By Tom Byerly
For years, officials of Conyers, Ga., wanted to join the e-government revolution. Problem was, turning the citys static Web site into an interactive electronic gateway to city services required a resource the city had little surplus of: money to implement an expensive IT solution.
commute to the city daily -- the ability to make payments at hours more convenient for them. With neither an MIS department nor the budget to hire one, city officials turned to the ASP model.
"We saw this approach as a way to achieve a higher level of service for less money," said Stacy Jones, director of public affairs. "The goal was to create the opportunity for citizens to do business with the city after hours, when its convenient for them."
Although the city made a significant up-front investment in a yearlong effort to network its departments for interface with the ASP, maintenance costs on the completed system have been low and the system has been easier to administer and use by clerical workers, Jones said. In addition to the payment service, an online help desk allows residents to log on and file work requests for community problems ranging from broken streetlights to clogged storm drains. Maintenance officials can track the work requests and adjust staff schedules to target areas with recurring problems. The city plans to expand the menu of online services to allow residents to file building-permit applications and pay traffic-citation fines using the GovHost.Permit and GovHost.Citation application modules.
Jones noted that this modularity is one of the advantages of an ASP service-delivery model, allowing agencies to pick and choose specific applications based on their various service missions. In Georgia and South Carolina, for example, where many local governments own sewer and water utilities, online-payment modules are most popular. In California, where communities are expanding in response to population growth, online-permitting modules are drawing the most attention.
Catching On
The success of Conyers ASP-based system has caught the attention of nearby Gainesville, Ga., where officials plan to use an ASP model to phase in a variety of e-commerce services for its citizens. The city, which operates a water utility, will initially rollout an online water-bill payment module that will also allow customers to monitor
water usage. Additional modules will allow the citys 20,000 citizens and the 120,000 residents in the surrounding county to purchase special-event and parade permits, pay parking and speeding tickets, register for parks-and-recreation programs and purchase tickets for concerts and cultural events at the Georgia Mountains Center.
Thanks to an ASP, title searchers in Butler County, Ohio, no longer have to spend hours at the county courthouse. Using its off-the-shelf LandAccess.com imaging software, ACS Inc., an IT solutions provider, created an ASP model allowing title searchers to pull up document images via the Web, take a snapshot, and pay the county recorders office a fee for the image. According to Brad Martin, CIO of the ACS Enterprise Solutions Group, the goal of any ASP-based system should be to uphold what he calls the "rule of any."
"Anywhere, anytime, anyone should be able to access a service," Martin said. "We really see ASPs as removing a geographic constraint to doing business with a small municipality or even a large municipality." Quick Fix?
Industry experts caution smaller municipalities not to be lulled into believing that ASPs offer an "out of the box" solution. While the ability to deploy off- the-shelf applications quickly is widely viewed as one of the key benefits, a significant amount of work occurs up front in preparing an enterprise-wide system for ASP integration. There is typically very little system commonality among departments in most small cities. Accounting may be running an application from one platform, while the building department may be operating on another.
"The challenge is integrating with their existing vertical system," said VC3s Dunn. "That takes time."
And, according to Martin, small jurisdictions should not expect a great deal of customization from their ASP-based e-commerce systems. Solutions are developed for an industry rather than specific single customers, which fosters quick deployment and helps keep costs down.
"ASPs take advantage of the power of aggregation," he said. "The goal is to develop something that, from a market standpoint, will satisfy as many small municipalities as possible."
And with tens of thousands of small government jurisdictions throughout the United States still lacking e-commerce capabilities, or the budgets to develop them in-house, the ASP market is expected to grow to more than $2 billion within the next three years.
"The Internet is essentially what the telephone was years and years ago, a wonderful medium to connect us," Martin said. "Anybody these days can have access to a telephone, but there are people who do better things with it than others. The same can be said of e-commerce. Its not enough to be connected. You need crisp execution, a solid business
plan and a killer idea."
