Governor's Technology Awards

Virginia Department of Health
H1N1 Get One Solution

Winner
Category: Online, Not in Line

Executive Summary:

In the midst of a global outbreak of the new H1N1 influenza virus, to which people had little or no immunity, VDH distributed more than 2.8 million doses of a safe and effective H1N1 vaccine to more than 3,000 registered and vetted provider sites across the Commonwealth, resulting in a statewide vaccination rate of over 26% for all eligible individuals and over 40% for school-aged children. The massive undertaking required a multi-dimensional effort to recruit, register and vet a wide range of immunization providers in many venues over a short amount of time, and to ensure that mechanisms were put in place for the provision of H1N1 vaccine to all Virginians.

The success of the campaign was a reflection of technological innovation, including the development of an online registration and ordering system as well as the promotion and use of the State’s Web-based immunization registry. Innovation was made possible through strong public-private partnerships and collaboration among VDH’s Divisions of Immunization (DOI) and Surveillance and Investigation (DSI), the Offices of Information Management (OIM) and EP&R, and VITA/Northrop Grumman.

As a result of paperless, online registration, VDH and providers combined saved an estimated $45,000 and 2,600 hours of staff time. With immediate access to registration data, VDH was able to target H1N1 provider recruitment efforts at state and local levels and expedite VIIS enrollment through proactive contact of registered providers. Registration data was subsequently imported into the federal vaccine shipment system, accelerating the campaign.

As a result of the H1N1 campaign, provider enrollment in the immunization registry increased from 75 to 3,250. Paperless submission of doses administered in VIIS resulted in an estimated savings of $2.4 million and 62,000 man hours. With access to doses administered data, VDH was able to evaluate vaccination rates by age group and location, and successfully target vaccination outreach efforts.

Ultimately, the technological foundation successfully laid by VDH in implementation of the H1N1 campaign has resulted in a level of emergency preparedness and collaboration that will benefit the agency and the Commonwealth in the event of future pandemics and other public health emergencies. Public awareness of VIIS and increased adoption of VIIS by healthcare providers throughout the Commonwealth is another benefit, resulting in significant time and cost savings. The expanded and continued use of VIIS is positioned to result in improved immunization rates and ultimately, reduced morbidity and mortality from influenza and other vaccine preventable diseases.

Contact for more information:
Jim Farrell
Director, Division of Immunization
Virginia Department of Health
James.Farrell@vdh.virginia.gov

 

Chesterfield County
Citizen GIS

Winner
Category: Online, Not in Line

Executive Summary:

The CitizenGIS application provides access to the Chesterfield County geographic information system (GIS) via a World Wide Web interface. The target user of the initial application is the county citizen who requires a map of their property or information about county services affecting the property. The information contained within the application is not confidential in nature, nor is it specific to economic development or land development planning, although it should be noted that those areas of interest will also receive some level of benefit from the initial implementation of this application. The project included the purchase of an ArcGIS Server staging license for the integration and quality assurance environments, in-house development of the interface, creation of the map services, and creation of the infrastructure to host the services.

The vision driving the development of this application was that the county’s GIS data would be readily available from any computer having access to the internet. Citizens and businesses would have, at their fingertips, the necessary GIS information as needed for visual reference and visual analysis of conditions surrounding their homes or businesses. This would correlate into a reduced need for staff time to assist in creating and providing maps to customers, allowing staff to focus their time on other key activities.

By providing access to CitizenGIS, Chesterfield County has demonstrated an increased level of world class customer service, something the citizens have come to expect.

The application provides both cached and dynamic map services. The basemap cache is updated quarterly; the dynamic map layers are updated weekly. Twenty separate data layers are included in the dynamic map and an additional eight layers provide information in a textual format following a parcel information click. Three different years of aerial photography are included as alternate basemaps. Map tools include a navigation tool, view map layers, measure & markup tools, searches, identify, print, a coordinate converter, a photo magnifier and bookmarks. Full screen mode is available for those who require a larger canvas for the map. Documentation in the form of tool tips, full help manual and legends are available on the Help tool. A return to the main Chesterfield County website is but a click away on the title bar.

Multiple search methods are supplied: by address, by GPIN, by Tax-id, by subdivision name, by pending zoning case number, by street name and by public point name.

Contact for more information:
Ted Maxwell
Manager, Application Development
Chesterfield County Information Systems Technology Department
MaxwellT@chesterfield.gov

 

The following entries were awarded honorable mentions in the "Online, Not in Line" category. All winners of honorable mentions in the category are pictured together with Lt. Gov. Bolling and Sec. Duffey, but each honored project’s executive summary follows.

 

City of Danville
A Digital Community

Honorable Mention
Category: Online, Not in Line

Executive Summary:

Launched on February 1, 2010, Danville’s new website offers a plethora of new opportunities for visiting users. The new design is simple and easy to navigate and provides an enormous amount of content on various operational and government services as well as visitor and business opportunities. Danville’s new website provides a unique social exchange, e-Services presence, and two distinct sub-site websites, the City’s Tourism website (www.visitdanville.com) and the City’s Economic Development website (www.discoverdanville.com). Listed below are just some of the e-Services provided by the new website:

• My eAccount - Access to utility billing and transaction history; one of the few Virginia municipal utilities that offers this service

• E-Payments - Ability to pay bills online

• Parks and Recreation online registration

• ePermits - Access to the status of applications, inspections, complaints, code enforcement cases, and plan review

• Real Estate Assessment/GIS - online mapping

• Bid Postings

• River City TV - Live streaming of the City’s government access channel with broadcasts of several unique shows that highlight Danville’s attributes

• Applicant online - Access to the City’s online job application process

• Council agendas online

• Documents center- Access to government information such as budgets and GIS maps; a member log-in account for specific downloadable sites (established FTP)

• Facebook/Twitter - Danville delivers a distinct look to Facebook by bringing in the appeal of the City’s website(http://www.facebook.com/CityOfDanville)

• Site Selection tool - Assistance in business selection, expansion, or relocation analysis; a GIS-powered website that provides a dynamic search for available office, retail, industrial, and warehouse buildings and vacant land (www.discoverdanvillesites.com)

• Notify me – E-mail subscriptions to newsletters and other updates

• Business/Resource Directory

• Tickets online - Ability to purchase concert tickets online

• Library online catalog - Ability to search all items, reserve and renew items (www.danvillelibrary.org)

• Report a concern - Ability to log complaints/concerns

• Imagine Danville - Input accessibility into the 2030 Comprehensive Plan (www.imaginedanville.org)

• A separate Tourism website focuses on events and offerings in the Danville community

• A separate Economic Development focuses on workforce development, business parks, training and media releases

With limited resources and staff, Danville took advantage of every opportunity available by collaborating with the talents of all departments and government offices and planning the execution and timely release of several e-Services applications that would enhance the City’s presence. What Danville accomplished is truly astonishing based on its size, budget, and limited financial resources.

Contact for more information:
City of Danville
Inez J. Harville, IT Director
harvilleij@ci.danville.va.us

 

Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy
ARRA Rebate Application

Honorable Mention
Category: Online, Not in Line

Executive Summary:

Virginia's commitment to helping citizens discover Recovery Act opportunities was facilitated by the use of the web in 2009 with the launch of a public web-based solution for DMME’s Energy Rebate Programs.

DMME partnered with Virginia Interactive (VI) on three separate rebate programs funded by ARRA. Two programs provide rebates to consumers who purchase a variety of energy efficient products for homes or businesses. The third program provides much larger rebates to individuals or companies desiring to invest in renewable energy by installing solar or wind energy systems.

