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ASPs and COTS solutions put high-powered e-government within reach of state and local government budgets, as long as they are willing to change.

ASPs and COTS solutions put high-powered e-government within reach of state and local government budgets, as long as they are willing to change.

By John Marcotte | Technology Editor

It is illegal to sell peanuts in Lee County, Ala., after sundown on Wednesday. In St. Louis, Mo., its against the law to sit on the curb of any city street and drink beer from a bucket. And in Chico, Calif., detonating a nuclear device within the city limits results in a rather stiff $500 fine. These laws, which seem silly by todays standards, all served a purpose and are a reminder that, once upon a time, every local government had its own way of doing things.

Although local governments often have radically different approaches, their citizens want the same things: better service, faster response and -- especially -- electronic governance. Fortunately, an entire industry has sprung up to support local governments in their efforts to provide e-government to their citizens. But the independence that has
been the hallmark of local governments often finds itself at odds with the "one size fits all" solutions offered by e-government vendors.

"They have to go through a cultural change," said Mark Epstein, executive vice president of Convergent Group. "Most governments have built their own IT shops and have justified their existence on the appointment of highly specialized, highly focused applications, tools and environments." "Six months ago, all everybody could think about was Y2K and making sure we didnt take a step backwards," Cris Reed, executive vice president of service delivery of ezgov.com added. Now, many smaller municipalities are faced with an increasing public demand for services that they may not be able to provide on their own. There are literally hundreds of consultants (Convergent Group and ezgov.com being but two) who are ready to come in and help state and local governments make the painful transition from paper- and process-based government to customer-service-based and Web-enabled e-government. But small municipalities often have small budgets, and wholesale overhauls of their internal systems may not be practical or affordable.

Consulting Alternatives
Enter ASPs and COTS: application service providers and commercial off-the-shelf solutions. ASPs and COTS allow governments to offer electronic services that they normally could not afford to provide by taking advantage of the aggregate buying power of many jurisdictions.

If you hire a consultant to develop a custom solution to match your specific needs, you end up paying a high price. If you purchase a prepackaged COTS application that an e-government consulting firm offers, the costs are split among all of the other municipalities that purchased the program as well, bringing the costs down to an affordable
level. And ASPs allow governments to quickly and efficiently outsource large chunks of expensive IT development. "[Our ASP] allows the municipalities to get out there and have a presence on the Web, and as they gain confidence with what theyre doing, it leaves the door open
to a more sophisticated solution without having to scrap what theyve done and start over," Reed said. "Were able to provide things like security [at an affordable price] through economies of scale by doing this for literally hundreds of municipalities." The ASP model, though relatively new, is gaining a lot of steam as a hot buzzword in the e-government sector. And as governments have seen the successes of the first few pioneers in the ASP market, the number of ASP users is growing exponentially. "With government agencies, they dont like to be the first ones to stick their toe in the water, but they dont want to be the last one(s) to get wet, either," Jennifer McCollum, director of communications of ezgov.com said.

Working with the Solution
But in order to take full advantage of the cost savings that ASPs and COTS solutions offer, local governments may need to be more flexible in adapting their processes to the solution, rather than the other way around. Imagine a municipality buying an inexpensive, prepackaged, state-of-the-art e-government solution, then turning around and
spending millions on a consultant to modify the program to match their outdated, paper-based process. Dont laugh. Someone, somewhere has already done it. Instead, most consultants advise that a move to e-government should also entail an ERP-like restructuring of business processes to put customer service first and remove inefficiencies that
paper-based systems often bring. "Different organizations have different degrees of difficulty getting up to a common look and feel in terms of processing and customer access," Convergent Groups Epstein said. "Some of them have already spent the tens of millions of dollars getting their back-office act together. Thats a lot simpler situation than those that have just built point solutions, and now they want to create a Web page."

Close, But No Cigar
The last major change in how consumers expected government services to be delivered came with the invention of the telephone. The computer revolution, though important, has until this point been used to automate and facilitate existing paper processes in the enterprise.

Instead of looking up the parcel number by hand in a filing cabinet, the clerk at the county assessors office now looks it up in the database. This is quicker, but it has only allowed most local governments to tread water as the increases in efficiency have been matched -- or in some cases outpaced -- by an increased demand for government services. From the perspective of the citizen, not much
changed after the "computer revolution." They still have to go down to the assessors office. They still have to fill out a form. They still have to wait in line. They still have to sit on the baby-barf green industrial furniture in the lounge while the clerk processes their requests. Computers didnt make the process faster for the consumer or change their expectations about government service too much.

Making It Work

As citizens embrace the e-commerce model of doing business, they are increasingly putting high demands on their governments to keep up. These are demands that many small jurisdictions may not be able to meet on their own.

"Citizens are beginning to demand [e-government]," ezgov.coms McCollum said. "They can shop; they can trade stocks; they can book airline tickets online. The Wall Street Journal has called e-government the last frontier on the Internet. It seems to be the last industry to get
online." Government as a whole may be the last major industry to "get online," but state and local governments can ill-afford to be the last of the last. As the New Economy hits full stride, location becomes unimportant: In some respects, it doesnt matter if your servers are
located in Boise or the Bahamas. But because firms feel that they can be located anywhere, they can be selective about where they call home. Location becomes everything.

State and local governments need to compete, and ASPs and COTS solutions put big-time services in the range of small-time budgets.

Contact:
Convergent Group
6399 S. Fiddlers Green Circle, Suite 600
Englewood, Colo. 80111
Tel: 303/741-8400
Fax: 303/741-8401
Web: www.convergentgroup.com


ezgov.com
101 Marietta Street NW, Suite 2900
Atlanta, Ga. 30303
Tel: 877/EZGOV4U
Fax: (404) 888-0245
Web: www.ezgov.com
With more than 20 years of experience covering state and local government, Tod previously was the editor of Public CIO, e.Republic’s award-winning publication for information technology executives in the public sector. He is now a senior editor for Government Technology and a columnist at Governing magazine.