This blog post was written by Jeff Paine, Senior Director of Public Sector Partners, Asia Pacific, and was originally posted on 12 June on the Microsoft On Government Blog. If you’d like to learn more about MOM’s project, please watch this video case study.
Citizen engagement is a key part of governance and can ultimately lead to more productive and open societies. Technology plays a critical role in this process by helping governments communicate with their citizens, and helping citizens find the information and services they need. In recent years, we’ve seen a lot of interest
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This blog post was written by Jeff Paine, Senior Director of Public Sector Partners, Asia Pacific, and was originally posted on 12 June on the Microsoft On Government Blog. If you’d like to learn more about MOM’s project, please watch this video case study.
Citizen engagement is a key part of governance and can ultimately lead to more productive and open societies. Technology plays a critical role in this process by helping governments communicate with their citizens, and helping citizens find the information and services they need. In recent years, we’ve seen a lot of interest in our
SharePoint solution for government, which offers a flexible and collaborative platform for information sharing between governments and their citizens. With more people going online to look for information and to access services, SharePoint provides value by enabling governments to easily share resources online, interact with citizens through integrated social media sites, and process a variety of government forms and applications through the web. The result is a solution that enables governments to be more open and customer-oriented with constituents.
Take, for example,
Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower (MOM) which recently chose SharePoint as the foundation for its new public-facing website. As the Internet has increasingly become the primary channel of communication between MOM and the public, the Ministry wanted to establish a strong online presence and deliver enhanced online services to its constituents. This included designing a website that would engage citizens more effectively by offering easier web page navigation and integrating social media sites like Twitter. MOM was also interested in the scalability, flexibility, security and reliability that SharePoint offered, as well as the fact that it was available both on-premise and through the cloud.
With the help of partners like
Microsoft,
Dimension Data and
Comwerks, MOM migrated its existing content from an HTML-based site to the Microsoft SharePoint platform and created a single portal for offering useful resources to citizens. As a result, the Ministry has seen a huge spike in web traffic, as well as a much greater level of interaction with citizens online. Shortly after deploying the new site, MOM reported that it had received 4 million page views in a single month—a true testament to the project’s success.
Beyond attracting citizens to the site, MOM’s SharePoint-enabled site also offers an electronic filing system for a variety of government documents and forms, meaning that users no longer have to physically mail in documents to the MOM office and wait for them to be processed. This capability has benefitted more than 5,000 businesses and has helped MOM reduce its carbon—and paper—footprint. Most importantly, with the new site, the Ministry is able to spend more time on what matters most: delivering efficient and open citizen engagement.
Have a comment or opinion on this post? Contact @Microsoft_Gov. Have a question for the author? Please e-mail ongovernment@microsoft.com.