January 19, 2012
by EnerGov
By helping government agencies achieve tangible benefits with increased efficiencies, enhanced services and improvements in overall economic vitality, EnerGov witnessed its most successful year in its ten-year history. EnerGov reached a milestone year in 2011 with record corporate growth and all-time new sales increases up 89% from the previous year. Over 5,000 new government agency users have been signed up over the past 12 months – an astounding number in which the success is derived primarily from the value EnerGov is bringing to its customers.
Take for example, Cedar Rapids, IA (2nd largest city in the state), which has realized substantial ROI by implementing EnerGov 9 Enterprise Licensing & Regulatory suite for managing rental properties. Before implementing the system, the city could not process landlord license application and property registration fees centrally with a single check as different departments had to collect the fees. Requiring two separate checks was not only inconvenient for the applicant, but became a cumbersome process of waiting for new checks to arrive in the mail, tracking forms between departments, and generating new invoices and receipts.
With EnerGov’s automation platform, the landlord license and property registration process can immediately be initiated within a centralized database, and payment received online within a matter of minutes instead of up to 30 days, yielding a 99.85% net increase in efficiency. This type of payback in various departments across the city will allow the city to quickly realize the investment they have made in their 2.1 million dollar EnerGov enterprise platform.
“And this is just a very small example of an actual EnerGov system benefit,” said Scott Foens, Project Manager for the city of Cedar Rapids. “We will certainly see many more of these as we go forward and I believe we will see some dramatic improvement in overall operational effectiveness with the implementation of the enterprise system.”
British Columbia Safety Authority, which manages regulatory and safety processes over a 364,800 square mile region and has 4.5 million residents, also achieved significant efficiencies after implementing phase 1 of their EnerGov 9 system last year. On average, the agency will process over 121,000 permits, conduct over 211,000 inspections and manage over 20,000 licenses per year… a staggering amount indeed!
With the authority’s prior client-server software, cases often sat stagnant because the system did not have the ability to route them to the next step, nor did employees always understand how to process licenses and certifications outside of their respective departments. 
With EnerGov 9, any agency employee can understand the licensing procedures for any industry sector because the common enterprise platform standardizes and automates the workflow for processing and managing licenses. With the centralized platform replacing disparate databases, employees throughout the agency’s 13 satellite offices can now access and work with the same information. Furthermore, certain tasks that were done manually or with workarounds are now easier and faster to finish in a streamlined the process.
EnerGov’s commitment to enable government agencies improve efficiencies and overall economic vitality will continue to be a key factor in driving success for 2012. Also available for 2012 is EnerGov’s latest service, EnerGov 365, a cloud-based SaaS offering of the EnerGov enterprise back-office software, as well as iG Workforce, a cloud-based mobile government platform for the next generation of mobility.
Take advantage of early registration for EnerGov’s 2012 User Conference and save 25% before March 31, 2012. Last year end users, administrators, managers and other key decision makers from more than 20 states and Canada learned about the newest features and latest products, including the iG Workforce mobile platform for the iPad.
In addition to addresses and parcels, GIS tools allow any type of irregular area to be tracked and managed. With refined editing capabilities, points, lines and polygon features can be drawn and tracked for a parade route permit or an irregular-shaped area of an engineering encroachment permit. Agencies can also improve managing their public assets by tracking any object with spatial relevance, such as hydrants, water drains, or trees.
Without a good management or budgeting process, a healthy infrastructure will often be left to the wayside to deteoriorate more rapidly according to Alex Marshall in 
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