One is “Digitopolis,” a huge and sprawling urban center located on the West Coast. Digitopolis has invested in next-generation technology infrastructure that encompasses cloud data management systems, open data platforms, mobile applications, predictive analysis models and consumer-friendly visualization techniques.
At the heart of Digitopolis’ innovative and mission-critical IT strategy is the core belief that technology is a crucial asset and a critical new way for government to address a host of pressing issues, including citizen participation, transparency and operational efficiency.
The other city is “Stressville,” a municipality of 25,000 in the rural upper Midwest. Stressville has just a handful of employees working in city hall; it has no IT department or budget; and it still uses manual processes to manage many day-to-day government functions.
This puts a huge burden on the shoulders of Stressville’s clerks, who are stretched thin and have to do the jobs of five people. In fact, on the days when Stressville’s city hall is preparing a major agenda document, its clerks wear slippers instead of less comfortable shoes in the office because they’re on their feet for hours collating cumbersome paper agendas and reports.
Digitopolis and Stressville are obviously fictional locales, but their radically different technology experiences help illustrate the growing Good Government Divide in the United States that has separated a few large and influential cities from their 25,000 small and medium-sized counterparts with populations between 1,000 and 25,000.
The Good Government Divide has nothing to do with intentions – the elected officials and staff members in both Digitopolis and Stressville want to govern well on behalf of their citizens. Instead, the divide has to do with resources. Too many small and medium-sized local governments in the U.S. believe they don’t have the budgets to harness state-of-the-art technology that would foster greater and much-needed efficiency and transparency for residents.
And money is truly at the heart of the matter here.
Public Sector Digitization: The Trillion Dollar Challenge – a recent McKinsey analysis – indicates that capturing the full potential of government digitization around the world could free up to $1 trillion annually in economic value through improved cost and operational performance.
On a more local level, there are a number of case studies that reveal the significant financial benefits that kick in when governments adopt new cloud-based technology initiatives. For example, when San Francisco offered citizens access to real-time transit data, the result was 21.7 percent fewer SF311 calls, which yielded a savings of over $1 million a year.
Savings like this are one of the reasons why a recent Government Technology survey indicated that open data has become a top priority of CIOs in cities.
I’m not suggesting that small- and medium-sized governments like Stressville’s can just implement cloud-based software solutions and expect to save millions of dollars a year; but I am saying that too many rural cities are missing out on the upside benefits of the efficiency-driven technology revolution that is now rapidly unfolding in places like Digitopolis.
This isn’t the first time that rural cities have been unable to take advantage of community-enhancing technology.
A recent analysis from the FCC for example, reports that: “Americans living in urban areas are three times more likely to have access to next-generation broadband than Americans in rural areas. An estimated 15 million Americans, primarily in rural communities, don’t even have access to entry-level broadband in their homes. Forty-one percent of American’s rural schools couldn’t get a high-speed connection if they tried.”
There are many explanations for this broadband technology gap, but the one that seems to hold the most weight is the high cost of connecting rural areas with fiber.
I run a for-profit software company, but I believe that cost shouldn’t get in the way of 21st-century technology basics like broadband or cloud-based solutions, which allow even the smallest communities in our country to achieve greater connectivity, efficiency and transparency.