Thanks to Ann Higgins for the heads up on the Digital Communities article that highlights Hennepin County and much of the work being done in the community to connect through collaboration.

First they featured Hennepin’s plan to interconnect with its cities and the State of Minnesota…

“When we started looking into this, we realized we have several partners that we need to work regularly with and [we] will continue to be doing that,” Regenscheid said. This effort includes the state and many local governments. “There are 45 cities within Hennepin County that we do business with,” she said. “Each of us are trying to solve this problem, and the best solution was to come together in a collaboration to say, ‘How can we lay this grid that will benefit everyone and [how] we can capitalize on cost sharing?’”

The county is being diligent in how the grid is designed, Regenscheid said. For example, if there’s a school or law enforcement agency that already has fiber in place, the county will include that facility in the design of the county’s grid rather than building around it or just ignoring that it’s there. The goal is to be efficient.

They feature Hennepin County’s collaboration with neighboring counties…

In a separate project but related to the fiber network, Hennepin County is completing construction this month that connects county data centers in Hennepin County with those of eight other nearby counties, Regenscheid said. The project is called the Metro County Fiber Interconnect.

They feature collaboration of online applications..

Collaboration extends to the county’s e-government efforts too. Hennepin County making a concerted effort to ask agencies what they need and to develop e-government offerings in a way that won’t require any retracing of footsteps, Regenscheid said. For instance, both the library system and tax payment system require the collection of funds, so the county is making an effort to create one solution that will work for all payment collection functions across the county, she said. That way, the solution is truly modular and the county doesn’t need to do more work than necessary.

And…

The county will create six regional one-stop hubs, along with satellite centers, for health and human services. The goal is to provide more convenient service. One issue with the current system the county has, Regenscheid said, is that because there are so many disparate departments and offices, citizens often have to complete redundant paperwork and wind up retelling their story over and over again to different government employees.

Through the use of digital imaging, video conferencing and other technology at these regional centers, a citizen will be able to get more services in one place and the county will be able to offer more efficient service.