Recently the local newspaper featured Washington City and our conversion to a "paper-less" city council. This project culminates effort for many years to bring us to this level. It also just the tip of the iceberg on what has happened technologically speaking to our city hall in the last five years.
By providing iPads to each of the council members we not only give them more tools in their hands as they make decisions but we save money in doing so. We recently estimated that going paperless will save approximately $2,500 a year in paper costs, labor to package their materials and delivery. Not to mention the efficiency of them having access to city codes, previous minutes, and resource materials as they make decisions.
As I said, this is the tip of the iceberg. In the past five years Washington City has made huge improvements in our technology. What started out six years ago as a couple of rebuilt computers has grown into a vast and powerful network of services and features. The great part of this is that this has grown in a very cost effective manner. Many services we use in the city are either free or have minimal charges. A good example of this is our conversion to Google Apps several years ago. This low cost option has given us many benefits including: greater security and redundancy, cloud collaboration tools, off-site access, and the savings of being able to avoid expensive annual licensing costs. In fact Google Apps (cloud computing), is what made this transition to paperless much more effective and efficient. Our website is another area of great improvement as we work to bring more and more services to our community through this medium.
So what will the future hold for us? Well, we will continue to look at ways in which technology can improve the way we deliver services and improve your quality of life as citizens. We will look at those services in which it is not needed to have a "personal touch" and can be provided in a more mechanical, less expensive way than with human resource. These services we will continue to enhance through technology thereby shifting our resources to providing the best quality human resource where it is needed. If you have any ideas that you would like us to explore regarding this, let us know.
In the meantime, please enjoy the features that we do provide through our website, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Youtube Channel, Xpress bill pay options, on-line applications, etc. It is our goal to continue to make working with Washington City as enjoyable as possible.
Great article. There are many other benefits of going paperless that go unmentioned frequently... For example, digital characters or words are searchable using a variety of methods. That is extremely more efficient than flipping through the pages of a lengthy document. In turn, how about the ability to access the various revisions of a document to review notes detailing how the document evolved or came to it's current state? Yet and perhaps more impressive is how easy it is for a council to see, collaborate, and share each others personal calendars to quickly, efficiently, and collectively schedule meetings together. Most forget council members are ordinary people with busy schedules working 40+ like the rest of us. Imagine seeing the entire council's schedule before you burden a fellow member to meet outside of council meeting. It is fascinating to see technology's blessings on government.
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