The local government’s continuous support is critical for the well-being of a community during disaster events. E-Government systems that establish and maintain ongoing connections with the community thus play a vital role in supporting crisis response and recovery. Such systems’ ability to adapt to the crisis circumstances and to address emergent needs helps them continue their fundamental functions during disasters. Considering various services might require different amounts and types of resources, prioritization strategies are helpful in determining the processing order of requests. This paper discusses the role of prioritizing services within an e-Government system, to better understand how such a system can be managed to best utilize available resources. The study examines how a well-functioning e-Government system, the Orange County, Florida 311 non-emergency service system, responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and how the changes in service operations requirements can affect service provision, specifically with respect to assigning or re-assigning priority levels.
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Analysis of Orange County 311 System service requests during the COVID-19 pandemic
Orange County, Florida is intimately familiar with impacts of natural disasters because of the yearly threat of hurricanes in the southeastern United States. One of the tools that has aided them in their efforts to monitor and manage such disasters is their 311 non-emergency call system, through which local residents can issue requests to the municipality for disaster-related information or other services. This paper provides a preliminary examination of the potential for the Orange County 311 system to provide actionable information to them in support of their efforts to manage a different type of disaster: the COVID-19 pandemic. The potential of the system to support the County in this context is illustrated through several preliminary analyses of the complete set of service requests that were registered in the first ten months of 2020.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1952792
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10294149
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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