Now we are living in a world where the impact of increased digitization is reaching every nook and corner. The digitization of documents has increased the possibility of transferring and accessing documents across electronic devices. Cisco predicts that by 2015, the connected internet devices will outnumber people by two to one. To move along with the wave, Evanston, a suburban city in Cook County of United States is stepping towards modernizing government services through digitization.
As a recent report published at informationweek.com, Evanston is striving to digitize and make available online all forms applicable to the city such as licenses, permits, fees, death certificates, and many more. Electronic conversion of documents makes them available in interactive form, reachable from any device. It also facilitates all kinds of transactions online.
Future Proposals in Evanston with Digitization
- With electronic conversion of documents, the authorities are planning to determine the development and funding priorities of the city. This can be done far better than before, as the authorities have the option to access the required data from the city departments, immediately and simultaneously.
- The city is now looking for a replacement for the parking-ticket system that will leverage two cloud-based services, wufoo and stripe. Wufoo is a front-end form builder and stripe is a payment-processing platform, priced as a percentage of transaction volume. Stripe is far more economical than the credit-card processing fees the city has been shelling out.
- The city is expecting to close 1 million transactions in one year.
- They will be launching the use of Dwolla for payments, another cloud app that uses a bank-routing number, by bypassing credit cards.
- Another project involves sending the ratings from Apple iPad-equipped city inspectors, who use a commercial inspection and rating application into the business’s Yelp profile.
- They recently launched a new parks and recreation app that allows anyone to send messages to the city’s non-emergency 311 operator.
So, by scanning and converting documents to electronic format, Evanston is achieving rapid development. For the next couple of years, they plan to focus more on the longer-range, enterprise-wide systems.
