Of course it would seem integrating the vehicle registration system with parking ticket enforcement makes obvious sense. Your town IT department can reliably project cash flows and enabling a simple return on investment (ROI) analysis will show whether the IT upgrade is worth the expenditure. More and more local governments use ROI analysis to justify their IT investments, explains Shawn McCarthy, program manager, U.S. IT Opportunity Government and Education at IDC, the market research firm based in Framingham, Mass.
"There's a lot of pressure on governments to build an ROI case around any sort of improvement," says McCarthy. But savvy solution providers who make convincing ROI arguments for technological investment can tap into a local government IT market currently estimated at $19.1 billion and projected to grow almost 50 percent over the next five years according to James Krouse, manager of state and local market analysis at Input, a Reston, Va.-based research firm.
"Over the past four or five years, belt-tightening has become a way of life," agrees Ed Hemminger, CIO of Ontario County, New York. "ROI is what allows us to go forward today. Tell me how it's going to make me faster, better or cheaper."
Fairfax County, Va., uses the acronym "ROI" 48 times in its 140-page "portfolio management" process justifying its $73.1 million fiscal year 2006 IT budget.
Solution providers are finding five IT solutions especially interesting to their local government customers: information consolidation, Wi-Fi networks, Voice over IP (VoIP), first-responder solutions and portals.
Blasting the Silos
As with the car registration and parking ticket data example, local governments are notorious for storing information in separate data silos. A solution provider can usually come up with a convincing ROI justification for any IT proposal that tears down the silos, allowing a local government to integrate information and share it between departments.
"We have been consolidated for the last 10 years," says Fairfax County's CIO Dave Molchany. "We have a single data center for the entire county government."
Consolidated data centers allow governments to use technologies like SANs, automated tape servers, integrated e-mail servers and server consolidation solutions more efficiently for the organization as a whole, says Molchany. "Consolidation also allows economies of scale in hardware and network support," he adds.
In addition to serving as CIO for Ontario County, Ed Hemminger is VP of the New York Local Government IT Directors Association, and he has noticed the trend toward IT consolidation state-wide. "We're doing more and more of it," he says. "We're trying to consolidate servers and then take advantage of new storage technologies."
Wi-Fi Networks: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
One way to consolidate local government information is to connect local governments, employees and citizens with a wireless "cloud."
Municipal Wi-Fi is still a technology where gee-whiz discussions rather than sober ROI analysis can come into play. Take Philadelphia's plans to make the entire city a Wi-Fi hot spot.
"What we've seen thus far is that local Wi-Fi is more an exercise of politics than economics, the largest of which was the Philadelphia initiative," says Krouse. "It will cost them $50 million to wire up the downtown area. Why? Bragging rights?"
Free public Wi-Fi initiatives have gotten a lot of press, but solution providers have a better chance of making sales when they demonstrate the ROI of Wi-Fi coverage for people like mobile city workers.
"A lot of municipalities start with people like zoning inspectors and water folks who, by the nature of the job, have to spend 90 percent of their time in the field," says IDC's McCarthy. "They spend the first and last hours of every day doing updates in their offices. Often you can build a business case [for wireless] around that."
Ultimately, the ROI on Wi-Fi depends to some extent on population density. Hemminger says the topography and spread-out population of Ontario County would make a countywide Wi-Fi cloud cost prohibitive. Except for a few wireless connections between buildings, Ontario County isn't in the Wi-Fi business, says Hemminger, and he's skeptical about whether governments should be in the public Wi-Fi business at all.
But wireless evangelist Paul Butcher, marketing manager for state and local government for Intel, can rattle off cases where public Wi-Fi will, he says, produce measurable returns.
In addition to "hundreds and hundreds" of job classifications of mobile municipal workers, Butcher envisions broadband wireless clouds passing emergency data from accidents to doctors, a network of devices like water meters firing off real-time information to municipal servers, a wireless network replacing the entire telecom infrastructure, and finally the potential private sector spin-off uses of a public wireless cloud.
