Roanoke has been named among the nation’s Top Ten Digital Cities in a survey involving hundreds of governments across the country since 2001. This year Roanoke ranked eighth in the survey, which measures a community’s use of computer technology on dozens of measures.
The survey is entering its 11th year and is becoming increasingly popular as governments are digitizing operations in ways that go far beyond replacing metal filing cabinets with computer databases, according to Todd Sander, director of Digital Communities, the organization that conducts the annual survey.
“The highest-ranking cities in the survey showed great strides in consolidating and enabling shared services, government transparency and communications interoperability,” he said. “We applaud these innovators as they work in the spirit of collaboration to provide extraordinary value to constituents despite budget setbacks.”
Roanoke has been named to the nation’s Top Ten every year since the survey began, only the second community to have done so throughout the four categories surveyed based on city-size. Roanoke is measured in the category of cities 75,000 – 124,999 in population. In past years the city’s performance has been a stand out in the survey results receiving six first-place rankings.
Such consistent placement among the Top Ten is quite an accomplishment in the rapidly evolving world of government technology, according to Kimberly Samuelson the government marketing director for Laserfiche ECM, which supplies document management software to Roanoke and 18 other communities named to the Top Ten this year.
“In light of budget cuts and a volatile economic climate, it’s no easy task to fund and follow through on projects that digitize government operations that have been paper-based often for hundreds of years,” Samuelson said. “Yet tax payers are eventually served far better when government makes the extra effort to embrace this technology as Roanoke has.”
For the full list of Top Ten Digital Cities visit: http://www.digitalcommunities.com/survey/cities/?year=2011.
