Dr. Jon Gant, Research Associate Professor at GSLIS and Director of the Center for Digital Inclusion, will lead a series of webinars this fall as part of the Local Government Strategies for Digital Government series, which is sponsored by the Digital Innovation Leadership Program (DILP). The webinars are designed for local government officials across the state of Illinois.
Read more: Gant leads e-government webinar series– Sept. 10, 2015, GSLIS Newsroom
All events are free to attend, but registration is required.
September 17, 2015: Best Practices in eGovernment
This leadership seminar helps local government leaders examine the strategies, practices, and technologies of digital government. Local governments in Illinois and around the US are integrating computer-based technologies into the centerfold of public administrative reforms to augment the delivery of services, support public participation, and enhance governing and decision-making. eGovernment relies on IT to automate and transform the processes to serve citizens, businesses, governments, and other constituents. The seminar focuses on understanding models of delivering services through IT-enabled processes, social media, and data analytics. We will consider open government, security issues, the technology ecosystem, and social and economic evaluation.
October 15, 2015: Technology Planning Webinar
All governments face growth in demand for services while confronting a strained economy, coupled with the belief that it is appropriate to explore new opportunities where technology innovation is essential. These challenges and opportunities are fueled by heightened expectations from constituents and the business community to interact and conduct business with governmental entities utilizing modern technology and web-based capabilities that enhance information, communication, and transactions in a variety of formats, and enable further transparency in government. An environment of rapid change and the need for responsiveness, together with finite resources highlights the importance of thoughtfully considered deployment of Information Technology (IT), that embrace supportable standards and agile, IT-enabled services.
As such, any governmental entity’s IT capabilities must be contemporary, flexible, scalable, secure, and environmentally conscious with the ability to respond to new goals and dynamically changing service and operational requirements by various agencies. An ideal environment builds on an enterprise architecture that includes industry standards, open systems, and tools that support a variety of needs and diverse portfolio of systems. The supporting infrastructure foundation is designed to ensure the integrity of transactions and data, as well as optimum system performance. Strategic planning, governance, and program management assures inclusion in decision making and implementation of solid products, and effective solution delivery.
November 19, 2015: Using Data and Analytics to Drive Government Innovation
Local governments collect mountains of data from citizens and services. However, knowing how to best organize, manage, and extract insights from these large, diverse data sets is a challenge. Enter data analytics. Illinois communities are leading the nation in recognizing the benefits of applying analytics. We’re seeing government organizations mobilizing to explain and report on their operations, performance, services, and decision making—both for internal employees and external constituents—utilizing data, the most valuable natural resource of the twenty-first century. Our discussion will focus on the vital components of data-driven government, and we’ll learn from communities of practice that are emerging all around the country that are digitizing information, disseminating public data sets, and applying analytics to improve decision making.
