Increasing the quality and availability of citizen services through collaborative enterprise-wide and cross-enterprise collaboration is motivated by achieving a citizen centric outcome, a comprehensive view of the citizen, and organizing with consideration to life events, according to a report released by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO). This motivation includes goals for increasing efficiency, effectiveness and capacity. The key to reaching outcomes is gaining initial and sustained funding. An “outcomes based” business case that fully accounts for all costs will help secure the necessary funding. The report, “Funding: The Drive Wheel for Cross-Jurisdictional Collaboration,” focuses on funding options. Visit www.nascio.org/2014FundingTheDriveWheel/ to read the report.

“In this report we look at a lot of funding options for IT and refer back to previous research we’ve done on this topic,” said Brenda Decker, co-chair for the NASCIO Cross-Jurisdictional Collaboration working group and chief information officer for the state of Nebraska. “We also make the case that understanding and clearly articulating all costs is an important part of the business case development and is essential prior to seeking funding.”

“This report rounds out our library of resources regarding cross-jurisdictional collaboration,” said Calvin Rhodes, co-chair of the NASCIO Cross-Jurisdictional Collaboration working group and chief information officer for the state of Georgia. “Funding is on the critical path to kicking off collaboration and sustaining it. That funding may be derived from a variety of sources creating essentially a funding basket.”