CC Mobile

In the article, "Most e-Government-for-Development Projects Fail
How Can Risks be Reduced?" Richard Heeks defines e-government as the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve the activities of public sector organisations. Seems straightforward enough right? Yet he goes on to explain that most e-government projects fail. I can see why. Although I don't work on e-government projects today, I have been an IT Project Manager for over 5 years and can testify that it's not just e-government projects that fail, but e-projects in general for a number of reasons. I find the biggest challenge in implementing an e-project (right now I work for US Airways and am working on an application that sends receipts to passengers booking via phone) is gathering the information from the business about what they want, assessing those needs, and translating that into a solution. It's much more complicated then it sounds. For the project I am managing, information has to be pulled from a number of databases into our web service and then data mapped sent to an email service which then sends the email to the passenger. Assessing the business needs is difficult enough, but once a solution is determined, the development of that solution presents its own challenges. Computers are not intuitive, we have to give them their brains and program every single detail of what they are doing and the devil is in the details.

Heek says that the reason most e-government projects fail due to "the oversize gaps between project design and on-the-ground reality." I think he means that the government needs are not met by the project itself. In that case more research needs to be done regarding what the community needs are.

In "Comparative E-Government: Trends and Sophistication at the Grass Roots", Tony E. Wohlers cites cost as a reason that hinders governments from engaging in effective and innovative e-commerce. Like Jaeger explains, unlike the private sector sites, government sites need to be 508 compliant. The already high costs for e-government websites and applications are compounded by the costs to make a website and webapp accessible which can be quite expensive.

Given the various challenges an e-government project presents, I found the CC Mobile service from Corpus Christi Texas innovative - http://www.cctexas.com/ccmobile/ The basis of the service is that is that residents and visitors to Corpus Christi Texas can report city problems with their smart phones. The e-government functionality is two parts:

1.) Residents download the application onto their smart phone. The directions to do so depends on the type of phone a user has. For instance those with iPhones go to the iTunes app store to purchase. They then can take a picture of a problem (such as a pothole) in the city, select the type of issue, and send. The communication then goes to the city's Customer Service Center and routed to the appropriate department. The application captures the location the picture was taken.

2) Anyone can go to the http://www.cctexas.com/ccmobile/ website and view what issues have been reported on an interactive map.

I think the CC Mobile service is effective in that it involves city residents in a very user friendly way in making the city a better place to live. The city centralizes citizen concerns to one site and one agency, the Customer Service Center, instead of residents needing to contact separate agencies. Also by publishing details of complaints including pictures on the interactive map, it lessens the number of repetative reports. The reporting feature isn't as detailed as data.gov for instance, but I feel it's easier to understand. What's the point of presenting complicated information when it doesn't meet your objective?

I think that there are certain features that are not necessary. For instance the app requires you to take a picture before submitting. In some cases this may not be possible and/or unneccessary. For instance, there was a report of dead animals that I found on the interactive map. It was not really necessary that a picture of them needed to be on the site.

Although the site makes an attempt to be 508 compliant, that is, accessible to those with disabilities I didn't see that the site was fully compliant. Granted, as Jaeger says, 508 compliance can be interpreted a number of ways, but I did see that when looking at the source code for a page detailing an incident report it was obviously not. There was way too much javascript in the source code and the text was not written out in the source code which means that a vision impared person would have a hard time knowing what was on such a page from a web reader.

All in all though I think that CC Mobile is an e-gov service that could effectively be adopted by other cities.