services can be the
answer in this situation as well. Price
says, “It may not be that they don’t have
the ability to afford the system at all, but
the type of system needed may be out of
a single city’s budget, he added. “You can
go after the ‘Cadillac solution’ together.”
E-mail for All
While nearly every agency and local
government can benefit from shared
services and applications, some may be
more conducive to sharing than others
or it may be easier to get stakeholder
approval to partner on certain systems
or applications.
E-mail is one application that just
makes sense to share and Fort Collins,
Colo., is wasting no time in ensuring its
departments and agencies start banding
together by housing the city’s e-mail
services in one place: the local Poudre
School District. Through an intergov-
ernmental agreement, after a one-time
transition fee of about $170,000, the
city will pay the district $20 per seat,
per year to maintain e-mail and upgrade
to a Microsoft Exchange system for
more than 1,800 city employees, said
Fort Collins CIO Tom Vosburg. “We’re
contracting with them to be our e-mail
provider instead of doing it in-house,”
Vosburg said. “And we’re going to save
around $55,000 a year doing that.”
There are no losers when it comes
to sharing services. The Poudre School
District now receives approximately
$32,000 a year in new revenue that
helps diffuse the fixed overhead costs
related to operating the e-mail system.
With the influx of funds, the hosting
organization is able to invest money
beyond overhead costs back into the
system for upgrades, etc., on their own
terms, not by a vendor’s schedule.
Getting the Job Done
Applications that assist government
employees in conducting their work
can also be shared across agencies
and jurisdictions. These technology
solutions may save the agency money
in the long run by increasing efficien-
cies and allowing employees to be more
productive, but with budget constraints
agencies may not be able to afford the
upfront costs.
In Minnesota, the Local Government
Information Systems (LOGIS) consor-
tium has recently rolled out a Ticket
Writer application in police squad cars
and in booking rooms. LOGIS describes
the Ticket Writer as having the ability
to capture query return data automati-
cally, guide manual data entry, print the
citation in the squad car and transmit
the data to the records management
system and the courts. LOGIS reports
that this entire process helps save time
and money and reduces errors due to
redundant entry.
Enterprise Systems — Beyond
the Enterprise
While overarching systems like enter-
prise resource planning have made
operations easier for service delivery and
new ERP systems combine essential
business operations — including software
for accounts receivable and payable,

5
purchasing, inventory management, and
human resources — under one umbrella,
these systems can be expensive. Fortu-
nately, they can be effectively shared as
well, and the cost burden can be distributed
among multiple agencies instead of falling
onto one cash-strapped department.
E-mail can be a solid starting point for
shared services initiatives, but jurisdic-
tions can also collaborate on services like
payroll and administrative management. In
Kent County, Mich., the Intermediate School
District has begun a shared services venture
where the five school districts in the northern
part of the county share payroll and accounts
payable services, among other programs. As
many as 20 other districts may opt to join
this group in 2011. Kent Swinson, superin-
tendent of Sparta — one of the five districts
participating — says that he expects Sparta
will save at least $75,000 in sharing payroll
and accounts payable services alone as it
moves to the new plan.
While sharing systems among two
or more governments is advantageous,
even greater benefits may be realized via
government utilization of shared public
information technology hosting services.
Often, geographic proximity can encourage
jurisdictions to share. Counties in Colorado’s
San Luis Valley were recently confronted
with the news that their property assess-
ment management software was going to
become increasingly expensive through
an outside vendor, so the counties came
together with a sharing plan. Pueblo County
now hosts the property assessment man-
agement for assessor offices, property
taxation management for treasurer offices as
well as geographic information service (GIS)
warehousing.
When cities and counties come
together, they can have access to the same
services, and save costs that can be redi-
rected elsewhere. In San Luis Valley, the
funds that would have been paid in fees to
the vendor now go to Pueblo to offset the
costs required to run the expanded service.
Pueblo County was able to implement the
program within its existing budget, so no
new funding for hardware was needed.
At the same time, the county’s costs have
decreased by 14 percent and may decrease
up to 25 percent.
Government leaders are not the only
ones encouraged by the prospects.
Members of the private sector are excited
about the possibilities as well, as sharing
allows governments to take advantage of
the efficiencies of technologies they may
not otherwise be able to afford, including
Software as a Service (SaaS).
“Governments always play a leadership
role driving innovation in IT — and this is
certainly the case with the public sector’s
growing adoption of shared services and
also SaaS, or Software as a Service,” said
Kevin Albrecht, government solutions
manager at Perceptive Software. “One

