E-government at work in Wayne County, Mich.
Connecting state and local government leaders
Faced with dwindling resources, Wayne County, Michigan officials had to take innovative steps in order to deliver quality, cost-effective taxpayer services.
Faced with dwindling resources in a region with one of the nation’s highest unemployment and home foreclosure rates, Wayne County, Michigan officials had to take innovative steps in order to deliver quality, cost-effective taxpayer services.
The county needed a technology platform that could deliver information in real-time to enable county leadership to make quick decisions on resource allocation. Officials chose Open Text’s Enterprise Content Management as a foundation to integrate existing platforms and systems and captures and presents content in an organized manner.
The technology enabled the county to move toward Web-based internal work processes and Web-based taxpayer services.
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The Wayne County Service Request System was the first step towards Web-based business processes developed on the Open Text platform. SRS help streamline, automate and standardize all internal services offered by county departments into an online system.
SRS automatically captures performance metric information, providing real-time access to information critical to making successful resource allocation decisions.
Wayne County also developed a Web-based application to support the Mortgage Foreclosure Prevention Program. Supported by an electronic workflow business process, the application provides online intake of foreclosure applications, online dispersal of cases to counseling partners and electronic case files that package information for reporting and submission for grant reimbursement.
Four other Michigan counties have licensed the application, as have several non-profit organizations. The program has saved more than 5,000 Wayne County homes flagged for foreclosures.
The county is also testing a patient-centric health care information exchange related to personal health records with 200 employees of the Detroit Medical Center.
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