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Results That Matter:
Technology Improving Service to the Public and County Operations
In the last year, Miami-Dade County has emerged as a leader in
technology and has received international recognition as a best
practice for electronic government. Components of the county’s
technology program have made a significant difference in both
service to the public and internal operations/efficiencies.
People are doing
things online, and when they do, it represents one less visit to
county offices, one less check that must be mailed, opened and
processed. It represents a time and money savings to the public,
and allows them to conduct business with the county at any time
of day, any day of the week. Streamlined processes associated
with these projects provide citizens with service in a fraction
of the time. Building inspection results, for example, that once
took up to two days can now be obtained within minutes of the
inspection.
This past year has seen a progressive increase in the use of the
County’s web portal, miamidade.gov, and the online services
available through it.
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6.7 million visits to the County’s web portal and departmental
websites |
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240,000 library books renewed online |
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4,500 recycling bins ordered online |
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An average of 375,000 property searches monthly (an estimated
4.5 million annually) |
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Nearly 60,000 electronic payments (e.g., parking tickets,
occupational licenses, building permits, EFT payments for water
bills), generating over $4 million in revenue |
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Over 1,200 vendors enrolled online to receive more than 1,700
vendor solicitations by email |
The use of online banking and the portal’s payment engine to pay
for government services has proven to be one of the most rapidly
expanding areas of electronic government. The chart below shows
the growth of online payments during the past fiscal year.
Although not statistically
projectable to a wider audience, a “One-Minute” online survey
implemented in September of this year reveals some interesting
information about users:
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20% of respondents are first-time
visitors to the site |
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78% are county residents, 22% are
employees and 11% are businesses (users can belong to more than
one category) |
And while we are
proud of our accomplishments, we are not ones to rest on our
laurels. As a matter of fact, the County is in the midst of a
very important project to enhance our web portal. Miamidade.gov
was launched in April 2001 as a pilot project to demonstrate and
evaluate the benefits of implementing an enterprise-wide,
service oriented web portal with a ‘focus on the citizen’. But
having outgrown the capabilities of that pilot effort, it is now
time to move to the next level. Here are some highlights of what
to expect when Release 2 of miamidade.gov occurs the beginning
of next year:
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A new look for our main portal page
and the associated ‘affinity’ pages for residents, businesses,
visitors and employees. (To see a preview, click on the image in
the right column to see it in a larger size).The new look will
allow us to take advantage of a new technology called ‘portlets’
(little windows into specific sections of information). As we
have expanded our content over the last two years, we have
outgrown the real estate on our home page. The portlets will
help us to better present this vast amount of content and online
service.
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Improved login and user
registration. Users will have more options for selecting what
they are most interesting in viewing when they come to
miamidade.gov. The new release will allow them to customize the
portal to their own personal preferences.
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Security will be enhanced via the
implementation of LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol).
This will allow the County to ‘authenticate’ users from the
portal and based on their access levels, provide them with
access to various levels of content.
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Spanish translation. This is being
done as a pilot to determine the requirements for the
translation of content to languages prevalent in our local area.
Not all content will be translated as a result of this project,
but we will select a representative segment of content and test
out this capability to determine how we can best proceed.
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New Portal |
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About e-Government
