Our world is changing rapidly, and so is the ongoing relationship between governments and the customers it serves. Today, the demands on governments to serve citizens and businesses have never been greater.
Microsoft can help. With the input of government customers and partners worldwide, we have created the Microsoft Citizen Service Platform (CSP), a solution set that helps local, regional, and national governments solve their unique business challenges. Component-based and rapidly configurable, Microsoft CSP can support common technology and process foundations across agencies helping local governments to deliver high quality, and highly efficient, services to citizens and businesses, everywhere.
What is the Citizen Service Platform?
The Citizen Service Platform (CSP) is Microsoft's comprehensive offering to help governments reduce cost and be more efficient and responsive to citizens. It supports governments who want to use an e-Government approach
- Meet their key business challenges
- Improve the effectiveness of their people and processes
- Provide of a set of core application capabilities
- Ensure flexibility by having access to a wide range of Microsoft partner solutions
- Leverage standard Microsoft-based technologies
Microsoft's Citizen Services Platform:
Reduces cost because the core application capabilities can be re-used across all departments in the organization reducing complexity and providing economies of scale.
Improves speed of implementation because the starter kit templates show how common issues can be resolved using the Microsoft Technology Platform and can be reused by customers and partners.
Enables flexibility because it offers a modular approach and organizations can choose which application capability to start with and then gradually add the others.
Supports a very broad range of organizations because the choice of applications available from partners meets the needs of very small government organizations with very small numbers of citizens and employees all the way through to large city, regional and even national governments in some cases.
The Citizen Services Platform is best decribed by using the following four layers.
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KEY CHALLENGES
The top layer of the model considers the key challenges that most governments face. These are crosscutting issues that slice through services and structures. These issues challenge the chief executives and policy makers and cascade down and across the organization
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PEOPLE & PROCESSES
Governments do not serve citizens, control costs, balance budgets, or achieve operational excellence. People do these things, and organizations excel when they empower their people.
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APPLICATION CAPABILITIES
This comprises Microsoft and third-party solutions that government organizations need to operate effectively, from core business applications through to applications that enable citizen and business connections and improve business processes and performance and citizen relationship management.
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TECHNOLOGY
Microsoft's end-to-end infrastructure provides a security-enhanced, scalable, and easy to manage foundation on which government organizations can overlay the applications they need. It is divided into core infrastructure, business productivity infrastructure, and application platform infrastructure. Microsoft has developed an optimization strategy for each of these areas to help governments create a 'people-ready' organization that empowers staff with the right tools and information to improve services, increase citizen satisfaction, and reduce cost.
About this Web site
This website focuses primarily on sharing case studies and Microsoft partner solutions available to illustrate the benefits of the Citizen Service Platform across the community of interested customers and partners. To help explain the CSP strategy and enable rapid implementation, we provide an extensive set of demos, white papers, and starter kit templates.
We welcome your feedback on how we can develop this site to be of greater value and hope that you will submit your own case studies and partner solutions for us to feature and share worldwide.
Recession and Recovery
Greg Clark, well known academic and international consultant, has written Recession and Recovery, a helpful paper for leaders in Local and Regional Government.
The paper offers an overview of the current economic crisis and the impact of this global downturn on the local economies worldwide. Specifically, attention will focus on the crisis' impact on local economies and the role of regional governments in reacting to and mitigating these consequences. This will be discussed both generally and with reference to cases from Europe and the rest of the world.
