ISYS product: ISYS:web Organization: City of Muskego Benefit: Improved decision-making by City officials; better public access to information. Industry: Local Government Available on: Website and intranet

City of Muskego

On all levels of government, technology has made a real and tangible impact. Case in point, the City of Muskego recently won the Lloyd D. Gladfelter award for improved public services thanks to its imaging system that uses ISYS:web as the search component.

Every City has a tremendous amount of information documenting how they govern. Municipal Codes, Charter Ordinances, Zoning Codes, and Comprehensive Plans are some of the routine tools used. There are huge numbers of documents generated by Common Council and a plethora of other Committee meetings, such as Assessment Board of Reviews, Zoning Board of Appeals, Finance Committee, Police and Fire Commission, and Committee of the Whole.

In order for Committee members, Aldermen, and City staff to make good decisions, they need to be able to access the records documenting the rationale behind previous decisions, as well as all the City's current policies. City residents need the same information to understand why decisions have been made, and to hold their elected officials accountable.

The City of Muskego used ISYS to help make all of this information easily available to those inside the organization as well as to the general public.

The entire hard copy collection of records, dating back to when the City was incorporated in 1964, was scanned to PDF format and uploaded to the City's web site at http://www.ci.muskego.wi.us. ISYS:web was then used to search and display information contained in those records. Features such as hit-highlighting within PDF and hit-to-hit navigation mean that visitors to the website can quickly find and navigate to relevant information.

Joe Sommers, of the City of Muskego, estimates that the system saves days of effort when records need to be found. The City Clerk recently researched the history of "Legal Lot Status" in two hours, which would otherwise have taken at least two days by pulling the hard copy documents.

Joe says that the biggest advantage of the system is that it provides information to the citizens of the City that previously was not available. This ensures that citizens have full and open access to the government information that affects their City.

The University of Wisconsin presented the Lloyd D. Gladfelter Award "for a meritorious proposal improving federal, state, county or municipal services in the State of Wisconsin" as recognition of the public benefits resulting from the new system.

ISYS Search Software would like to acknowledge the contribution of Joe Sommers (Director of Information Systems, City of Muskego) in the preparation of this case study.