Novell Helps Philadelphia Define its eGovernment Future

The city of Philadelphia has turned to Novell for help in developing an eGovernment strategy to improve and expand online services to its millions of citizens. With the expertise of Cambridge Technology Partners - now part of the Novell® NgageSM family of professional services - the city identified the key challenges in moving to an eGovernment model and developed a detailed plan to meet those challenges. The eGovernment initiative has helped the city of Philadelphia achieve a centralized and effective technology roadmap for the future, laying the foundation for increasing and improving constituent services across the Web.

Like many organizations today, Philadelphia, one of the largest cities in the United States, wanted to leverage the Internet to drive down costs and improve services to its business and citizen constituents and among its multiple agencies. The city saw a centralized eGovernment initiative as a good catalyst for driving more value from existing technology and workforce resources, while also increasing inter-departmental collaboration and improving the overall delivery of city services. Given the diversity of the city's agencies and departments, the city also wanted to build a repeatable methodology that could be applied easily to different agencies or when analyzing new initiatives.

The city looked at a number of professional services firms and selected Novell for the job. "Out of all the firms we researched, the superb methodology and expertise of the Novell team clearly stood above the rest," said Michael Dean, deputy chief information officer of the City of Philadelphia. "They offered us a senior team with extensive experience in the government and corporate arenas. They were instrumental in bringing our eGovernment strategy to life."

Novell performed an organizational assessment to understand the city's core objectives: neighborhood transformation and blight elimination; economic development; fiscal health and a steady tax reduction; high quality public education and social services; and public safety and quality of life standards. This assessment served as the foundation for Novell and the city to develop a high-level technological and organizational roadmap that defined the necessary modifications in technology, people and processes to improve the current situation, as well as architecture recommendations to support future initiatives.

Based on the work with Novell, the city has developed a Federated Information Services organization that now serves as the city's sole provider of strategic IT leadership and support. The strategy has extended collaboration across department and agency boundaries. Already, more than 100 eGovernment initiatives have been defined, including, among others, online zoning permits, eFiling, online environmental review and clearance, online new business registration, a partner extranet for visitor and tourism information, an online pressroom, employee benefits portal, a police integrated information network, and more.

"Thanks to Novell, we now have an eGovernment strategy that provides a united face of government to our key constituencies," Dean said. "This solution supports our objectives and enables us to deliver on our initiatives, offering city agencies, residents, visitors and businesses superior services through technology."