6
Behind every innovative idea stands
the technology to make it work. Har-
nessing the cloud is important for local
governments as they begin pushing
forward in sharing services. Shared
infrastructure in the cloud — either
public or private — is gaining traction in
many jurisdictions because it allows the
spreading of fixed costs among several
participants.
When Gopal Khanna, CIO for the
state of Minnesota, announced the first-
ever statewide cloud initiative he said,
“Rethinking the way we manage our
digital infrastructure centrally, to save
locally across all units of government,
is a crucial part of the solution. The
private sector has utilized technological
advancements like cloud computing to
realize operational efficiencies for some
time now. Government must follow suit.”
Making it Possible
LOGIS
In Minnesota, the mission of Local Government In-
formation Systems (LOGIS), a consortium of local
government units, is to “facilitate the latest leading-
edge, effective and adaptable public sector technol-
ogy solutions through the sharing of ideas, risks,
and resources in a member-driven environment.”
Departments across the board are involved in this
alliance, making it easy for constituents of the
region to access government services. LOGIS, a
quasi-government agency and nonprofit coalition, is
controlled by its members with a board of directors
composed of one representative from each agency.
All funding decisions are controlled by the members
through an annual budget and work plan, and by
action of an executive committee.
LOGIS applications include permits and inspection,
equipment management, code enforcement, and
payroll and human resources.
well-understood aspect of SaaS is that
governments and their partners can
truly maximize the benefits of mission-
critical applications like ERPs, case
management systems, and enterprise
content management solutions to create
new efficiencies.”
“Governments always play a leadership role
driving innovation in IT — and this is certainly
the case with the public sector’s growing
adoption of shared services and also SaaS, or
Software as a Service.”
– Kevin Albrecht, Government Solutions Manager at Perceptive Software

7
Members of the private sector who
have seen the benefits of the cloud agree.
“By consolidating and applying the right
technologies in the cloud, organizations
can simplify the management of architec-
ture to enable more focus on the business
applications. This will help organizations
spend more time building relationships and
partnership frameworks,” said Bethann
Pepoli, chief technology officer for EMC’s
State & Local Government Practice.
Open source technology is also at the
heart of sharing services and as open
source becomes more of a mainstream
practice it also assists counties, cities and
districts in coming to a collective agreement
that sharing services is indeed an option.
“Open source software, by its very
nature, is created and designed to be
shared,” said John Punzak, senior national
sales director of State & Local Government
and Education for Red Hat. “For example,
the city of Raleigh recently implemented
a new open source Web portal that saved
the city a lot of money while providing
expanded services to citizens.”
Whatever the technology, looking to
best practices and examples of shared
services that have had a success-
ful outcome is a good starting point for
local governments who want to adopt a
similar model or buy into an existing orga-
nization. After establishing what systems
and services are the most conducive for
sharing, a plan needs to be put in place
for a jurisdiction to take advantage of all
of the benefits shared services can bring.
We’ll explore some places to get started in
our next section.
Fort Collins and Littleton, Colo., are
part of the early crew setting the stage for
shared services in the United States with
their involvement in the larger consor-
tium in Colorado, the Government Shared
Services Council (GSSC). The GSSC is a
standing subcommittee of the Colorado
Government Association of Informa-
tion Technology, or CGAIT. The GSSC
is becoming well-known for its shared
services initiatives — but it didn’t happen
overnight.
Fort Collins CIO Tom Vosburg, a
member of the GSSC, pointed to a number
of shared services initiatives that inspired
the GSSC, including a regional consor-
tium of cities in the northwest Denver
metro area — including Boulder — that
formed around a wide-area wireless
network initiative. While he described this
as a different sort of business model, it
was a good example of cities partnering
and forming a new entity to collaborate
on the acquisition of technology and the
management of a Wi-Fi network.
“People understood the potential of
joining together and establishing an appro-
priate governance structure to aggregate
strength and accomplish things they could
not do individually,” Vosburg said.
For the last few years, the GSSC has
been facilitating different work groups to
develop shared services and Vosburg says
they are continuing to research different
“By consolidating and applying the right technologies in the cloud,
organizations can simplify the management of architecture to enable more
focus on the business applications. This will help organizations spend more
time building relationships and partnership frameworks.”
– Bethann Pepoli, Chief Technology Officer for EMC’s State & Local Government Practice
“People understood the potential of joining together
and establishing an appropriate governance structure
to aggregate strength and accomplish things they
could not do individually.”
– Tom Vosburg, CIO, Fort Collins, Colo.
Getting Started: Planning for Success