The comprehensive online offering automated the complex submission requirement through a public web interface for rebate functions including:

• Notification of rebate availability and e-mail integrated notification

• User profile creation

• User rebate reservation project request based on "first come, first served" rules

• User verification of energy related improvements and appliances

• User data validation

• Instant calculation, using complex formulas, for eligible rebate amounts based upon user selections

• Automatic generation of federally required improvement statistics related to the proposed energy projects

• Integrated system anti-fraud rules to highlight, prevent and audit suspicious submissions

Contact for more information:
Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy
Al Christopher
Director, DMME Division of Energy
Al.Christopher@dmme.virginia.gov

 

Virginia Department of Transportation
511 Traffic Information via Twitter

Honorable Mention
Category: Online, Not in Line

Executive Summary:

Links:
http://twitter.com/511northernva
http://twitter.com/511northwestva
http://twitter.com/511centralva
http://twitter.com/511southwestva
http://twitter.com/511hamptonroads

Do you hear that tweeting sound? The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) began tweeting this year and is currently tweeting about 450 times per day. The tweets are about real-time traffic information being delivered to the traveling public via Twitter. VDOT's 511 traffic information service is not new. The service was first established in 2000 along the I-81 corridor and has grown to provide traffic information state-wide using voice recognition telephone, website and email subscriptions. What's new is that 511 information is now available through Twitter.

Twitter was introduced in 2006 and has grown exponentially to become the premier micro-blogging software globally. The general public has demonstrated a growing preference for receiving information through this type of medium. In March 2009, VDOT undertook to learn more about Twitter technologies. VDOT established a Twitter profile and began tweeting general information and news releases to the public. Shortly after that a prototype Twitter 511 traffic data profile was established reporting a limited selection of traffic events. The full-service version went into production on November 24.

The general public can now follow a general VDOT news profile plus five regional 511 traffic information Twitter profiles.

Cumulatively, the 511 Twitter profiles have reported over 32,000 traffic incidents from the Nov. 24 launch through June 30, 2010. The process that brings this news to the public is:

1. A traffic incident is entered into the traffic reporting system in one of the five regional VDOT traffic operations centers.

2. The traffic reporting system publishes the information instantly to an xml feed available over the Internet.

3. The xml feed is pulled by the vendor providing the VDOT Twitter service in their operations center in Atlanta.

4. The vendor publishes the data to the applicable Twitter traffic information profile.

5. Elapsed time from when data is keyed at the traffic operations center to when the tweet appears: 5 minutes or less.

The public can reach the VDOT tweets by going direct to the Twitter URL for each of the profiles. Links to these URLs are available on the 511 website. But the most popular way to use Twitter is to "follow" selected profiles. Tweets from all the profiles followed are streamed to that user's Twitter account. For example, a user can follow tweets from family and friends, breaking national news, the local weather and the VDOT regional 511 traffic profiles, all viewed in one string of tweets on the user's Twitter home page. Users can view their account by logging in using an Internet browser or by receiving tweets in the form of text messages on their mobile telephone.

Contact for more information:
Virginia Department of Transportation
Scott Silva
ITS Systems Development Manager
scott.silva@vdot.virginia.gov

 

Supreme Court of Virginia
Officer of the Court Remote Access

Honorable Mention
Category: Online, Not in Line

Executive Summary:

Since access to court documents has traditionally had limited hours the services to the citizens of Virginia was also restricted. The combination of a narrow range of hours and specific courthouse locations confined access by Officers of the Court in their pursuit of justice.

By implementing OCRA access the Supreme Court of Virginia has allowed online secure access for Officers of the Court including law enforcement, Commonwealth Attorneys, Judges and attorneys in good standing with the Virginia Bar to non-confidential court records 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

With the advent of the Officer of the Court Remote Access (OCRA) portal, an Officer of the Court can view pertinent documents that the officer is party to from remote locations over a secure access portal. Multiple officials can simultaneously access the same document from different locations saving travel time and transportation expenses while increasing access, efficiency and usability.

Contact for more information:
Office of the Executive Secretary of the Supreme Court of Virginia
Daniel McBryde
Records Imaging Systems Manager
Department of Judicial Information Technology
dmcbryde@courts.state.va.us

 

Fairfax County, Arlington County, City of Fairfax and City of Alexandria
CAD2CAD Exchange

Winner
Category: Cross-Boundary Collaboration

Executive Summary:

Based on the geographic proximity of the local governments in the northern Virginia area, the 991 dispatch centers in Fairfax County, Arlington County, the City of Fairfax, or the City of Alexandria often identify a need to request vehicles and personnel from a neighboring jurisdiction in order to optimize the timing and resources of their response to a call for fire or rescue assistance. This sharing process, called mutual aid, is utilized multiple times per day to respond to incidents located near the border with a neighboring jurisdiction or large incidents requiring multiple resources.

Interoperability among the CAD dispatch operations of the independent municipal first responder agencies have been a long-desired capability, but its implementation was hampered for years by proprietary legacy CAD systems, disparate data element designations, and industry recommendations for expensive upgrades to or replacement of existing CAD systems. Prior to CAD2CAD interoperability, this coordination of mutual aid resources was done through time-consuming phone calls between dispatch centers. The successful implementation of the CAD2CAD Exchange has given dispatchers a significantly faster and more accurate way to request and dispatch mutual aid units to incidents on a daily basis. A remarkable improvement in time savings of 50%, or nearly 2 minutes, has been achieved through CAD2CAD, demonstrating a direct and critical improvement in emergency-response service to residents when each minute counts.

The CAD2CAD Exchange was built to federally-recognized standards for interoperability, the first of its kind in the nation to do so. This has resulted in a stable, scalable solution that will allow other jurisdictions to join the Exchange in the future with minimal modifications and at a significant cost savings. The CAD2CAD Exchange is the realization of a longstanding goal for CAD interoperability in these three jurisdictions, and it represents a critical step toward meeting broad goals for homeland security in the National Capital Region.

Organizations participating:
Alexandria Fire Department
Alexandria Department of Emergency Communications
Alexandria Department of Information Technology Services
Arlington County Fire Department
Arlington County Office of Emergency Communications
Arlington Department of Technology Services
Fairfax City Fire Department
Fairfax City Department of Information Technology
Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department
Fairfax County Department of 9-1-1 / Public Safety Communications
Fairfax County Department of Information Technology
Fairfax City Fire Department
Fairfax City Department of Information Technology

Contact Person(s) and Title(s)
Lynn Hadden, IT Systems Architect, Fairfax County
Adam Thiel, Fire Chief, City of Alexandria
Tom Trobridge, Director, Information Technology Services, City of Alexandria
Jim Burke, Information Technology Director, Alexandria Fire and EMS
JoAnne Munroe, Director, Department of Emergency Communications, City of Alexandria
George November, Project Manager, Alexandria Fire Department
Jim Schwartz, Fire Chief, Arlington County
John J. White, Assistant Fire Chief, Arlington County Fire Dept.
John D. Crawford, Director, Office of Emergency Communications, Arlington County
Roger Waller, CAD/GIS/IT Systems Manager, Arlington County Public Safety
Jack Belcher, CIO, Department of Technology Services, Arlington County
Ron Mastin, Fire Chief, Fairfax County
Steve Souder, Director, Department off 9-1-1/Public Safety, Fairfax County
Wanda Gibson, Chief Technology Officer, Fairfax County
Jon Ronan, CAD Lead, Fairfax County Department of 9-1-1 / Public Safety Communications
Dean Cox, Battalion Chief, Fairfax County Fire Department
Don Bowers, Captain, Fairfax County Fire Department
Gail Bohan, Chief Information Officer, Fairfax City
Tim Butters, Acting Fire Chief, Fairfax City
Alex Fitch, Lieutenant, Fairfax City Fire Department

E-mail Address:
lynn.hadden@fairfaxcounty.gov

 

The following entries were awarded honorable mentions in the "Cross-Boundary Collaboration" category. All winners of honorable mentions in the category are pictured together with Lt. Gov. Bolling and Sec. Duffey, but each honored project’s executive summary follows.

