Mayor Robert Garcia joined Long Beach City Auditor Laura Doud Tuesday morning for the release of her office's Digital and E-Government Best Practices Report, a "non-audit assessment" documenting where the City currently stands in terms of its use of technology, as well as recommendations for how to move forward into the future.
Doud told the Post that listening to the mayor talk about his vision for the city as a technology leader, as well as the recent formation of the Technology & Innovation Commission, led her office to conduct its study into what Long Beach is currently doing—and what it could be doing better—to "meet the technology challenges of the future," and work toward Garcia's stated goal of making the city a leader in technology, both regionally and nationally.
"I think Long Beach is in a good position to be a more responsive city to its constituents," Doud told the Post. "The pieces are in place."
And what are those pieces? In Long Beach, residents have access to government services and processes like paying utility bills, requesting city services like pothole repair or graffiti removal and managing their library accounts online. Moving these sorts of services online were at one time, as the report says, "ambitious e-government initiatives for many jurisdictions."
However, the report continues, in 2015, these services are "no longer considered innovative or forward-thinking, but rather just standard practice."
If Long Beach wants to stay on the cutting edge, the report says, the future is SMAC—a catchy acronym for social, mobile, analytics and cloud, the four major pillars of modern information technology.
The report gives examples of cities using SMAC technologies to connect with and better serve constituents, such as the City of Indianapolis' use of social media during the 2012 NFL Super Bowl to monitor real-time chatter and quickly respond to users’ questions and complaints regarding trash, parking, crowd control and other related issues as well as direct appropriate resources to the right places before these issues intensified.
“We are making Long Beach one of the nation’s most cutting-edge cities by linking government with the public through digital technology,” Garcia said in a statement. “The City Auditor’s Best Practices Report is an exemplary guide that enhances the City’s two-way communications with residents, and also provides examples of innovative technology programs being used successfully in cities around the country.”
In tandem with the release of the report, Doud announced the launch of her office's new mobile app, called MyAuditor, which seeks to connect residents with the city auditor's office, including the ability to quickly and confidentially report suspected fraud against the city, access audit information, make suggestions to the city auditor and provide feedback on matters within the City.
MyAuditor, the first app of its kind among California government audit offices, is now available free on the App Store and on Google Play.
The City Auditor's full Digital and E-Government Best Practices Report is available here.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Dennis Dean
Quelle/Source: Long Beach Post, 25.03.2015
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