8
regions. In many areas across the U.S.
however, the GSSC model is still quite a
new idea and it’s up to local advocates
to spearhead a shared services project
to get things moving.
In Washtenaw County, Mich., home
to Ann Arbor and surrounding areas,
Kristin Judge, the county’s commis-
sioner, took on the role of organizer
and pulled together the seven member
counties of the Southeast Michigan
Council of Governments (SEMCOG)
to discuss a shared services model. “I
wanted to get a commissioner or two
from each county and the IT director
eCityGov Alliance
The Puget Sound region of Washington State serves as a
sterling example of the benefits to sharing Web services
across jurisdictions. In 2001, nine area cities formed the
eCityGov Alliance, an agency created to pool resources from
each government body and more easily provide Web-based
services to constituents.
Smaller government jurisdictions that once lacked the ca-
pabilities to supply quality online services have found as-
sistance through the backing of bigger agencies to bridge
the digital divide and help deliver on good government. This
has eliminated redundant services while allowing members
to retain full policy authority.
Within the Alliance, the cost of this support is based on the
population of the given city member. But no matter the loca-
tion of the constituent, each citizen or business has the op-
portunity to benefit equally from the information provided.
The average citizen looking to obtain a building permit or
buy or lease commercial property, for example, is often met
with obstacles due to the wide range of zoning laws. But
the Alliance has helped constituents avoid sifting through
a mess of bureaucratic confusion by providing a unified
source for a variety of service-specific portals.
The portal, MyBuildingPermit.com, is described as a cen-
tralized location for obtaining and monitoring permits, as
well as providing checklists for the purpose of safe and
proper building. It is one-stop shopping as contractors can
pull and receive multiple over-the-counter permits from 15
jurisdictions with a single online payment, said Toni Cra-
mer, chair of the eCityGov Alliance Operations Board and
chief information officer of the City of Bellevue, Wash.
“MBP.com saves the contractors time and money by elimi-
nating multiple trips to each city hall to pull permits and
reduces costly call backs due to differing code interpreta-
tions,” said Cramer. “(So far) in 2010, 71 percent of the city
of Bellevue OTC permits were issued through MBP.com.”
Another portal, MyParksAndRecreation.com, allows visi-
tors to search the parks, trails and facilities provided by the
member cities. As to feedback from park users, Cramer de-
scribes a recent instance where a local mother of two young
children called MyParksandRecreation.com an invaluable
resource in terms of convenience and time savings. “She
explained that MPR.com makes it easy to find the most
convenient day camps in cities between where she lives
and works,” Cramer said. “The alternative would be to use
several different sources to find the same information.”
These services go beyond the nine partner cities that found-
ed the Alliance. Forty-six participating agencies covering
1.4 million citizens across five counties are now represent-
ed and able to access these portal services.
“Collaboration takes time,” Cramer adds. “The heavy lifting
associated with any shared service project comes down to
getting staff onboard and breaking down old process silos.
“We are all doing the same things, with the same goals
but each city and county has established different adminis-
trative processes and policies. These differences can drive
constituent customers crazy by sucking up time and driving
up the cost and complexity of compliance.”

9
from each county in a room,” Judge said.
“We all do similar things. Everyone has
a tax roll. We all do assessing. We all
do dog licensing. We all run a jail and a
court system.” The county members of
SEMCOG agreed.
“Everybody came to the table willingly,
ready to work and ready to find ways to
save money,” Judge said. “So we’re creating
this database of what we all have, so that
when someone is doing something new
and needs software, they can just go to this
local database and say, ‘Oakland County
already has that. Why don’t we just lease it
from them?’ Then we don’t have to go pay
this open market price and we can share.”
The opportunity to reuse and extend
infrastructure technology and share gov-
ernment specific applications is important,
but the current fiscal crisis may also lead
to further improvements. Paul Christman,
vice president of State and Local Gov-
ernments & Education Sales at Quest
Software, encourages communities to
continue making changes to the “business”
side of managing technology.
“State and local governments should
more aggressively band together in a ‘con-
sortium of business’ to reap the rewards
of strategic sourcing and drive out inef-
ficient purchasing and contracting,” said
Christman. “We have seen states such as
Virginia and Michigan consolidate purchas-
ing contracts over the last few years. This
horizontal consolidation across state
agencies should be expanded to vertical
consolidation with other local jurisdic-
tions. For example, Washtenaw County
may have an opportunity to go even further
and aggressively integrate their purchasing
with the City of Ann Arbor and University
of Michigan as well as the state.”
Unfortunately, the reaction to and
adoption of existing consortium buying
vehicles in many places around the
country has been lukewarm at best.
Some previous attempts at coopera-
tive purchasing may have been seen as
threatening the self-interests of a single
jurisdiction’s contracting and purchasing
organization. Christman says that resis-
tance may now be able to be outweighed
and overcome by the economic necessity
of acquisition and administrative cost
reductions that can be achieved through
common contracts that encompass
several jurisdictions.
While in totality the economic problems
of local governments are immense, areas
that are willing to change failing processes
and embrace creative solutions are finding
new paths to success.
The sooner local governments team up
with their neighbors, the quicker they will
rise out of economic debt and ever present
budget deficits. The obvious question
is: Why cut program spending when
resources and costs can be shared across
district and county lines?
Still, some skeptics see the current
interest in closer collaboration and sharing
as a temporary necessity with a return to
“business as usual” likely to come back
once revenues start to increase again.
“This is definitely not a passing fad,” says
Bethann Pepoli of EMC. “It will take a
number of years to get the economy back
on track and cost savings measures will
continue to be important. In addition,
data sharing and emergency communi-
cations become more critical every day.
Data standards are essential for sharing
information. Infrastructure consolidation
and application priorities which include a
scalable, secure and agile infrastructure,
as well as information repositories that
enable more focus on application inno-
In Closing
While in totality the economic problems of local
governments are immense, areas that are willing
to change failing processes and embrace creative
solutions are finding new paths to success.

