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Statewide Honors for KeyBoard, the County's Automated Agenda System

KeyBoard, Santa Clara County's automated agenda system, received statewide honors in 2005 for innovation, from the California State Association of Counties.

Santa Clara County wanted to improve public access to important policy, budget and other issues being deliberated by elected officials while decreasing cumbersome paperwork for public employees. Enter Keyboard, an automated online system that provides virtually all public information at a citizen's fingertips. The Clerk of the Board of Supervisors and the county's Chief Information Officer fine-tuned a system that now can store and retrieve a wide range of information. Keyboard not only streamlines the agenda process and provides expeditious flow of information, but also allows county staff to electronically write, scan and distribute supporting documents electronically. Cost was not cheap, but the $5.6 million price tag is being spread over multiple budget years. In addition, the system saves several million dollars annually in "soft" costs, such as staff time that now can be directed to other public services, as well as tens of thousands of dollars in annual "hard" costs savings by reducing the previous need for millions of sheets of paper.

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