BasicGov / BLOG

I hope Google Trademark lawyers don’t come after me.  I took that title from a recent webinar hosted on a TechRepublic Webcast and modified it a bit.  The presentation was done by James Ferreira, CIO for the office of the New Mexico Attorney General.

In the presentation (email me and I’ll send you a link to download it from TechRepublic) James compares the cost, features, and benefits of two systems and the decision making rationale for selecting one over another.  In one corner, you have the heavyweight champion(Microsoft) , enterprise based, installed software with huge marketshare.  In the other corner, the leading contender, definitely in the heavyweight category for speed and power, but with the added benefit of lightweight costs and overhead due to a software as a service (SaaS) delivery model.

Guess who won?

I wrote an earlier post about LA moving over to Google from Novell Groupwise products, and this youtube video talks about another company that moved 12,000 employees from Microsoft to Google. Clearly SaaS is not longer just a trend.

A summary of the factors at which Google did better is below:

• Scalability
• Storage Capability
• Data Searchability
• Data Security
• Total Cost of Ownership
• Data Management
• Connectivity

All this leads to a model where the customer was able to reduce costs while increasing functionality.

I’m not saying BasicGov is Google, but those 7 items above are reasons to choose us over other providers of software for local government.  Our software is hosted on Force.com and Amazon.com and these two cloud computing platforms are in the same league as Google, if not better.

The added bonus long term for BasicGov is that a very high percentage of our tech effort is on feature development.

As of last week, the new BasicGov Citizen Portal is now available.  The Product Development team at BasicGov been hard at work on the portal over the summer, and we are looking forward to implementing it, and seeing how it is used in action.  Our Implementation team is hard at work preparing for upcoming implementation as well, to make sure that this transition is as fast and easy as possible for our customers.

The Portal allows citizens to apply for permits, register complaints, submit planning applications, apply for licenses, request inspections, and download documents, online over the web.  The Portal directly interacts with the BasicGov system, so that as soon as citizens or developers apply for permits (or complaints, planning applications, or licenses) on the Portal, this information is immediately reflected in BasicGov, so that the city users can immediately see the permit, schedule inspections, and update the citizen on the status of the permit.  The Portal is a fast and easy way for citizens to get information to the city, and it is a great way for the city to immediately let citizens and developers know when the permit information has been updated.

The Portal is configurable for each city as well.  Each city can work with BasicGov to configure the information that is displayed for permits, complaints, licenses, and planning applications.  This means that the fields on each screen are configurable, as are the header information, and the messages that appear on each screen.  The technical architecture for the Portal enables BasicGov to configure this information quickly and easily for each city.

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