2005 C.I.P.A. Winners

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Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Trade/Municipality of Chatham-Kent

Municipal Portal

The municipality of Chatham Kent is located in Southwestern Ontario along the shores of Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair. In 1998, 23 communities were amalgamated into one municipality with a population of 110,000. About 40 per cent live in the city of Chatham, but Chatham-Kent is largely a rural community. As part of the amalgamation, an audit was performed to identify community needs, which called for an e-services delivery initiative.

In 2000, the Government of Ontario announced a five-year program to improve delivery of municipal government services and help local economic development. Now known as the Connect Ontario Partnering for Smart Communities Program, it has distributed more than $11 million and provided the financial foundation for 11 implementation projects, of which Chatham-Kent was one of the first and remains the most advanced.

Chatham-Kent received $1.5 million in provincial funding in 2001 and used it to build a community portal, www.chatham-kent.ca, which was launched in October 2002.

Challenges

The portal project required extensive changes to Chatham-Kent's IT architecture and business processes, as well as the implementation of back-end tools, technology platforms and databases.

"As we began to move forward with our e-services initiative we realized how large this project was," says Joann Kjeldsen, IT Services project manager. "The amount of information, the cost of publishing this information and the fact that we had to work with some 1,700 staff to manage content on the Web site was incredibly daunting."

Nevertheless, Chatham-Kent's ambition and vision resulted in a successful application to Connect Ontario through the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade (MEDT).

"They came to us at early stage, with a very good and very detailed implementation plan," says Dick Ko, manager of program partnerships with the Entrepreneurship Branch of MEDT. "We believed that it would be a successful project and it's been proven so."

Support from MEDT was the main reason why Chatham-Kent was able to overcome the financial challenge posed by its small tax base.

Kjeldsen says, "There's no way that the Municipality of Chatham-Kent could have built the portal infrastructure and released the related electronic services without the financial support from Connect Ontario."

Objectives

The Municipality wanted to provide consistent information to citizens, while improving the quality of information available. The portal project focused on reducing costs through internal operating efficiencies, expanding community access to services and information, improving tourism promotion and establishing the infrastructure and workflow processes for future Web initiatives.

Chatham-Kent was also in the forefront of municipalities that recognized the value of using geospatial information systems technologies (GIS) to integrate mapping information on the Web. It wanted to present information about the municipality's attractions for tourists, and about its available industrial land and properties, so the rural municipality could compete globally in attracting business investments.

Solution

Since inception, the Chatham-Kent portal has served as a model for municipal e-government initiatives, especially for rural municipalities. It has introduced several technological and service innovations, and continues to do so in 2005.

The Chatham-Kent portal delivers outstanding depth and sophistication of services. The municipality was among the first to:

• Provide online information and transactional services for recreational programs. Residents can register and pay for programs and classes online for more than 250 recreational programs involving 340 municipal facilities;
• Introduce a GIS system that provides complete mapping information for more than 6,000 direct points of access. The system addresses local business requirements for access to property measurement tools, aerial photography and interactive mapping;
• Introduce a business function, called the Site Selector Tool, which permits investors to search for available industrial and commercial buildings and land, and map nearby services and businesses using information from the portal's Business and Service Directory;
• Permit residents to pay speeding tickets and other municipal fines online, at any time;
• Mount a Community Events Calendar, which enables all community organizations and groups to post information and organize events online;
• Make all 11 library collections available online for searching and reservations;
• Offer citizens the ability to create a user name and password as a single sign-on that gives them portal-wide access to all electronic services requiring authentication.

Innovative Use of Technology

These and other services were made possible by Chatham-Kent's pioneering use of two technologies: content management and Web services. The deployment of Microsoft Content Management Server made it affordable to keep the portal updated and maintained by having Web pages created, not by specialists, but by departmental staff who are use standard software and templates to create and upload content. The introduction of Web services permitted communication between the content management system and the GIS software, so that portal users can custom-design their own maps.

Kjeldsen notes, "The Chatham-Kent portal has been viewed as the proving ground for citizen-centred service and electronic methods of service delivery, particularly in rural regions where distance can be a deterrent to accessing municipal information and services."

In 2005, the Municipality added another first when it joined in partnership with the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance and MEDT to offer online access to local hospital services. Through the Patient Appointment Request Service on the portal, residents can request most physician-ordered, non-urgent hospital procedures, tests and appointments, at their convenience.

A 2005 CIPA Winner!

For exceptional and innovative applications of information technology to solve real-world business problems and bring greater benefit to all stakeholders, the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Trade and the Municipality of Chatham-Kent have been awarded a Silver Award of Excellence from the 2005 Canadian Information Productivity Awards in the Organizational Transformation Not For Profit category.

Major Technology/Expertise Contributors to Project

Class Software Solutions
Concept Interactive Inc.
Dell Corporation
Dynix Corporation
ESRI Canada
FitDV Inc.
McKesson Corporation
Microsoft Canada Company
Oracle Canada
Orion Technology Inc.
PayTickets.ca

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