That's just one example of the G2G program the federal government hopes to implement. Ultimately, Forman says, the government must have a citizen-centered, not agency-centered, presence on the Internet and be able to make administrative decisions in minutes or hours, not the weeks or months it currently takes.
"It should ultimately create e-democracy not e-bureaucracy," he says. That means it should do much more than simply speed-up existing processes. Forman admits the federal government has been very slow in making the best use of IT, mainly because of traditional bureaucratic to break existing lines and the assumption that IT could and should only speed up existing processes. The new catch cry is "e-government, not just IT," Forman told the gathering.
The process is already underway as the FirstGov.gov, the federal government portal, abandons its hierarchical, Yahoo-lookalike design, and moves to a "three-clicks" strategy, which promises any user will get where he wants to go with just three clicks. One part of that process will be to severely reduce the existing 22,000 websites that have been created by every government department, agency and branch office. Forman promises that the use of wizards and other tools will greatly help the government on the path to achieving its ambitious goal.
Another part of the process will focus on unifying existing databases and simplifying lines of business. Some of these projects such as providing what Forman calls "a government-wide architecture of governance," which will be taken to all levels of government. His office is also co-ordinating a crash program to ensure the nation's cyber security. Last year, he said, the work was 20-30 percent done, and by the end of this year the schedule calls for the 60 percent of networks to be secure. That figure will rise to 80 percent by 2003.
Las Vegas CIO John Marcella explains how the city is implementing e-government.
The site that most interested the local government officials was www.disasterhelp.gov, which is designed to co-ordinate disaster response efforts at all levels of government. It promises to be integrated most quickly. Other projects that will draw together all levels of government and set common standards include e-vital.gov which will standardize all vital statistics gathered across the country from every county; and grants.gov, which hopes to provide a single portal for all government funding programs. Forman says that people affected by the terrorist attacks were faced with 250 different and usually differing sites requesting essentially the same information. In future, such projects will be integrated so that all applicants can use the same data for every application.
This means, according to Forman, the PDF forms will disappear, and eventually be replaced by extensible markup language or XML. According to its creators and standard setters, XML "is a simple, very flexible text format." Originally designed for large-scale electronic publishing, XML is, says the standards group, "also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the web and elsewhere." The one thing Forman emphatically ruled out in his discussion of the electronic federal government was a national standard for data collection, but the flexibility of XML makes other standards superfluous.
Most of the attendees did not have the lofty goals Forman has been working on. Hansen's software business focuses mostly on providing software tailored for local and state governments to track infrastructure repair, tax collection and utility billing.
City of Las Vegas CIO Joe Marcella and Development Manager Louis Carr, Jr. spoke at the conference outlining the city's experience in developing the e-government into more than just a website. Las Vegas, like most major municipalities, has been using IT for both customer service and back-office functions. Thus, Marcella argued, the enormous growth of the population and the increased demands for service have made it imperative that the city develop an effective and efficient system.
The raw numbers make the case. Las Vegas deals with 21,000 building inspections, 1,300 building permits, and 1,400 fire Inspections per month. On top of that, there are 1,100 work orders per month, 700 business license applications per month, 146,000 sewer customers and 80,000 citizen complaints files. The system has to be stretched across 88 physical locations where the city does business. All those interactions mean, Marcella says, the city has to cope with G2B, G2C, B2G, C2G and G2G transactions, and under his working definition of e-government, citizen services have to be delivered 24 hours-a-day.
Marcella says the city pays $20 per citizen for information technology, but that is much cheaper and more efficient than traditional record-keeping and service provision that was very labor-intensive. At the same time, he acknowledged that government will always require some level of face-to-face service. The radid migration of city business to the web, according to Carr has been necessary because of "growth, growth, growth," and the fact that city employee levels have not risen to match the population. Most license applications and registations can be done on the city's website. The city is posting RFPs and bid documents on marketplace websites such as Demand Star, and also putting purchase order and invoice transactions on the Internet.
The city is now using its third-generation website and will soon be launching its fourth. The basis of the city's IT system is an Oracle Enterprise Resource Mangagement System, although the city uses Hansen software to manage its work orders and billing.
The city has gone against the fashionable trend in not outsourcing its IT functions, but in doing so it is valuing quality over quantity and price. Recent research indicate that outsourcing does not deliver the major transformations that Marcella and Carr say they have planned for Las Vegas e-government. A report from Forrester Research, published earlier this year, criticizes the mania for outsourcing as ill-conceived because outsourcers provided poor training and were reluctant to commit to the service levels that organizations needed for optimum results. Outsourcing, the authors note, can cut labor costs, but is ill-suited for organizations seeking major transformations.
Las Vegas currently uses the Build (EAI), Buy (COTs -- Commercial off the shelf software) and Rent models (ASP or Application Service Provider like WEB Hosting) in various parts of its operations. "Wholesale outsourcing is seldom the right answer -- particularly if an organization is out of control," says Marcella. "Without a clear definition of needs, the provider will not only be more expensive but also non-responsive ! We continue to cherry pick the best opportunities and leverage, what I call 'Point Solutions.'"
Under Marcella, the city of Las Vegas has created a unified system that radiates out to all functions. He is still working to finish moving the legacy databases such as sewer billing and business licensing. Ultimately, the city hopes to have an IT architecture that avoids the problems recently predicted by Gartner. Some 80 percent of expenditures will be wasted, the consulting group says, because each local government department typically builds its own systems for its own purposes and, of course, has its own website.
Hansen's Chairman and CEO Chuck Hansen said the CIty of Las Vegas had been a leader in using IT and the Internet.
"I was really impressed the first time I came here. [City of Las Vegas CIO] Joe [Marcella] had got people from every department sitting around a table -- the police, building, planning, parks and leisure -- so they were all co-ordinated instead of everyone building their own silo," he says enthusiastically.
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