 

Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles and Virginia State Police
Traffic Records Electronic Data System

Honorable Mention
Category: Cross-Boundary Collaboration

Executive Summary:

The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), in partnership with Virginia State Police (VSP) and Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT), built and launched the Traffic Records Electronic Data System (TREDS). A Traffic Records Coordinating Committee (TRCC) was formed by DMV at project onset for strategic and functional direction comprised of 11 state and federal agencies and 134 local law enforcement jurisdictions. TREDS is a state-of-the-art system that automates and centralizes statewide crash information, collaboratively serving Virginia’s highway safety community with timely, accurate, secure, and accessible crash data.

In 2003, the Virginia Highway Safety Office (VAHSO) at DMV initiated an internal review of its crash system. This review identified a need to redesign the legacy system. The VAHSO commissioned the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to conduct an assessment of Virginia’s crash data reporting performance. As expected, NHTSA’s findings supported the VAHSO’s initial conclusion; a major redesign of the state’s crash database was implemented. The redesign focused on application of electronic crash data collection methodologies. TREDS expanded to streamline and simplify data collection, eliminate duplicate data entry, increase the quality, quantity, and availability of traffic records data and provide enhanced reporting and analytics.

TREDS was developed over a 30-month period, delivering incremental functionality; final migration was completed July 6, 2009. Primary delivery points include an electronic crash report module allowing officers to enter reports from the field, role-based workflow modules to guide users from submission to conclusion and TREDS data warehouse to provide extensive reporting and analytics.

The system offers user interfaces for law enforcement, DMV/VAHSO staff, and VDOT engineers. The architecture enables TREDS to exchange information with heterogeneous systems from VSP, VDOT, Virginia Supreme Court, Department of Health, Community College System, local law enforcement, and private vendors, regardless of applications on which those systems are running. More than 300 business rules and interface edits ensure data accuracy. The architecture is a virtual clustered environment with multi-factor security and high availability.

Today, TREDS serves more than 5,000 law enforcement officers statewide and federal, state and local agencies. The TREDS project, at a cost of $5.4 million dollars, is yielding recognized savings of $1.4 million annually for Virginia. The project exceeded all objectives for scope, schedule, and budget. TREDS is recognized as a “Best of Breed” technology solution in Government Connected Frameworks by Microsoft. With the implementation of TREDS, Virginia now is recognized as a national leader in highway safety information, analysis, and technology.

Contact for more information:
https://TREDS.Virginia.Gov

Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles
Virginia State Police
Primary contact: Angelisa Jennings; Deputy Director - Virginia Highway Safety Office at DMV
Angelisa.Jennings@DMV.Virginia.Gov
Russell "Bud" Cox; Senior Analyst - Virginia State Police

 

City of Richmond and the counties of Henrico and Chesterfield
Richmond Region Traffic Information and Mapping

Honorable Mention
Category: Cross-Boundary Collaboration

Executive Summary:

Based The Traffic Information web page was originally implemented in 2004 as a means to automatically extract selected incidents from the City of Richmond?s Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system and make this information available to the news media as well as the general public. More than 80% of telephone calls from the news media were reduced after the inaugural implementation.

The type of incidents that are published include traffic accidents, disabled vehicles, certain types of hit and run accidents and incidents that require a large fire apparatus response that could potentially have a serious impact on traffic around the area of the incident. This information is also made available to other Public Safety agencies through a web service initially developed in collaboration with Henrico County and later expanded to include data from Chesterfield County.

Not long after the City made the traffic information available to the public, the availability and the popularity of internet sites that made it possible for the public to view diverse types of data in a geographical context dramatically increased. In an effort to allow consumers of the City?s traffic information to directly map traffic incidents, the process used to generate the traffic incident data was changed to include latitude and longitude coordinates with each incident record.

The City worked extensively with Henrico and Chesterfield counties to modify the existing data schema used to exchange traffic incident information to include location information for each incident. Henrico County modified their web service to provide latitude and longitude data and Chesterfield County modified their service to provide additional addressing information. The City modified its existing web service to provide latitude and longitude data with each incident and made this service available to any Agency that wants to subscribe to it. The City also created a new GeoRSS feed to make the aggregated traffic information available to applications with the ability to digest RSS feeds.

The City of Richmond was the first agency in the region to provide latitude and longitude information for traffic incidents in the entire region and provide a means to display this information on a publicly accessible web site.

Contact for more information:
http://eservices.ci.richmond.va.us/applications/publicsafety/traffic/trafficpage.aspx

City of Richmond, Dept. of Information Technology
Henrico County, Dept. of Information Technology
Chesterfield County, Information Systems Technology

Bill Hobgood, Safety Team Project Lead, City of Richmond, Department of Information Technology
Robert Freeland, Manager Digital Government, Chesterfield County Information Systems Technology
B R Carson, IT Project Manager, Henrico County Department of Information Technology
Bill Hobgood: Bill.Hobgood@richmondgov.com
B.R. Carson: car@co.henrico.va.us
Robert Freeland: freelandr@chesterfield.gov

 

Virginia Department of Corrections
VirginiaCORIS

Winner
Category: IT as Efficiency Driver

Executive Summary:

To vastly improve operations, better serve numerous collaborating government partners, interoperably manage offenders, and retire outdated, costly legacy systems, the Virginia Department of Corrections (DOC) has implemented a far-reaching and tightly integrated offender management system.

The Virginia Corrections Information System (VirginiaCORIS) unites offender management for over 4,000 current users including prison institutions, probation and parole officers and the Virginia Parole Board. VirginiaCORIS also communicates with and is used by the Virginia State Police, the Attorney General’s office and courts.

Two major divisions, Institutions and Community Corrections (Probation and Parole), operated different systems. Data sharing was limited; paper files existed in multiple locations without the same data and could not be viewed by all users. Offenders often were being handled by both divisions with limited data sharing.

Agency managers only were able to view limited data on any offender; data was repeated multiple times manually and its accuracy was always questionable. Officers managed caseloads via hand-written notes, file folders, 3-ring binders, Microsoft Word and Access databases. Offender contacts with the corrections system were siloed; entries could take months to reach other important public safety touch points.

Legacy systems were failing and required daily downtime to maintain; vendors no longer supported the technology and a graying workforce signaled loss of capability to maintain it. Expensive contract labor became a requirement and even it was scarce.

Today, multiple user groups access and update a single system, VirginiaCORIS, from any location, 24x7, via Web access to track offenders and note important information, including a complete and real-time log of all contacts with the corrections and law-enforcement systems. In ten months of operation, VirginiaCORIS has captured 1.8 million officer system-generated notes that previously would have been paper-based.

VirginiaCORIS was designed and now operates fluidly as an easily maintained, interoperable system, including active arrest notification integration with Virginia State Police information systems. To date, over 8,000 arrest notifications have been delivered into the system for officer notifications of offender activity.

VirginiaCORIS eliminates an inefficient and paper-based system and creates global views that vastly improve public safety. Over a dozen legacy systems, including one 32-year-old mainframe system, now have been retired by DOC through implementation of VirginiaCORIS.

Contact for more information:
Rick Davis
Chief Technology Officer
Virginia Department of Corrections
rick.davis@vadoc.virginia.gov

 

Virginia Department of General Services, Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services
Laboratory Information Management System

Winner
Category: IT as Efficiency Driver

Executive Summary:

The Virginia Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services (DCLS) in the Department of General Services (DGS) was formed in 1972. The first consolidated public health lab in the nation, DCLS provides laboratory support services to a wide variety of local, state and federal law enforcement, emergency response, health and environmental protection programs. DCLS is at the core of the Commonwealth’s public health system linking almost every facet of the health infrastructure such as, food safety, disease control and prevention.

Previously, over 6 million scientific tests were being performed annually without an integrated Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS). Test requests were received on over 40 different multi-part paper forms, each containing 45 pieces of metadata. These data were then manually entered into one of a hundred disparate legacy systems. Lab results were also reported on various multi-part paper forms which had to be manually separated and mailed to lab customers. Data standards were not enforced and there was no ability to query across various lab applications. An integrated, interoperable, and comprehensive LIMS was required.