The bottom line, says Butcher, "is the more affordable broadband, the better, and in an environment of change, it should not be legislation that limits innovation."
VoIP: Talk Is Cheap
Although few towns and counties contemplate the immediate prospect of ripping out their telephone wires and replacing them with a wireless cloud, a lot have had their heads turned by the seductive lure of "free" telephone service via Voice over IP (VoIP).
But a lot of governments, like a lot of businesses, are still not convinced of the reliability and quality of VoIP service. And local government faces a potentially very sticky situation around tax issues.
"This is a major political issue," says Input's Krouse. Telecommunications companies produce billions of dollars of tax revenues for state and local governments, says Krouse, and if those governments throw out their traditional telephone service for VoIP, they send a message to taxpayers to do the same thing, potentially slashing their own tax revenue.
But despite the taxation and technological issues, the potential savings from VoIP are too big to ignore.
"Traditionally, telecom taxes have been big for local jurisdictions, but with VoIP taking off at the state level and the tax base dwindling at the local level, the efficiencies and lower costs of VoIP mean local government can't ignore this technology," Hemminger says.
"Many counties are heavily into VoIP transitions and ROI is the big issue at this point," says Hemminger, whose county still uses a Centrex system because he hasn't been sold on the ROI a VoIP system would generate.
Emergency Responders: What's a Life Worth?
ROI justifications take a different twist when solution providers sell local governments on first responder systems. In Ontario County, the 911 center now has the ability to plot cell phone GPS signals on a map.
When a snowmobile driver was critically injured in the middle of nowhere last year, he called 911 but had no idea where he was. The 911 center located the call, sent a deputy to the nearest road and then told the deputy which way to walk to reach the injured snowmobiler.
"We saved someone's life by having the ability to do cell phone and vehicle location," says Hemminger. A lot of first responder solutions involve multi-use systems, integrating data for use by multiple departments, says IDC's McCarthy, citing as an example a GIS system that would be used initially by the water and sewer departments, then by the road departments for maintenance and updates.
"Then as you start layering out all this data, you've built something that could be very useful to first responders. It doesn't have to be a terrorist attack. It could be a tornado or a flood or any number of situations," says McCarthy.
EDS, for example, has taken knowledge integration to a new level with its Enterprise Virtual Operations Center (EVOC), a system that uses game technology to create a three-dimensional virtual command center.
Typically GIS, weather, 911, codes and other relevant information are siloed, says Steve Hutchens, Homeland Security Leader for EDS. EVOC integrates all those potential sources of information, even video feeds from television news, "into one operational environment that expands literally to anywhere in the world. If you can get a broadband connection, you can weigh in on a decision from hundreds and thousands of miles away," Hutchens explains.
In Anaheim, Calif., site of one of the first EVOC installations, the entire virtual floor is "a geospacial imagery system for the city of Anaheim," Hutchens says. "As you look at the floor and go into specific sectors and blocks, you can bring it down to even see what kind of card were on the highway the day the image was made."
Portals: Government Everywhere, All the Time
That Anaheim virtual reality emergency center is a long way from the connections most governments make with their citizens. In many towns, you still have to visit the clerk's office or a licensing office to apply for a dog license or a building permit, says IDC's McCarthy, a waste of citizen time and money when the government can put the functions on the Internet.
"The logical step is for all cities or counties to bring these functions online while tying them to existing databases and enabling payment processing," says McCarthy.
Fairfax County not only has portals; it has multiple options for citizens to interact with their government. "Everything we do is over multiple channels," says Fairfax County's Molchany. "We have our Web portal, we have 30 kiosks throughout the county, we have IVR (interactive voice response) and we have mobile access to our services from a PDA or a cell phone."
Government-to-citizen interaction in Fairfax County even includes a text-based messaging alert system, whereby citizens can sign up to for emergency notifications via telephone or e-mail. "The idea is to create an e-Government program that allows people to use technology they feel comfortable with and allows them to do business wherever they are," says Molchany.
Autor: Peter Jordan
Quelle: VARBusiness, 02.09.2005
