The Village of Skokie Marketing Plan
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Village of Skokie is entering a new era as it begins to offer new ways of providing services to its constituents, its businesses, its vendors and other parties who transact with the Village whether frequently or infrequently. These offerings are based on desires expressed by the Village’s Board of Trustees, the managerial and supporting staff members and the public as a whole. Our recent public survey shows a desire by many to utilize the Internet and other electronic means to participate in Skokie government and to conduct business with Skokie government.
As the Village has added greater use of automation and technology to perform its tasks, we have recognized the return on investments in technology through efficiencies of staff and the reduction in paperwork. It is now our desire to add new steps which will further reduce the burden on existing human resources by providing various parties with the means to gather information and to carry out some transactions with reduced need for staff interaction. While the facility for electronic transactions will develop, we will, as always, continue to offer the personal services that have always been recognized in Skokie.
While the benefit of electronic services has been weighed for years and while we have come to a point that we now feel that this is a beneficial investment, the decision to move froward has inherent security issues that must be addressed. We must be able to provide these services securely, robustly and accurately. We must be able to keep our systems responsive and readily available. We must protect information that we maintain and gather and assure all parties that access to information is limited to those who need access. Along those lines, we must develop policies to determine what information is available to whom. We must take steps to protect systems from failure and security violations. We must also ensure that our information and systems provide redundancy to recover from any failure that may occur.
Issues
Prioritizing Design and Implementation of Electronic Business Applications
Application Data Access Security
Threats and Vulnerabilities inside and outside our environment
Security Measures Available
hardware vs. software
internal staff vs. external providers
Redundancy provisions
Cost-Benefit of security provisions
General Needs
As our systems are developed, we must address all needs of those systems to make them easy to use, but secure against all threats. Decisions must be made with the assistance of all stakeholders and communicated throughout the organization as to the inherent risks of e-business. Decisions must also be made regarding those risks that we choose to aggressively protect against and those protections that we are willing to forego due to the cost. In some instances, we may find it necessary to avoid an offering because we find its risks too great to justify cost of protection.
While we are interested in providing new, easy-to-use services to various parties that we anticipate will greatly reduce taxation of our human resources, we also must recognize the need for protection of all parties from the threats that exist. Most of us have seen the benefit of electronic business, but it is necessary to look behind the scenes to see the measures necessary for safe transactions and the costs associated.
General Overview / Electronic Government Application Definitions
Village Business Defined
The Village of Skokie is a municipal government located eleven miles north of downtown Chicago. The Village is approximately ten and one half ( 10.5 ) square miles with one hundred fifty five ( 155 ) lane-miles of roadways to maintain supporting sixty-three thousand ( 63,000 ) residents. The Village is responsible for typical municipal services including:
Street and Alley Maintenance
Snow Plowing
Leaf Removal
Garbage Collection
Recycling
Water Utility
Vehicle Registration
Police Services
Fire Services
Crime and Fire Prevention
Sewers and Drainage
Personal Health Services
Public Health
Environmental Health/Animal Ctrl
Building Safety
The Village also offers services that are not necessarily typical but offer additional benefits to the