10
1 Russell Nichols. “Fort Collins, Colo., Pays School District to Manage E-Mail Services,” Government Technology’s Public CIO.
http://www.govtech.com/pcio/Fort-Collins-Colo-Pays-School-District.html?page=1
2 The LOGIS Blog. http://thelogisblog.wordpress.com/
3 Jeff Cunningham. “Kent ISD districts to move to share accounting, technology services,” MLive.com.
http://www.mlive.com/northwestadvance/index.ssf/2010/07/kent _ isd _ districts _ move _ to _ sha.html
4 Cloud Computing: Pueblo County Shared Services Partnership.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Cloud+computing%3A+pueblo+county+shared+services+partnership-a0232177918
5 http://www.state.mn.us/mn/externalDocs/OET/State _ of _ Minnesota _ Signs _ Historic _ Cloud _ Computing _ Agreement _
with _ M _ 092710090511 _ MN%20BPOS%20Announcement%20Release%209%2027%20FINAL.pdf
Endnotes
If you would like more information about any of the program examples discussed in this paper or the Digital
Communities program contact: Todd Sander | Tsander@centerdigitalgov.com
vation and less time on managing the
operations are areas where we are espe-
cially committed to working as partner
with cross boundary government
agencies as one customer to ensure a
simple government transformation.”
The models are out there, and with
greater emphasis being placed on
Web-based application development,
the time and cost needed to put govern-
ment sharing into action is minimal. As
evidenced by the previous examples,
these services can take effect across
a number of jurisdictions and a tre-
mendous variety of departments, from
parks and recreation to school systems
to property management.
Even so, that does not mean that
a more “collaborative” approach to
government is inevitable. It will come
only as the result of courage and
intention. Many government agencies
are increasingly facing the stark reality
of having fewer staff, fewer resources
and just as much — if not more —
work to do.
Some communities still have not
created an environment that even
discusses collaboration, let alone
pursues it. But there is cause for
hope: The U.S. is the land of innova-
tive leaders and workers. It is these
individuals who will pursue and make
possible collaborative government
opportunities. Success will come from
those who are open to new ideas and
solutions. Historically, that openness
has been the hallmark of the public
sector IT professional.

The Center for Digital Government and Government Technology would like to thank
the Digital Communities Digital Infrastructure Task Force members for their support
and assistance in the creation of this report with special recognition to the following
task force members for their contributions.
© 2010 e.Republic, Inc. All rights reserved.
100 Blue Ravine Road
Folsom, CA 95630
916.932.1300 phone
916.932.1470 fax
www.digitalcommunities.com
Industry
Members:
Andy Pitman – Microsoft Industry Business Development Manager
Ken Price – Littleton, Colo., Information Services Director
Tom Vosburg – Fort Collins, Colo., Chief Information Ofﬁcer
Kevin Albrecht – Perceptive Software Government Solutions Manager
Bethann Pepoli – EMC State and Local Government Practice Chief Technology Ofﬁcer
John Punzak – Red Hat Senior National Sales Director of State and Local Government and Education
Kristin Judge – Washtenaw County, Mich., County Commissioner
Paul Christman – Quest Software Vice President of State and Local Governments & Education Sales
Toni Cramer – eCityGov Alliance Operations Board Chair and city of Bellevue, Wash., CIO
Paula Hoppe – iSYS, LLC Director of Business Development

Digital Communities Article 2010

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Viewers also liked

Viewers also liked (7)

Similar to Digital Communities Article 2010

Similar to Digital Communities Article 2010 (20)

Digital Communities Article 2010