Cross-jurisdictional “joining up” will only increase as states and local governments continue to find innovative ways to deal with budget challenges and opportunities for gains in service delivery - even while demand for government services increases.
Everyone benefits from this kind of cross agency and cross jurisdictional collaboration. Citizens benefit when services are coordinated or integrated and are more accessible. They benefit from greater efficiencies in spending their tax dollars through removing and avoiding over investment in technology, business processes, and human resources. Government gains from the new efficiencies and the potential new available discretionary budget that arrives when agencies and jurisdictions pool their resources. The service provider community gains a better focus on service innovation and development opportunities, and the provisions of viable cross-boundary solutions can be accelerated.
A spirit of cooperation replaces turf issues and thinking - and the attitude of public servants changes. Will all that happen overnight? Certainly not, but we’re rapidly moving in that direction and already have a host of successful state and local collaborations.
As we continue to move forward, state and local government leaders and employees will need new skills, capabilities and incentives. We need to learn how to best plan, design and implement cross-jurisdictional collaboratives. Collaborations will become the norm. That is the idea behind the NASCIO State & Local Collaboration Working Group. In partnership with PTI, NASCIO is exploring current successful collaboratives and uncovering best practices. At this juncture we have 19 finalized scenarios published on our internal online NASCIO community and will soon be publishing these on a new website open to the public. Stay tuned for more on our state & local collaboration working group.
The week of September 17th, we’ll present a webinar Effective transformation and integration that can enable cross-jurisdiction collaboration, with guest speaker Dr. Brian Cameron, Executive Director, Center for Enterprise Architecture, The Pennsylvania State University.
David Behen, CIO, State of Michigan, Co-Chair of the NASCIO State & Local Collaboration Working Group