Thursday, August 1, 2013

Google Enterprise Blog: City of Omaha and Douglas County join forces to move government workers to Google Apps, plus 1 more

Google Enterprise Blog: City of Omaha and Douglas County join forces to move government workers to Google Apps, plus 1 more

Link to Google Enterprise Blog

City of Omaha and Douglas County join forces to move government workers to Google Apps

Posted: 31 Jul 2013 06:55 AM PDT



Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Derek Kruse, CIO of the Douglas Omaha Technology Commission (DOTComm), which provides municipal technical services to the City of Omaha and Douglas County, Nebraska. Be sure to join Innovation for the Nation, a virtual summit featuring government customers, streaming live on July 31st and August 1st. And see what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Derek Kruse, CIO
The City of Omaha and Douglas County have something many municipalities lack, a collaborative relationship. With Omaha located within Douglas County, we are fortunate to live in a community that values working together to solve complex challenges. Our cooperation has led to many innovative solutions, including the formation of the Douglas Omaha Technology Commission (DOTComm). Another example of this collaborative spirit is our decision to upgrade our email and calendaring platform. In order to improve government productivity and efficiency, DOTComm has been tasked with moving approximately 5,000 city and county employees in more than 70 departments to Google Apps for Government.

In May, after a thorough and exhaustive evaluation process, the DOT.Comm Oversight Committee approved the proposal to implement Google Apps for Government. The decision was endorsed by the Mayor and also unanimously approved by both the City Council and the County Board of Commissioners. We decided to go with Google Apps because it not only meets our current needs, but it offers new collaboration features at a fraction of the cost it would take to upgrade our existing system. We chose SADA Systems, a Google Apps Premier Enterprise Reseller, to help with this transition and serve as our deployment partner. It is obvious that SADA's focus on training and ensuring a smooth migration will enable us to quickly and easily adopt Google Apps.

Moving to Google Apps will provide tremendous benefits. Our current system is more than 10 years old and lacks any modern features. Employees struggle to access information on their mobile devices and people spend valuable time deleting emails because our mailboxes do not have enough space. Given the age of our system, we have seen a steep increase in outages as well. That will all change when we move to Google Apps for Government. We will offer a more secure, stable, modern and scalable cloud solution to the City and County. Employees will now be able to communicate instantly and work collaboratively online, even if they are miles apart. Mailbox size alone has people cheering -- one of our employees made the comparison that we will be moving from a shot glass to a swimming pool!

We started out this process to fix our aged email system. We have discovered this is much more than a fix -- this is the future -- and another big step in the ongoing collaboration between Omaha and Douglas County. The next few months will be very exciting as we implement Google Apps and we are very thrilled to be rolling up our sleeves once again to improve our community together.

Unemployment Insurance Fraud Detection in Iowa

Posted: 31 Jul 2013 06:50 AM PDT



Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Gary Bateman, CIO for the Iowa Workforce Development. Be sure to join Innovation for the Nation, a virtual summit featuring government customers, streaming live on July 31st and August 1st. And see what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

In Iowa, our mission at Iowa Workforce Development (IWD) is to provide a comprehensive statewide system of employment services, education and regulations to ensure the economic security of Iowa's workers, businesses and communities. An important part of our effort is to identify and prevent unemployment insurance fraud. Our efforts have cut the rate of fraud to less than 6%, but we are not satisfied to stop there.

Detecting and preventing unemployment insurance fraud is challenging because of the high volume of claims we receive. Often times, we're not able to detect the discrepancy until after multiple payments have been made. This lag means the bad actors can take the money and move on, making it difficult and expensive to recover the payment. We went looking for technologies to provide an even better rate of fraud detection, allowing us to act faster to prevent this criminal activity and save the state money.

After a competitive bid process, we selected Fraud Detection as a Service (FDaaS) by Pondera Solutions, a Google Enterprise Partner, to help us identify and prevent improper payments. FDaaS is a Google-powered solution that uses Google Prediction API, Google Maps, Google Street View and Google Earth.

With FDaaS, suspicious claims are proactively flagged by the system, which alerts IWD employees about potentially fraudulent claims. The claims are plotted on a heatmap built on Google Maps to identify areas with the highest fraud incidents and determine where to put more investigative resources. We also use Google Street View to check the validity of businesses that submit claims. All of these data points are compiled into a custom, configured dashboard that helps us quickly examine claimants and employers to validate whether these claims are valid. This dashboard will replace many of our manual processes of checking disparate databases. And because Google helps to integrate relevant market data into our validation processes, we can parse massive amounts of data quickly and efficiently, allowing us to identify advanced schemes and rapidly respond to potential issues. With all this information available at our fingertips, we can then examine claimants and employers to validate whether these claims are proper much more efficiently.

Using the new solution, IWD will improve accuracies in Unemployment Insurance, benefiting both the employers and citizens of Iowa. Our continuing efforts will help assure that the vast majority of unemployment insurance benefits are delivered to the citizens who need and deserve our assistance.

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