NASCIO looks at cross-jurisdiction collaboration
The National Association of Chief Information Officers released a report Wednesday that examines the benefits of cross-jurisdictional collaboration and the role it plays in tapping into a variety of funding streams.
The report also explores how cross-jurisdictional collaboration can help improve the quality and availability of citizen services and deliver more citizen-centric outcomes.
Cross-jurisdiction collaboration has gotten more attention in recent years as state governments look to shared services as a way to pare costs and share funding. In many cases, the state capitals have the advantage of being situated in one the most densely populated cities and counties in a given state, giving ample opportunities for different government groups to share services and find savings in their own geographical area.
According to the 2013 State CIO Survey, 74 percent of state CIOs include cross-jurisdictional collaboration in their strategic plans while another 20 percent are considering following suit.
“In this report we look at a lot of funding options for IT and refer back to previous research we’ve done on this topic,” said Brenda Decker, co-chair for the NASCIO Cross-Jurisdictional Collaboration working group and chief information officer for Nebraska, in a release. “We also make the case that understanding and clearly articulating all costs is an important part of the business case development and is essential prior to seeking funding.”
“This report rounds out our library of resources regarding cross-jurisdictional collaboration,” Calvin Rhodes, co-chair of the NASCIO Cross-Jurisdictional Collaboration working group and chief information officer for Georgia, said in a release.
The ability to start and sustain collaboration depends on getting sources of funding to work together and create a funding basket, Rhodes said.
While the process to collaborate across jurisdications gained new popularity in the wake of the great recession, agencies have worked on shared service solutions for more than two decades, with some aspects being more mature than others. The report, for instance, concludes:
- Interagency collaboration at the state level is more mature than state and local collaboration.
- State and local collaboration is more mature than multistate collaboration.
- A focus on selected technologies is more mature than a focus on service processes.
- Governance and compliance provisions are more mature than funding options and integration with overall state core management and service prioritization processes.
There is another increasingly important motivator behind cross-jurisdictional collaboration – the pressure to improve citizen services, according to NASCIO.
Achieving a comprehensive view of the citizen, organizing services around to life events, and increasing the quality and availability of citizen services through enterprisewide and cross-enterprise collaboration is key, the report says. This motivation includes goals for increasing efficiency, effectiveness and capacity, according to the report.
NASCIO said in its report:
