eGov Update: Great Lakes IT Report for April 16, 2004

Oakland County shows 'em how e-gov is done -- live, and 14 time zones away

Oakland County's e-government group keynoted an e-government conference last week.

Nothing too weird about that, except that the conference was in Canberra, Australia.

And Phil Bertolini, director of information technology for the county, never left Oakland County.

"For us, it was 9 p.m. the night of April 6, which was 11 a.m. April 7 their time," Bertolini said.

The Web-conferenced event started out with a five-minute video produced by the county, narrated by County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, that touted Oakland's quality of life, its e-government investment, and its Automation Alley initiative.

Bertolini followed with a 40-minute presentation on Oakland County's system for Web content management, and how it's been adopted in the county's work force.

"We have 140 content managers in the county, people who publish their own content within their business unit," Bertolini said. "We talked about how we trained and educated them in our policies and procedures."

On the other end, in Australia, attendees at the Marcus Evans Website Content Management for Government conference saw Bertolini on one TV screen and his PowerPoint presentation on another.

Oakland County's Web site now provides the ability to pay for traffic tickets, order "vital statistics" forms like birth, death and marriage certificates, buy park passes, order property and planning maps, and download forms for business startups, professional certification registration, and more.

Bertolini said Oakland County has already collected about $55,000 in traffic tickets online in the 52nd District Court's four divisions.

Bertolini said online payment of county property taxes will be available soon, with online payment of local municipality and school taxes coming no later than this winter's tax bills. The county will be able to accept online payment by credit card.

There's more about the county's overall initiative at Oakland County's e-gov site, http://www.oakgov.com/egov.

Reprinted with permission from the Great Lakes IT Report, http://glitr.com.