Digital Government

A growing number of cities throughout the U.S. are reaping the many benefits of digital government. By adopting smart technologies that enable more city business to be conducted online, cities are more effectively meeting the needs of citizens while improving productivity and reducing costs.

Digital government services enable residents and businesses to interact with local government agencies through a variety of channels – websites, mobile apps, social media sites, email, text, chat, phone or in-person visits. Citizens no longer need to make a time-consuming visit to city hall during business hours to handle government-related business – they can take care of most tasks online at any time of day.

A digital government strives to digitize most data and make the majority of information and services available online. Digital government services may include:

• Online portals where residents can complete government business such as paying parking tickets and taxes, applying for licenses, completing required paperwork such as an annual census,completing online permitting request, reporting problems and issues in the community, or finding information about city services.
• Websites and mobile apps that provide information about city departments and the services they offer.
• eDemocracy tools that promote public conversation, voter registration, eVoting and greater citizen engagement.
• Social media channels that provide an easy way for citizens to give feedback.
• Online libraries and repositories of information.
• Tourism sites that guide visitors to local sites, shops, restaurants and businesses.

What digital government can accomplish

With the right technology for digital government in place, cities can achieve:

• Greater citizen involvement. When citizens can interact with government more easily and on their own terms, it empowers them to be more proactive about reporting issues, making requests and engaging with their local government agencies and elected officials.
• Increased performance. Digitization and online processes allow agencies and departments to coordinate more effectively, eliminating old processes that are paper-based, time-consuming and error-prone.
• More transparency. By making more information available to more people, digital government technologies help build trust between local government and constituents.
• Improved quality of life. Making local government services easier and faster makes a city a more attractive place to live, strengthening the tax base and the local economy.
• Lower costs. An investment in digital government technology offers great return on investment in the form of lower operational costs and increased productivity – benefits that ultimately come back to the taxpayer.

The technology required for digital government

To enable digital government, cities must implement a variety of smart technologies. Intelligent traffic management, smart grid solutions and critical infrastructure security need IoT-enabled sensors, cameras and drone monitoring technology positioned throughout the city to collect information on thousands of data points. Cities also need a powerful analytics platform that can ingest enormous amounts of data streaming in from continuous monitoring sources, analyzing and distilling it to produce actionable intelligence for city officials and automated systems. Cities also require user interfaces – websites, mobile apps, digital signage, smart streetlights and smart kiosks that deliver useful information to residents. And all of these technologies require a backbone of high-speed connectivity that can move data quickly, securely and reliably with ultra-low latency. That’s where Spectrum Enterprise comes in.

As a trusted provider of connectivity solutions to the nation’s largest businesses, Spectrum Enterprise is also a premier partner to smart cities everywhere. Spectrum has built a wholly owned network with more than 840,000 miles of fiber infrastructure nationwide, and is in the midst of an additional $25 billion investment to bring more capacity and capabilities to additional communities throughout the U.S.

To help cities implement digital government and other smart technologies, Spectrum Enterprise provides:

• High-speed connectivity for local governments and large institutions, with symmetrical connectivity speeds up to 100 Gbps on a two-way, fully interactive digital network.
• Gigabit connectivity for homes and businesses within the Spectrum footprint, enabling residents and business owners to fully participate in digital government.
• Cellular connectivity provided by a cellular LTE network that is one of the nation’s largest.
• Wireless connectivity at hundreds of thousands of WiFi hotspots that will soon offer connection speeds up to 1 Gbps.

Learn more about Spectrum Smart Cities at www.spectrumsmartcities.com.