May 19
2012
The City of Boston worked with Salesforce to create The Boston Business Hub web portal to provide an innovative new service for businesses looking to start, relocate, or expand in the City of Boston.
This new one stop portal shows Mayor Menino’s commitment to supporting business development in Boston and is a good model for other cities to embrace.
The Boston Business Hub provides tools:
- Connect with the right people in City Hall to answer your questions and:
- Guarantee a response within two business days;
- Provide an inquiry number, the name of the person who will respond, and their contact information; and
- Track the status and history of your inquiry.
- Create a permitting and licensing checklist for your business needs, including:
- Details and links to the relevant departments; and
- Downloadable application forms and a personalized checklist that you can save or email.
- Compile resources based on business type and location.
As a Salesforce AppExhange for Government partner, BasicGov’s permitting and licensing modules are easily added to streamline those processes for government staff and businesses.
May 19
2012
Mobile computing is changing how IT services are provided in government.
Paul Strobeck, IT Manager for a local government in the San Francisco Bay Area and a contributor writer for TechRepublic, recently wrote an article about tablets in local government and highlighted many interesting and relevant factors in this transition.
- Increased Productivity – local governments that support tablets recognize that it adds to productivity by allowing staff access to access to their work systems in the office or remotely in the field, at remote sites, or at home.
- Bring Your own Device (BYOD) movement – the iPad has put pressure on organizations, both private and government sector, to allow staff to BYOD for increased work efficiency but this also adds new IT challenges.
- Mobile IT strategy needed – “For tablets to be successful in our enterprise environment, we need to grow our skill sets and discover solutions to new issues” such as policies, security standards, enterprise mobility strategy, and application roadmaps.
Mobile computing is also fueling cloud computing
Mobile apps are also driving demand for cloud services on the back end, such as app stores, databases, and storage (source).
Organizations that have security figured out for cloud computing have the advantage for adding in more mobile computing.
It is encouraging to see local government IT professionals like Paul Strobeck with their embrace change attitude “In the local government, we try to follow what others are doing in the private sector with the mounting issues that tablets have introduced. We do our best to attend conferences and trainings to seek out the evolving policies and advice to support and manage tablets. We’ve discovered that many enterprises are going through the same wave of transition.”
Be on the lookout for news form BasicGov in the coming months for how we are responding to the needs for a mobile workforce in government.
