San Luis Obispo County Grand Jury
• 2010-2011
• Agency Response
What's on-line? e-Gov in Subject: San Luis Obispo County*
⚠️ Translation Notice: This content has been automatically translated. The original English text is the official version. Translation may contain errors.
⚠️ Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente. El texto original en inglés es la versión oficial. La traducción puede contener errores.
Findings and Recommendations 5 findings
F1
SLO County should consider establishing an e-Gov advisory group consisting of local public users of e-Gov services, ideally a cross-section of business people and private citizens. Response: This recommendation may be implemented in the future. It appears the intent of forming an advisory committee is to obtain public feedback about e-Gov services. The approach the County is taking is to use the survey related to e-Gov services posted on the County web site as a means to obtain public feedback. Should the responses from the survey prove insufficient to make meaningful decisions, the e-Gov COI, under the guidance of the GSA-IT, will implement the Grand Jury's recommendation to consider forming an e-Gov advisory group after the survey results are monitored over the next several months. A decision will be made in late fall of 2011. Consideration of the decision to form an advisory group will necessarily involve an evaluation of the allocation of staff time to support an e-Gov advisory group relative to other County priorities.
No recommendations for this finding
F2
SLO County should establish a focus group approach to obtaining feedback from public users of e-Gov services. Response: This recommendation will not be implemented as the County is currently seeking feedback from the public through its survey. Additionally, if a decision is made to create an e-Gov advisory group identified in Recommendation #1, the advisory group would be utilized to fulfill the focus group role.
No recommendations for this finding
F3
County government has not placed similar focus on its own, currently underutilized, intranet. Response: The GSA agrees with this finding. Most of the internal support organizations, such as the Auditor-Controller's office, have a fairly significant intranet presence. On their site, the Auditor-Controller posts items of interest to all County employees such as Travel Policy and Reimbursement Rates, Smartphone Guidelines, and various County Forms. Similarly, General Services - Purchasing posts information on how to Surplus Clean Electronics, Request for Proposal templates, and a Purchasing Handbook for County employees who are involved in purchasing activities. Both of these organizations also post information that is primarily only of interest to departmental employees. The GSA believes that additional focus could be placed on the County's intranet and that the group best positioned for such a focus would be the e-Gov COI.
No recommendations for this finding
F4
County government has not developed and implemented a regular, formal method of obtaining feedback from the citizens of SLO County on its e-Gov services, both current and potential. Response: The GSA partially agrees with this finding. The County web site allows for citizens to make inquiries or provide comments on a wide variety of issues including the status of e-Gov services. However, there has not been a formal process to obtain feedback specific to e-Gov services. In April 2011, the County began posting a short survey on its external-facing website. Questions include: 1) What type of information were you looking for on our web site?; 2) Were you able to find the information you were looking for?: 3) What could we do to improve our site?; and 4) What did you like about our site? Each response has been reviewed by the e-Gov COI, a cross-departmental team who guides the day-to-day implementation of the web site. Feedback through the survey will be continued moving forward. The County has not formally surveyed its staff on how it might improve utilization of its intranet. Response: The GSA agrees with this finding. However, the e-Gov COI, who guides the day-to- day implementation of the intranet web site, has representatives from 14 different departments. The COI members are expected to bring ideas from their respective departments on how to improve both the internet and intranet web sites.
No recommendations for this finding
F5
The County has not formally surveyed its staff on how it might improve utilization of its intranet.
No recommendations for this finding
Conclusions 1
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CL1In summary, the Grand Jury learned that SLO County government has committed, experienced professionals in place to plan, implement and oversee new e-Gov offerings to county citizens and businesses now and into the future. In 2002, SLO County government had the foresight to commission the Gartner Group to develop an IT Strategic Plan for the County. Since then, the County has been implementing the plan and has made significant strides in developing and delivering e-Gov offerings to the citizens and businesses of the County. More information and services are available on-line than ever before and the amount is growing. Much remains to be done, however, in both the internet and intranet arenas. Although the County has made progress in making information available and delivering e-Gov services to the public via the internet, the County does not appear to have a regular mechanism for obtaining feedback from external users. Understandably, the focus to date has been on developing and delivering e-Gov services; however, there has been much less emphasis on obtaining potentially valuable feedback from public users. Public user feedback would have value not only for assessing current e-Gov services, but also in helping to identify future e-Gov services. Regarding the County intranet, comparatively little has been done. Some information, indeed, has been uploaded to the intranet and is used by County employees. However, far more information could be uploaded, which means that the capabilities of the County intranet are underutilized and potential benefits are delayed. In addition, the County appears to have made little effort to survey County employees about their views and suggestions as to how the County intranet could be better utilized.
* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.