| | AUGUST 201819CIOReviewCSDCPioneering the Smart City MovementThe Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data are now heavily used terms in many industry verticals and the GovTech industry is no different. With the advent of these technologies, it has opened the door for a wide range of applications that were previously thought to be impossible. "To become a smart city, governments need digitization, the ability to use and share data across agencies and the right technologies like IoT and Artificial Intelligence to help them capture data and make use of the information they collect.It takes a lot of effort to be on the path of becoming a smart city and there are a lot of demands," says Erin Mulligan Nelson, CEO of CSDC, a company with a 28-year history of streamlining and modernizing regulatory processes at the core of a city's most essential functions, critically enabling smart city penetration and growth.Today, citizen expectations are increasing on a daily basis. They do not compare services to the services of another state or city. Rather, the excellent experiences they receive from the private sector from the likes of Amazon and Google are what citizens want. This is a tall order as the government is not only trying to implement smart city infrastructure, but also working hard to invest budget dollars wisely. Modern citizens are tech-savvy and digitally oriented, and they demand modernization, transparency, and access.CSDC's Amanda platform helps governments meet these critical requirements. It provides them a modern technology foundation to digitize critical business functions and data. It bridges IoT initiatives like monitoring air quality to existing government workflows (e.g., an inspection) and it enables multiple agencies to share one source of data using the platform's master database architecture. The platform offers four different types of functionality to governments. At the core is a permit, compliance and licensing solution. It enables customers to maintain land management, building, and licensing data as well as public safety, to name a few. This allows the government to create new sources of revenue for the city. CSDC's solution also has a portion that supports freedom of information, giving city, state and federal governments the ability to respond to requests from citizens to review and audit reports. The Amanda platform also has a Courts and Justice functionality that allows governments to manage court cases and dockets for courts and justice system, enabling the city to efficiently manage these operations and provide citizens a more efficient and transparent system. The fourth offering is around higher education and grants--it allows front-office subject matter reviews, curriculum and process management for grants for colleges and universities. Recently, CSDC launched Amanda Editions, which drastically lowers entry costs for customers through subscription pricing and cloud hosting. Amanda Editions helps close the technology gap between rural and urban communities by making the product more widely available to governments that previously were limited by budget requirements or on-staff IT bandwidth. "At its core, Amanda is the world's most effective government case management software, enabling all cases to be managed in a digitized and modern framework," states Nelson. Implementation takes anywhere from three months to a year, depending on the complexity of the integration of the platform into the customer's pre-existing architecture. It provides powerful process capability and management, and secure data access; enabling cities to efficiently run the processes that are critical to the management of their revenue stream through a highly configurable and scalable platform.Recently, a rural county with eight municipalities in Canada needed to modernize and digitize permitting and land management operations to attract and manage growth, and to improve services for its citizens. They also required a platform that could integrate with their existing GIS system. The county and eight municipalities were able to co-innovate and use the Amanda platform as a shared service by streamlining their land management and building permitting processes. They also saved money by using Amanda as a shared service with subscription-based pricing and were able to establish a single source of truth for information using Amanda's master database architecture.CSDC is focused on improving its software offerings and is expanding its partner ecosystem to make this technology available to more governments. "We know that providing customers with an incredibly strong platform allows them to drive efficiencies around their data and processes and paves the way for their future," states Nelson. A smart foundation is a critical enabler to helping governments provide great services to their citizens and to attracting and managing growth. Erin Mulligan NelsonSOLUTION PROVIDERS - 2018PUBLIC SECTOR
< Page 9 | Page 11 >