The new LIMS was fully implemented in September 2009 and is now used to process all clinical samples received by DCLS. Test orders are submitted electronically and results are delivered daily to public health agencies, hospitals, physicians, and law enforcement agencies throughout the Commonwealth using a standard reporting format. Data standards were also adopted and implemented in the LIMS to promote system interoperability. Rapidly and securely disseminating lab results allows key decision makers to act upon data provided in order to protect and improve population health, as demonstrated during the H1N1 pandemic.

Other enhancements include the direct transfer of information from lab instrumentation to the LIMS, thereby reducing data entry errors and allowing lab staff to focus on analytical testing. Quality control checks and validation within the LIMS ensure compliance with nationally recognized lab practices and regulatory requirements. Highly complex workflows and event driven email notification processes have improved sample turn around times and lab responsiveness.

Maintenance and support is simplified through the adoption and use of common application architecture. Developers use the same vendor tool-set. All data resides in an Oracle RAC database, which is configured for high availability and no data loss. The LIMS is launched from within a secure CITRIX server environment. Data is now securely exchanged using the Rhapsody tool for data mapping, brokering, and integration.

Contact for more information:
Joe Damico
Deputy Director
Virginia Department of General Services
Joe.Damico@DGS.Virginia.Gov

 

City of Williamsburg
Performance Management System

Winner
Category: IT as Efficiency Driver

Executive Summary:

The creation and utilization of the new Performance Measurement Program is one component of the larger vision of city leadership to find systems and tools that measure operational progress and lead to better performance. The city’s challenge was to build an effective, comprehensive performance management system for better outcomes for Williamsburg citizens, with no additional city staff and at a time of declining resources.

In 2008 a software module was created to expand citywide data collection and reporting capabilities with dynamic departmental operating reports with real time data. Created by private software developer EMGovPower (Charlotte, NC), in partnership with the city’s Finance and IT Directors, the new software cost approximately $17,000 and interfaces with the city’s financial, billing, codes compliance, work orders, and property assessment systems. The new software standardizes, expands, and automates several hundred performance metrics for the monthly departmental operating reports. The software pulls numbers from other city databases as well as direct input by city staff.

Monthly reports are used by city staff, but the reports are shared with City Council and the public for Council deliberations and public conversations.

The blueprint for the City’s future is the “Biennial Goals, Initiatives and Outcomes.” Every six months the GIOs are updated to show progress on accomplishing the Initiatives. The Performance Measurement Program provides the data for making assessments and enables staff, council and the public to make the connection between performance, productivity, the budget and achievement of goals.

The newest part of the system, introduced in May 2010, produces charts, graphs, and dashboards to better display performance metrics, monitor departmental operations and budgets, and see longer term trends. Development of the system cost $10,000 and is managed by the city’s IT staff. City employees create dashboards related to their specific work tasks and budgets, and they have access to other dashboards, giving them insights into other departments and their functions as well as how their own work relates to the larger organization. Dashboards are updated continuously from live databases, providing the most current trend data available. Real time dashboards will be tailored for public use and available on the city's website as a next step.

Performance Management has always been Williamsburg’s first priority. Because of ingenuity and strategic use of staff time and resources, Williamsburg has a performance management system that is effective now and will be adaptable in the future.

Contact for more information:
Kate Hoving, Communications Specialist
Mark Barham, Director of Information Technology
City of Williamsburg
khoving@williamsburgva.gov

 

The following entries were awarded honorable mentions in the "IT as Efficiency Driver" category. All winners of honorable mentions in the category are pictured together with Lt. Gov. Bolling and Sec. Duffey, but each honored project’s executive summary follows.

 

Chesterfield County
Jail Management System

Honorable Mention
Category: IT as Efficiency Driver

Executive Summary:

Local jail operations consist of an individual being arrested and brought before the magistrate. After the magistrate finishes the formal charge process, the person is moved to the booking area where they are fingerprinted, photographed. Data is entered into the State Livescan System and a separate entry is made into the County Police Records Management System (RMS). Once the person is formally charged, booked and fingerprinted, they are moved to jail intake and have to be re-processed to collect the necessary data for the Jail Management System before being placed into the jail. Information from this system is then extracted on a recurring basis and sent to mandatory state systems. A large portion of the data collected during these processes is the same information that was gathered and validated just minutes earlier during the booking process. Jail business requirements and processes have changed since the development of the old system. The customer developed story cards and the new system was built to address current business requirements and processes. The old Jail Management System was not user friendly, allowed for inconsistency in data due to restrictive data editing methods, was difficult to interface to other systems and information was difficult to retrieve and report upon. The new system provides a more user friendly graphical interface. It utilizes modern techniques such as drop down data selections, radio and check box controls, and advanced interactive editing features thereby providing more accurate and reliable data. The use of current technologies provides the platform for information sharing and interfaces that will allow the elimination of redundant data entry into other systems.

Contact for more information:
Chesterfield County Information Systems Technology Department
Chesterfield County Sheriff Department
Ted Maxwell, Manager Application Development, IST Department
James Pritchet, Captain, Sheriff Department
MaxwellT@chesterfield.gov
PritchettJ@Chesterfield.gov

 

Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice
Web-based Video Intake

Honorable Mention
Category: IT as Efficiency Driver

Executive Summary:

DJJ and other government organizations successfully worked to identify a robust videoconferencing solution that is service-based, flexible and secure. The VIA3 solution provided by VIACK was successfully implemented at DJJ as a pilot and has since expanded across the Commonwealth. The solution allows DJJ to control usage on this hosted solution and secure access to this service. Technical advantages of this solution include the need for only a basic computer with access to the Internet, a web cam, and/or microphone. Financial advantages are the low monthly fee that allows shared accounts by facility or partner. The previous solution required the high initial cost for Polycom systems and ongoing monthly operational costs for ISDN lines and usage fees as wells as extended outages when circuit failures occurred.

The Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) has been using VIA3 to process after-hours intakes since the fall of 2009. VIA3 allows DJJ to complete intakes from across the State with the ability to sign, send and receive documents. The 9th District Court Service Unit processes after-hours intakes for 21 out of 35 Court Service Units, which includes 93 localities throughout the State of Virginia. After-hours Video Intake was created as a way to save probation officers from having to go out in the middle of the night to complete an intake after working their normal day hours. During the 2009 calendar year, After-hours Video Intake saved the probation officers 27,124 miles and 1,534.6 hours by completing their after-hours intakes. This is an outstanding example of how innovative technology can be utilized to improve efficiencies and save money. VIA3 is also saving Parole Officers travel time when visiting their clients at a Juvenile Correctional Center (JCC) or Halfway House. Note: Since 2003, DJJ has been using Polycom and PictureTel to process intakes. The cost of using a Polycom and PictureTel at two of our locations within the 9th District Court Service Unit is $133.48 and $210.81 a month, respectfully. This is a significantly higher cost than the Web-based Video Intake solution using VIA3.

Contact for more information:
Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ)
Robert H. Jenkins
Chief Technology & Security Officer (CTSO)
Robert.Jenkins@djj.virginia.gov

 

Virginia Department of Social Services
$4 KIDS

Honorable Mention
Category: IT as Efficiency Driver

Executive Summary:

DSS currently disburses 53 percent of all child support payments electronically through direct deposit. As an alternative, DSS provides a website and interactive voice response (IVR) system that allows employers, NCPs and individuals paying on behalf of NCPs the ability to remit child support payments. The program titled, Virginia $4KIDS, can accept payments electronically 24 hours a day/7days a week through a secured website and/or telephone.

The Virginia $4KIDS payment system has several advantages to help save the user time and money:

• Convenience: The user can make payments seven days a week using the online application, through standard touch-tone telephone or via a web enabled mobile phone.

