Fairfax – the leading e-government implementation?

Now this sounds good. What local authority in the UK wouldn’t aspire to what they’ve achieved in Fairfax county. It’s a good site with clean design. Everything looks easy to find. Worth a visit..

Seven years on, the county Web site gets 625,000 visits a month, and 257,000 people have used the kiosks. The phone lines have received 819,000 calls. Requests for court data, library books and tax payments are users’ most popular transactions. Still, the numbers represent a fraction of county business: 5 percent of the county’s real estate and personal property taxes were paid electronically last year, for example. But 61 percent of the books library patrons put on hold so far this year were reserved online, up from a total of 47 percent last year, county statistics show.

And mobile too …

Next, the county hopes to enter the age of wireless communication by displaying text messages on cell phones, beepers or hand-held computers alerting residents to traffic tie-ups, a plane crash in the area, a derailed train, fire or other emergency. Molchany calls this multiple delivery of messages “just-in-time” government, which he said “is the power of e-government.”

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