In early 2004, Nassau County, N.Y., decided to expand its online presence beyond a static Web site in an effort to better serve constituents. County officials turned to Reston, Va.-based Tier Technologies, which recommended IBM WebSphere for the architecture of a new enterprise portal, and worked with New York-based WebSphere solution provider Prolifics to get the job done.
GovernmentVAR talks to Ron Rigores, manager of the Long Island county's IT Program Management Office at the time of the project, and Jeremy Sharrard, project manager at Tier Technologies, about the county's approach to putting government services online. GV: Prior to this e-government initiative, how far along was the county in online services?
Rigores: From a technology perspective, Nassau was several years behind and required a major overhaul from an architectural standpoint to build new applications moving forward. If you look at the Web site prior, it was just thrown up.
Sharrard: We interviewed key agencies within the county to get some ideas of what potential applications Nassau County could benefit from, then conducted a citizen survey of more than 3,000 people. We wanted to understand what they were looking for from government sites. The strategy really looked countywide at the different opportunities that might exist to understand from the constituents and agencies what made the most sense moving forward. Most surprising from the survey was just how many people wanted government to be online, regardless of age, gender or race. Also, people don't really care what agency provides what service...They just want to go to one place to get all of the information and appropriate contacts.
GV: From that, how did you plan to move forward with the rollout?
Rigores: A big reason why the initiative has been successful so far is that we started out with an initial strategy. We had a sense of what we wanted to accomplish, then put together a plan. That allowed us to set goals and milestones. For this initial phase, we're implementing 13 services, chosen according to a structured perspective: What did constituents want, what could we provide, and what applications could enhance the way that the county collects revenue? We married those together to come up with the best options for phase one.
GV: Can you name a few of those 13 services?
Sharrard: One application is for paying parking tickets. That will be the first to go live. Right now, about 50 percent of tickets go unpaid; if we could increase compliance rates by 5 or 10 percent, the application would more than pay for itself. A second example is the eligibility wizard for health and human services. Constituents will be able to go online, enter information about themselves and find out which benefits they qualify for. In addition, people will be able to reserve tee times [at municipal golf courses] and register for the civil-service exam. All of these applications will be completed by the end of the third quarter.
GV: What kind of potential do you see for new technology to be incorporated into the portal?
Rigores: The potential is huge...This jump-started us as a county to thinking strategically about how we can leverage the technology. That's what we're working on. Nassau is a fairly large county from a government perspective. This is taking us one step further to allowing constituents access to information they need in order for them to live their lives and run their businesses. Government closes at 5 p.m., but this allows government services to be available 24/7.
Autor: Jill R. Aitoro
Quelle: VARBusiness, 27.07.2005