• Control: The user designates the date their bank account is to be debited and the amount to be paid.

• Reliability: Once the user has completed the transaction, they will receive an on screen and email receipt as proof of payment.

• Payment Efficiencies: The user will avoid the difficulties that could result from late or lost payments.

• Free of Charge: The user will no longer have to issue checks, print envelopes and pay postage. The Commonwealth of Virginia does not charge for this service. The telephone number is a toll free number.

Contact for more information:
Virginia Department of Social Services
Nikita Atkinson
Nikita.Atkinson@dss.virginia.gov

 

City of Hampton
Technology Enabled Civic Engagement

Winner
Category: Innovation in Local Government

Executive Summary:

Working through a very difficult budget in 2010, the City of Hampton initiated an effort called the "I Value" campaign. The goal of this program was to learn from citizens what they feel are the City's most important and valuable services. Paper and online surveys only went so far in the past, so this year the City tried something altogether new -- audience polling technology. Citizens attending a budget forum were provided an electronic keypad that would allow them to vote in an interactive session that evaluated dozens of City services. Citizens were asked to "vote" using their keypads based on information presented on screen and the results were shown in real-time on each successive screen. Hundreds of citizens attended and the forums were a great success. The program helped to educate and build consensus around difficult decisions and made citizens feel a part of the process.

Contact person for more information:
John Eagle
Assistant City Manager
john.eagle@hampton.gov

 

City of Virginia Beach
Emergency Medical Services Electronic Medical Records

Winner
Category: Innovation in Local Government

Executive Summary:

Prior to this project, all reports were handwritten on the Virginia State PPCR form. More than 60 mandatory data elements were then manually entered into a database allowing the information to be uploaded to the Virginia Department of Health (VDH). This process involved four employees deciphering sometimes unreadable information to perform data entry using over 5000 labor hours annually. These paper reports were ultimately stored in locked file cabinets. Quality assurance checks by VBEMS and VDH required manual retrieval and review. With the EMR system, information is now stored on a secure server. Data is entered directly to the server by the medic instead of a 3rd party. Supervisors and quality improvement officers can perform case reviews from any computer workstation.

To achieve the primary goals of more accurate reporting and efficient data processing, VBEMS enlisted the help of the City’s Communications and Information Technology (ComIT) Department to assist in the design and implementation of the EMR system. VBEMS also wanted to compare pre-hospital care actions with patient outcomes. A partnership was formed with Sentara Health Systems to obtain access to view medical records of any patient transported by VBEMS. Through this unique arrangement VBEMS is the first pre-hospital agency in the country allowed access into the live environment of hospital medical records. This offers tremendous opportunity to improve patient care through outcomes-based study.

VBEMS and ComIT developed a network to allow handheld computers to talk to each other via a closed wireless system through Verizon networks. This network provides secure pathways to download and upload patient information from the patient’s side. The wireless network also connects our cardiac monitors to the system allowing the transmission of potentially lethal cardiac rhythms to the hospital. This capability enables the patient to bypass the emergency room and proceed directly to the heart catheterization lab, saving critical minutes.

While not initially a priority goal of the program, a significant benefit of the EMR system is faster turnaround times for our ambulances. By collaborating with our receiving facilities, medics are able to wirelessly transmit patient data to the emergency room well before the ambulance arrives. This push of information allows hospital staff to read the chart and prepare bed space for the patient. This facilitates faster patient turnover and quicker turnaround times for ambulances to go back in service for the next emergency.

Contact for more information:
Thomas Green
Division Chief of Emergency Medical Services
City of Virginia Beach
tgreen@vbgov.com

 

City of Staunton
Virtualized Public Access Workstations

Winner
Category: Innovation in Local Government

Executive Summary:

Public access terminals in the public library have become a necessary service for local governments. With an aging stable of traditional PCs being used for public access terminals, the City of Staunton’s IT department investigated options for replacing the systems. The traditional PCs were replaced with virtualized desktops and devices from Pano Logic. The Pano Logic devices have no firmware or moving parts and essentially act as a hub for the monitor, keyboard and mouse to connect to a virtual desktop running on a server. Utilizing VMware on the server, desktops were quickly created, cloned and implemented. By restricting changes to the desktop hard drive through VMware, every patron login presents a new desktop, free of viruses, malware or information from previous sessions. This also eliminates most of the calls for service to IT or library staff resulting in happier patrons. For the cost of replacing the nine PCs, Staunton was able to implement fifteen virtual desktop workstations, increasing the number of workstations available to patrons. Much of the infrastructure purchased can support even more virtual desktops in the future.

Contact for more information:
Kurt Plowman
Chief Technology Officer
plowmanks@ci.staunton.va.us

 

The following entries were awarded honorable mentions in the "Innovation in Local Government" category. All winners of honorable mentions in the category are pictured together with Lt. Gov. Bolling and Sec. Duffey, but each honored project’s executive summary follows.

 

County of Chesterfield
Chesterfield.gov portal redesign

Honorable Mention
Category: Innovation in Local Government

Executive Summary:

The county website, www.chesterfield.gov, has been redesigned to place the citizen at the center of the web experience. Our new website utilizes a state-of-the-art CMS and introduces the citizen to “Connected Government” with the consistent use of social media tools throughout the site, interactive mapping for directions, nine language translations and font sizing options. The website is a platform for continuing to deliver services electronically. Citizens now do not have to request documents from staff members; they can use the connected government tools to print the web page and document in question. Google analytics is used to compare website traffic from month to month, and metrics have been published comparing traffic to the site before the conversion. Website visits for April have increased from 854 in 2009 to 77,324 in 2010. A dramatic increase.

Each major citizen facing web project of the last year has enjoyed warm acclaim and citizen involvement by placing citizens on the steering committees of the projects including the website redesign (http://www.chesterfield.gov), the Citizen GIS mapping application (http://citizengis.chesterfield.gov) provides online access to map layers and aerial photography displaying geographic details and parcel information. Leveraging the talents of the citizens on the projects has produced higher quality systems, and made staff more efficient by limiting rework.

A further example of innovation on our website is Chesterfield County TV. It is a project that was implemented specifically for openness in government. Board and Commission meetings are now streamed via our Internet, saving citizens the time and energy from having to drive in to attend a meeting. They can now view the meetings online, at their convenience. The indexing feature of the system allows citizens to view only those portions of the meeting where they may have a particular interest. All of Chesterfield’s streaming features may be found on our website.
(http://www.chesterfield.gov/content3.aspx?id=9375).

Chesterfield County continues to be the model for openness in government by demonstrating our commitment to providing the public easy access to the records and proceedings of all public meetings. Chesterfield.gov, as demonstrated by our dramatic increase in web traffic, is now the “go-to” place for county information.

The redesign quickly caught the attention of the National Association of Government Webmasters (NAGW) resulting in the site winning the Pinnacle “Members Choice” Award, the highest honor awarded by that nationally renowned organization.

On Sept. 1, Chesterfield County’s website was named tops in the nation by the Center for Digital Government’s Best of the Web program, county category. This is a BIG deal – congratulations!

Contact person for more information:
Chesterfield County
Information Systems Technology Department
Ted Maxwell, Manager, Applications Development
Robbie Freeland, eGovernment Manager
MaxwellT@Chesterfield.gov
FreelandR@Chesterfield.gov

 

County of Fairfax
Virtual Fairfax - 3D

Honorable Mention
Category: Innovation in Local Government

Executive Summary:

Fairfax County implemented a web-based, 3-D visualization tool for use by the general public, particularly those who are interested in and/or impacted by development. Because of the population density of the county, the extension of Metro rail to Tysons Corner and Reston/Herndon and the dense development that is occurring in these and other county centers, having processes and tools to better visualize impact and minimize contention provides significant benefit. The need for the information and the display tools was anticipated by a Board of Supervisors appointed citizen Land Use Information Accessibility Advisory Group. The 12 members were involved in county land development issues and identified guiding principles and recommendations to improve understanding of impact and citizen involvement in the land planning and development process. Virtual Fairfax specifically addresses several of their principles and recommendations.

