State agencies are working with Alabama Interactive, a private company, to help citizens get state licenses round the clock through their computers rather than dealing a state office during normal business hours. Alabama Interactive doesn't charge the state anything for the service. Instead, people who purchase licenses pay a fee, said Winn McInnis, general manager of Alabama Interactive.
Alabama Interactive started working with two state agencies last new and is now working with 14 to get licenses online. Doing that was nothing new for the company. It is a subsidiary of NIC, which does similar work with 18 other states.
"It's kind of a snowball effect in every state we go in," McInnis said.
One of the first services to go online in Alabama was license renewal for nurses at the State Board of Nursing. Genell Lee, the board's executive officer, said 41 percent of the 46,000 licenses that were renewed last year were done online.
"It's phenomenal. We've been so satisfied that we're putting as much online as we can because it gives people 24-7 access," she said.
For nurses renewing their licenses online there is a $3.50 charge in addition to the $60 renewal cost.
They pay it with their credit card, and they get a confirmation whether their renewal has been accepted or rejected.
Lee said online renewals save her staff time. It takes 90 minutes to process 50 renewals received by mail, but the same number of online renewals can be handled in 30 to 45 minutes, she said.
"There was significant savings in time," she said.
The Alabama Real Estate Commission was also an early agency to work with Alabama Interactive to establish online license renewal. "We were small enough to be a pilot and big enough to be profitable to them," he said.
The first year was a hit, with 45 percent of the renewals done online, he said.
License renewal is also provided for the insurance, banking, legal, and chiropractic professions.
License purchases and renewals can be handled by going directly to an agency's Web site or by using the state's new portal developed by Alabama Interactive: www.alabama.gov
Fees vary from a few dollars to pocket change. For instance, the fee on a hunting or fishing license is 2 percent of the license's cost.
The portal also offers a free service for people who need help determining which state agency to contact about a service or problem.
A person can type in a question during normal business hours and get a reply in seconds. There's no more waiting until the next day for a Webmaster to reply to an e-mail, said Erin Linton-Wright, director of eGovernment solutions for Alabama Interactive.
So far, Alabama Interactive has averaged 12 questions per day, but Linton-Wright expects that to grow as more people find the Web site.
Not everything Alabama Interactive does for the state is free. For instance, the Revenue Department paid the company $8,925 to develop a system where individual income taxpayers can use the Internet to check the status of their tax returns for free, agency spokeswoman Carla Snellgrove said.
Linton-Wright said Alabama Interactive has had no security problems with someone securing a license using another person's name because consumers must provide extensive personal information that prevents a fake entry.
On the flip side, Alabama Interactive doesn't provide or sell consumers' information to anyone else, so someone who buys a hunting license online shouldn't be flooded with subscription offers from hunting magazines, McInnis said.
A person might assume that a company like Alabama Interactive would eventually reach a limit on how many state services can be offered online, but McInnis said that is not the case. The parent company, NIC, began offering services 12 years ago in Kansas and it's still adding.
"There is no end in sight," he said.
Quelle: NBC13
