An Bui, Spelled An With 1 N

 

In early March, I had written a post about City Planners and core competencies. The gist of the statement that inspired that post was City planners must consider the whole of a [transportation] system.

 

Recently, I read from the Ann Arbor Chronicle information about Ann Arbor’s City Council Meeting. This comprehensive coverage of the City’s initiatives included software:

Software

The city and county have already combined their data centers (hardware). On Monday, council authorized a contract worth $263,371 to integrate document-management software as a part of the “City/County IT Enterprise Content Management Partnership.” Based on the cost breakdowns, this particular contract appears to involve city departments.

Chronicle inquiries with the county yielded the insight that the county uses the OnBase system and that the city will be building their applications on the same technology infrastructure. This allows the city to pay for licensing, but not have to buy new servers. Descriptions of the work the individual city departments will be undertaking:

• City Attorney Scope: Implement workflow for contract tracking. Will initially use professional service contracts as the starting point. The developed process will provide visibility into where the contract is at all times. Includes eSignature process from Docusign* and full routing for approval, including external signers.
• Purchasing Scope: Requesting Accounts Payable workflow for invoice coding and approval and simple workflow for Purchase Order requests.
• Accounts Receivable Scope: For storage and retrieval of scanned or electronic documents.
• Clerk Scope: Configure OnBase to store and retrieve the following scanned  document types: Annexation, Ordinance, Council packets, Minutes  Contracts, Easements/Deeds, Liquor licenses and Traffic Control Orders.
• Project Management Scope: Replace eCabinet process and convert existing eCabinet documents to the OnBase platform.
• Assessor Scope: Bulk load of Assessor property cards into OnBase.

Kudos to Ann Arbor for online sharing of city initiatives and plans. Other information includes street closings, repavings, public art installation and more. The depth of coverage and discussion reveals some evidence of considering the whole system of IT.  I’m interested in seeing how DocuSign and OnBase work together, and if Ann Arbor uses DocuSign’s API to extend OnBase.

For now, I’m happy to see a city government sharing civic information on the Web and integrating technology into their processes to cut costs. 

*disclaimer: DocuSign is a client

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.