Virtual Fairfax (VF) enables its users to fluidly navigate the county (and surrounding jurisdictions), view buildings in key county areas in 3-D, determine terrain and building elevations and evaluate the shadow impact of buildings. It enables users to add their own 3-D building models to the Fairfax landscape and view their impact, print maps/views, create email-able links to or snapshots of a specific location, turn on parcel outlines and road information. VF contains direct links to key county land information systems containing assessment information, nearby zoning and building activity, as well as school districts, elected officials, parks, and calls for police service.

Technically, VF fuses two cloud-sourced data sets at the user’s web browser, providing a seamless 3-D user experience. Skyline Software Systems serves the county’s terrain, imagery and 3-D buildings while the county serves out the more compact vector information (parcel edges, road centerlines, places of interest) along with the search capability. Tests show the Skyline servers carry over 90% of the data load. This approach minimizes impact on county systems from a very data intensive application. Getting to the release of a 3-D application involved several years of research, testing and vendor discussions. The application, released June 11, is already averaging over 460 sessions/workday with peaks close to 1,000. Its visualizations are being used in county reports and discussions are underway with county agencies to enable viewing of proposed development in Tysons Corner. Traditional 2-D applications do not give an accurate representation of what the resulting 3-D environment will look like. Virtual Fairfax provides that key element in an interactive tool.

Contact person for more information:
Fairfax County Department of Information Technology
GIS & Mapping Branch
Tom Conry, GIS & Mapping Branch Manager, DIT
Gordon Jarratt, Enterprise Systems Division Director, DIT
tconry@fairfaxcounty.gov
gjarra@fairfaxcounty.gov

 

City of Richmond
CommonCents

Honorable Mention
Category: Innovation in Local Government

Executive Summary:

Developed by City of Richmond’s Department of Information Technology, this product, which addressed the employee budget feedback program, resulted in significant cost savings (2 ? 5 million dollars) by automating the business process of capturing the cost saving ideas, review and research on potential cost savings that an idea can incur and final approval of ideas for adoption by Chief Administrative Officer.

This product supported the employee budget feedback program whose primary goal is to create efficiencies in city government from ideas submitted by city employees. All city employees were allowed to submit ideas on how the city can save money with emphasis on cost savings for FY10 and FY11. The program required that all ideas have actual, quantifiable savings that have an immediate impact.

The idea review business process is completely automated by leveraging Metastorm’s Business Process Management software. The workflow built to address this program generated email notifications to initial review team who filtered the ideas based on program objectives. These filtered ideas then were assigned to pertinent city departments for further analysis on cost savings. The workflow also created a to-do list (tasks to address as part of business process) for departmental project team who were charged with estimating the cost savings for ideas affecting their department. Once the departmental review is done, the system created a to-do list for pertinent Deputy Chief Administrative Officer and subsequently a to-do list for Chief Administrative Officer. Throughout the whole business process, the system generated email notifications to keep appropriate parties informed. These to-do lists and email notifications generated, forced the checks and balances to be in place and thus the Mayor’s program was a huge success.

After the program ended, employees were provided with a reporting web site, which allowed them to track their ideas’ outcome and also analyze cost savings by department. The employees, whose ideas were approved by City of Richmond, have been recognized as STARS on the web site and also they had an opportunity to attend the reception (organized to recognize employees who submitted cost saving ideas that had an immediate impact) with Mayor Dwight C. Jones.

Contact person for more information:
Bill Hobgood, Project Manager
Subhashni Narra, WEBBI Project Lead
City of Richmond
Dept. of Information Technology
Bill.Hobgood@richmondgov.com
Subhashini.Narra@richmondgov.com

Screen Shots:

https://sharepoint.richmondgov.com/DIT/Competitions/Forms/AllItems.aspx?RootFolder=%2fDIT%2fCompetitions%2fDigitalCities%2f2010%2fCommonCents&FolderCTID=&View=%7bEB379544%2d5EC6%2d4DD9%2dB0C5%2dEF25E1AED767%7d

 

County of Washington
Citizens Emergency Alert System

Honorable Mention
Category: Innovation in Local Government

Executive Summary:

Washington County IS/ GIS Department created the Citizen Emergency Alerting System (CEAS) to notify our citizens in a timely manner on how to respond to emergency situations. This system was devised by a project team of County elected officials, administration, Sheriff and emergency response agencies and funded through a small grant from Homeland Security and the Virginia Department of Emergency Management. It allows our E911 Operators to leverage the use of our existing E-911 telephone and GIS databases to define the area for CEAS alerting. Citizens were given opportunity through community outreach and PR efforts, as well as, the county website to also register VoIP or cell phones. This project identified a clear business need, created an efficient service delivery methodology to the customers, a population of approximately 53,000 residents, and succeeded in creating the first “hybrid” emergency alerting system of its kind among Southwest Virginia local governments.

As it was specified, the CEAS would be a hybrid system. One that could use a national dialing bank for a large volume of calls that needed to be made quickly OR use a small bank of five available local phone lines to handle smaller call volumes.

Under the leadership of Ms. Nadine Culberson, Deputy County Administrator, a project team was formed comprised of a core working group and a much larger advisory group. The core group included two public champions of the project: Sheriff Fred Newman and Supervisor Jack McCrady. The larger group included representatives from the Emergency Volunteer’s Association, Fireman’s Association, County Administration, and the Southwest Region Wireless Board.

Technically, the terms of the grant were met; however, the team wanted to interface several technology platforms to maximize the services that could be offered to the citizens.

Many citizens do not use local telephone companies for home telephones. The percentage of citizens opting to use VoIP or cell phone services continues to grow each year. These resident’s telephone numbers are not in the E911 database. The team targeted solutions to include all citizens in the CEAS project.

A web page was created and added to the County’s web site www.washcova.com providing citizen secure online registration of their cell or IP phone numbers to the CEAS database. Using the address entered during the registration, the new numbers were geo-coded into the mapping system.

Brochures with coupons to complete and mail as well as large posters with tear off registration coupons were developed in-house. Materials were placed in public buildings and community centers around the county. Programs were conducted in Neighborhood Watch meetings to educate and inform citizens of the new service.

Many of the team members volunteered their own time to setup a CEAS information and registration booth at the 2009 Relay for Life, the 2009 Plumb Alley Days and the 2009 Washington County Fair in one of the County’s largest public outreach efforts and promotional campaigns.

Contact person for more information:
Nadine Culberston
Deputy County Administrator
Operations & Personnel
Washington County, VA
IS/GIS Department
nculberson@washcova.com

 

County of Albemarle
Instructional Management and Performance System

Winner
Category: Innovation in K-12 Education

Executive Summary:

In Albemarle County Public Schools, (ACPS) student assessment information, curricular resources, and performance tracking was neither readily accessible nor compiled in a comprehensive way. The division sought to build a framework to serve this information via a meaningful delivery model while also providing a collaborative environment. The school division built the foundation for this framework via a significant investment in a partnership with a K-12 educational software company as well as a web-based delivery model for a comprehensive Balanced Scorecard environment.

School division staff invested significant time and resources into the development of curricular materials and student assessments. The resulting curricular documents and accompanying assessment items represent a focus on a concept-centered approach to teaching and learning as well as higher order thinking. After formation, ACPS was unable to provide for 24/7 access, the ability to search, find, and/or sort. The resulting Software as a Service (SaaS) model ACPS has developed successfully accommodated the challenges and resolved multi-level interaction restrictions.

Our partner in this accomplishment, the K-12 educational software company, SchoolNet assisted in mapping and migrating the information, in separate distinct areas, into a broad-based container. Training and pilot instances were early wins that allowed the system to render results-based goals.

The second approach of the overall project involved a method to better enable performance tracking across the ACPS school division. ACPS decided to adopt the corporate model of the Balanced Scorecard. Making the delivery effective and dynamic was inherent in the goal during this segment of the project. Establishing access for external and internal stakeholders meant developing this structure in a web-based instance. We started with basic metrics and priorities using them to scaffold content into the broader School Board and Superintendent priorities and departmental performance goals that allowed users access to dynamic information in several areas.

Contact for more information:
Dr. Luvelle Brown
Chief Information Officer
Albemarle County Public Schools
lbrown@k12albemarle.org

 

Virginia Department of Education
Share the Skies

Winner
Category: Innovation in K-12 Education

Executive Summary:

This innovative project was collaboratively developed in 2007 by the Virginia Department of Education, New Mexico Skies, Software Bisque, and Virginia Tech’s Institute for Connecting Science Research to the Classroom. This collaboration has been essential to the initiative and truly represents the very best in public/private partnerships -demonstrating that everyone can play an important role in the education system.

The initiative allows students in Virginia to access and control research-grade telescopes to explore Australia’s night skies via the Internet. Students also can use CCD (charge-coupled device) imaging techniques to capture digital images of deep space for further study. In addition, the project:

• Helps students develop essential skills in science, mathematics, computer science, and communications

• Enables students to learn science by doing science

• Offers experiences that encourage students to consider careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics

• Leverages Virginia’s existing technical infrastructure to deliver high-quality learning experiences

• Provides teachers with effective tools to improve instruction

The Share the Skies Web site also provides students and teachers with access to sky maps, an image gallery, and other resources. No additional hardware or software is required, meaning that classroom computers instantly can access the program and control the telescope.

Without this project, most students in Virginia would not have the opportunity to study astronomy. A small number of physical observatories exist in the state; however, relatively few students have a chance to visit them after dark. Share the Skies overcomes this obstacle by giving students access to the night skies without leaving their classrooms. As a result, it ensures all students equal access to the same resources.

In these ways, Share the Skies and similar initiatives have helped Virginia remain ahead of the curve nationally in its commitment to educational technology and in preparing students for the changing economy and information age.

Contact for more information:
Dr. Tammy McGraw, Director of Educational Technology
Virginia Department of Education
tammy.mcgraw@doe.virginia.gov

 

The following entries were awarded honorable mentions in the "Innovation in K-12 Education" category. All winners of honorable mentions in the category are pictured together with Lt. Gov. Bolling and Sec. Duffey, but each honored project’s executive summary follows.

 

City of Chesapeake
Using Technology to Promote Excellence

Honorable Mention
Category: Innovation in K-12 Education

Executive Summary:

Seven goals of a Strategic Plan for School Improvement support the Chesapeake Public Schools (CPS) philosophy of serving all the children of all the people: Optimize School Safety, Ensure Rigorous Educational Standards, Evaluate Effectiveness and Efficiency, Ensure Effective Staff Training, Optimize the Use of Technology, Enhance Parental and Community Involvement, Provide Optimal School Facilities.

To produce results given fiscal constraints and a reduced workforce, a heightened emphasis on technology has become the hallmark of the CPS planning process; and action teams involving community members identified technology initiatives and wrote action plans to benefit students, parents, teachers, administrators, classified personnel, and the business community.

IT solutions used to implement the seven goals have included:

• Safety: 981,029 calls (2009-10) by the Parent Alert System, saving 87,752 staff hours; a camera monitoring system connecting school video cameras and the CPS WAN, giving immediate visual access

• Rigorous educational standards: 6 fully online courses and VDOE AP courses, saving teacher and transportation costs; distance learning courses available as needed (5 in 2010-11), saving personnel and facilities costs; 174 computers donated to disadvantaged CPS families; Technology Academy offering advanced courses, mentorships, internships

• Effectiveness and efficiency: a climate control system that saved $876,410 in an 8-year period, including central climate control and lighting efficiency projects; $79,000 saved (2009-10) by setting thermostats back on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in summer

• Staff training: participants conveniently sign up from remote locations via the online catalog/registration available 24 hours a day and participate in convenient, self-paced online training and online technology courses, saving instructor and facilities costs

• Technology: fiber optic CPS cable system (increased band width 25MB), saving $27,348 annually; IP telephony using WAN lines eliminating busy signals, allowing for web cams and quick response at the central office if 911 dialed from a classroom, saving $545 a month.

• Community involvement: electronic grade book uploaded into Edline, giving parents/students access to grades, homework, etc., 24 hours a day; 88% of students connected to Edline; CPS-owned cable providing timely access to CPS information; CPS web site with 105,580,947 hits in 2009-10, eliminating 406,081 potential parent calls saving a potential 33,840 staff hours

• Optimal facilities: innovative classroom technology tools, including 1,126 SmartBoards (1 teacher per 1.7 boards) and 163 Doc cams integrating with existing technology; wireless network providing state of the art learning.

Contact for more information:
Chesapeake Public Schools
Penny Goodin
Program Administrator
goodipe@cps.k12.va.us

 

James Madison University and Virginia high schools
The Geospatial Semester

Honorable Mention
Category: Innovation in K-12 Education

Executive Summary:

The Geospatial Semester is a unique partnership between Virginia high schools and James Madison University. In a term or over a full year, students learn about cutting-edge geospatial technology (GIS, GPS and remote sensing) and apply it to locally-based problems. Participating students can also earn dual enrollment credit from JMU at a significant discount. The project is entering its 6th year and more than 1,000 students from 15 high schools and 12 districts have participated since its inception in 2005.The Geospatial Semester focuses on exposing students to an increasingly important technology with real-world applications. Participating students receive the opportunity to apply the technology to local problems and to conduct projects over an extended time period, learning both time management and group process skills. This work both prepares them for higher education and/or employment.

Note this is a joint nomination between participating high schools and JMU

Contact for more information:
http://www.isat.jmu.edu/geospatialsemester

James Madison University (Project Lead), Dr. Bob Kolvoord and Kathryn Keranen

Participants:
Paul Rittenhouse - Western Albemarle High School (Albemarle County)
Ryan Miller - Washington-Lee High School (Arlington County)
Dr. Kurt Michael - Shenandoah Valley Governor?s School (Augusta County, Staunton City, Waynesboro City)
William Ryan - Colonial Heights High School (Colonial Heights City)
Rebecca Gentry - Herndon High School (Fairfax County)
Jennifer Tatum - Robinson Secondary School (Fairfax County)
Joshua Mosser - Briar Woods High School (Loudoun County)
Jon Pruess and Michael Wagner - Heritage High School (Loudoun County)
Philip D’Arcangelis - Loudoun County High School (Loudoun County)
Erin Wissler - Loudoun Valley High School (Loudoun County)
Dr. Andrew Knight - Potomac Falls High School (Loudoun County)
Tara Meadows - Luray High School (Page County)
Tracy Shifflett - Page County High School (Page County)
Michael Pratte and Cherise Hodge - Mountain View High School (Stafford County)
Steven Tatum - Warhill High School (Williamsburg/James City County)

Contact Person(s) and Title(s)
Dr. Bob Kolvoord, Professor of Integrated Science and Technology
ekolvoora@jmu.edu

 

City of Colonial Heights
Building a Fiber Optic Gigabit Wide Area Network

Honorable Mention
Category: Innovation in K-12 Education

Executive Summary:

Despite economic challenges and budget cuts, Colonial Heights City Public Schools used the competitive bidding process to build a new fiber optic Wide Area Network (WAN) to connect city schools through shared Gigabit (1000 MBPS) connectivity. The WAN provides the very framework that interconnects all our schools to provide improved network services, while supporting the innovative educational use of technology.

Different obstacles in the past had made it difficult to reach an agreement with former cable companies, for schools to utilize unused dark fiber for technology infrastructure. Persistent efforts over the years eventually paid off. A school division self assessment for the accreditation process found that the former T-1 connections at elementary schools offered limited bandwidth, that was below the capacity needed to handle new educational technology. After formulating plans and funding the project, a new fiber optic Gigabit infrastructure was built to support education in the twenty-first century.

Contact for more information:
Mark D. Webster
Director of Technology and Learning
Colonial Heights City Public Schools
mark_webster@verizon.net
mark_webster@colonialhts.net

 

Longwood University
Collaborative Learning Opportunities

Winner
Category: Innovation in Higher Education

Executive Summary:

Many rural, as well as urban, public school districts in Virginia are impacted by a high percentage of low-income families and minority residents, increasing rates of students with Limited English Proficiency (LEP), scarce resources, an insufficient number of qualified teachers, high teacher turnover, and low performance of students in subgroups with special needs. At the same time the school districts are dealing with these issues, they must focus on keeping teachers up-to-date on the latest technologies. With limited time and resources, teachers must be prepared to integrate emerging technologies into their classrooms to effectively engage students and prepare them to enter the 21st century workforce. From the national to the state and local levels, improvements in math and science education have been recognized as essential in a 21st century global economy.

As a K-12 educational outreach program of Longwood University, the Institute for Teaching through Technology and Innovative Practices (ITTIP) is collaborating with the Southside Virginia Regional Technology Consortium (25 school divisions, www.svrtc.org), as well as the Central Virginia Technology Consortium (15 school divisions, http://cvctech.org) and 10 school divisions in Central and Eastern Virginia. The Institute’s mission is to transform teaching and learning environments by working with the school districts to incorporate emerging technologies and research-based instructional practices into the schools. Since 2005, ITTIP has focused on bringing STEM expertise to administrators, educators, students and parents of Southside Virginia. Since then, thousands of teachers and students have been served by ITTIP and will continue to do so as courses, materials and technologies are repeatedly used and explored through asynchronous and synchronous online learning and social networking (http://ittip.net/forteachers; http://elgg.ittip.us; http://stem.ittip.us). Longwood ITTIP’s game design project for students is considered a national model, http://www.digispired.org.

ITTIP projects for K-12 educators and students are primarily long-term projects established through grants and partnerships with various organizations and educational institutions. Research has shown that multiple and sustained opportunities for practice, collaboration and reflection are key to improving student learning and instructional practice. Past and current projects have been funded through the National Science Foundation, State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and the Virginia Department of Education Math and Science Partnership. Partners have included Longwood University, Virginia State University, NASA, National Institute of Aeronautics, the Science Museum of Virginia, Old Dominion University, James Madison University, Institute of Advanced Learning and Research, Southern Virginia Higher Education Center and Concord Consortium.

Contact for more information:
Dr. Manorama Talaiver
Longwood University; Southside Virginia Regional Technology Consortium
manotalaiver@gmail.com or mano@ittip.us

 

Tidewater Community College
Human Patient Simulators

Winner
Category: Innovation in Higher Education

Executive Summary:

Tidewater Community College has undertaken a major increase in the integrated use of the Human Patient Simulator (HPS) in its Nursing and Health Sciences Programs. The HPS is a top-of-the-line, fully automatic, scenario-driven, high-fidelity patient simulator specifically designed for training in anesthesia, respiratory therapy, and critical care. The simulators allow instructors to use over 80 pre-programmed conditions. A collection of carefully defined Simulated Clinical Experiences (SCEs) allows instructors to integrate specific learning objectives into the Nursing and Respiratory Therapy programs and add critical learning opportunities to real-life simulated environments quickly and easily.

The absence of simulation scenarios for the respiratory therapy field led to the development of a project supported by the College’s Batten Fellowship for Technological Innovation and Leadership. The Batten Fellowship was established with a $1 million gift from the late Frank Batten Sr. to support faculty research in cutting edge, applied technology and to see TCC become a national exemplar of a comprehensive community college in the twenty-first century. The first recipient of this award focused his efforts on developing the first HPS simulations for respiratory therapy.

Gary Cross, head of TCC’s Respiratory Therapy program, coordinated with equipment manufacturers and integrated the human patient simulators with a respirator and other emergency room equipment. Working with Sentara Healthcare he developed eight simulator scenarios for the Respiratory Therapy program. These simulator scenarios allow the human patient simulators to mimic respiratory and cardiovascular problems and automatically respond to the student’s treatment, either showing an improved or a deteriorating condition. Students monitor and react to a variety of body functions, including heartbeat, breathing sounds, pupil dilation, and blood pressure. Students can practice their skills in a truly realistic learning environment. The ground-breaking project exemplifies a “best practice” for thinking out of the box to enhance partnerships and teaching and learning at community colleges.

At its new Portsmouth Campus TCC captures and publishes on the college intranet the student interaction with human patient simulator scenarios. These videos can be viewed from any TCC campus via a standard Internet browser. The multimedia segments stream multiple synchronized videos which display multiple camera angles and patient vital signs on a single windowed web page. Thus, the student and instructor can replay the entire scenario for a facilitated debriefing and after-action review of how the student reacted to changes in the human patient simulator’s physiology.

Contact for more information:
Richard F. Andersen
Vice President for Information Systems
Tidewater Community College
randersen@tcc.edu

 

The following entry was awarded an honorable mention in the "Innovation in Higher Education" category. Winners are pictured with Lt. Gov. Bolling and Sec. Duffey; the honored project’s executive summary follows.

 

Radford University, Virginia Tech, and New River Community College
New River Valley Multimedia Services Access Point (MSAP)

Honorable Mention
Category: Innovation in Higher Education

Executive Summary:

The extraordinary requirements of high performance research computing combined with the continued growth of the Internet and the increasing demand for rich multimedia and streaming video by students, faculty and staff result in an upward spiraling requirement for bandwidth among institutions of higher education. Unlike many large metropolitan areas where access to national research networks and commodity Internet backbones is readily available and demand helps reduce costs, bandwidth costs in Southwest Virginia remain relatively expensive.

Virginia Tech operates the NatCap research network aggregation facility in the DC metropolitan area which provides access to national research networks and major Internet backbones for universities throughout the mid-Atlantic region. Virginia Tech has in place diverse optical connections from Blacksburg to NatCap required to support university research.

The goal of the project was to establish a Multimedia Services Access Point (MSAP) that would serve as a high speed network connection point between RU, VT and NRCC allowing the three institutions to share network resources including Internet bandwidth and connections to national research networks including National LambdaRail(NLR) and Internet2. In addition, the MSAP allows for network peering with other New River Valley networks that are able to establish a path to the MSAP. This creates opportunities for broad interconnectivity among regional anchor institutions.

In 2007, the three institutions began a dialog around collaboration and leveraging of combined resources including NRCC's new site located at the New River Valley Mall. The three institutions agreed to construct an MSAP in Christiansburg, VA near the New River Valley Mall which is a central location in the region. Each institution took responsibility for establishing a fiber path leveraging relationships with local provider partners. Each institution paid a portion of the costs for construction of the MSAP and the necessary network hardware. Completion of the MSAP took place in August of 2008 just before the start of the new academic year.

The MSAP immediately provided a means of interconnection among the participants to enhance collaboration, instruction, and research. Radford University and New River Community College were able to dramatically increase the available Internet bandwidth while avoiding cost increases.

Contact for more information:
Organizations:
Radford University
Virginia Tech
New River Community College

Contact Person(s) and Title(s):
Danny Kemp, CIO and VP for Information Technology, Radford University
Ed Oakes, Associate VP for Information Technology, Radford University
William H. Sanders, Director for Technology in the Arts, Virginia Tech
Brenda Van Gelder, Director eCorridors, Virginia Tech
John Van Hemert, Vice President for Finance and Technology, New River Community College

E-mail Address(es):
dmkemp@radford.edu
eoakes@radford.edu
bvgelder@vt.edu
sandersw@vt.edu
jvanhemert@nr.edu