5 Outstanding State Solutions

The state-government market continues to be a proving ground for VAR-launched projects on the cutting edge--changing the very essence of how government works. Recently completed and ongoing projects throughout the country are saving state governments money and time, and increasing efficiency and information-sharing in ways that couldn't have been imagined even three years ago. And the ultimate customers--the state's citizen taxpayers--are seeing the difference. Just ask the tens of thousands of Georgia residents who no longer have to stand for hours in line to renew their driver licenses. And the success of these projects is fueling the anticipated growth in state-government IT spending that--in light of how tight budgets are these days--are still projected to grow at least incrementally: Spending for state-government IT is expected to reach $32 billion this year, and will grow to nearly $34 billion by 2006, according to Fed Sources, a McLean, Va.-based market research firm. Expect more if there's a turnaround in the budget woes, experts say.

GovernmentVAR spotlights five projects with the most compelling cases that--thanks to innovative VARs--makes doing business under those gleaming state capitol domes hardly "business as usual."

VIRGINIA
The Challenge: Reducing traffic on roads in the greater Washington, D.C., area

The Project: An integrated camera/network solution from Fairfax, Va.-based TrafficLand for the Northern Virginia area

What Happened: Virginia Department of Transportation officials knew they had a major challenge on their hands in Northern Virginia, where D.C.-area commuters have experienced staggering traffic congestion for years. By the late 1990s and into this decade, it remained one of the biggest beefs among taxpayers when it came to quality-of-life issues. Enter TrafficLand and its main vendor partner, Lund, Sweden-based Axis Communications. The two combined to create an integrated, value-added video-networking solution optimized to provide a window on traffic conditions and pinpoint traffic characteristics and driver behavior.

A key component to the solution is network-video servers to convert analog camera streams into digital video, so that not only state officials, but commuters, could access the information online.

"Transportation officials immediately saw the benefit of sharing traffic images via the Internet," says Larry Nelson, president of TrafficLand. "The best way to manage a traffic system is to know what is going on at all times, and the Internet is a cost-effective solution for doing just that." Now, emergency crews can access traffic information to develop their best route in response to an accident or other incident request. The system had a remarkable tryout day, too, being that it launched on Sept. 10, 2001. When the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington stunned the world the next day, the site successfully handled more than 1.5 million hits as local users anxiously sought alternate routes home. With TrafficLand's system, they were able to get the "big picture" immediately. Thanks to the system, both they and emergency/public-safety personnel found out that--contrary to reports from local radio and TV stations--a main traffic outlet like I-95 South was, in fact, open.

Getting the project off the ground was hardly a cakewalk. Challenges included funding. In fact, Nelson and his colleagues at TrafficLand paid an undisclosed sum themselves to get the project rolling in its initial stages and to provide for a demonstration to convince state-transportation officials that the solution would produce results. The project ended up costing some $1.5 million, and TrafficLand now generates revenue via a fee-for-use service by the state Department of Transportation.

The Upshot: After a successful test distribution of the original 32 cameras in 2001, TrafficLand and Virginia now have expanded this to more than 100 Northern Virginia cameras, and TrafficLand is expanding the project to Maryland, the District of Columbia and other states. The TrafficLand.com Web site gets more than 400,000 visitors per day. "The site is designed so that commuters can set up personalized traffic profiles to access specific information about their routes quickly and easily," Nelson says. "It's so simple that most people log on and off the site in one minute or less. The Axis video servers are so dependable that they have served up more than 500 million Web pages, and not one of them has crashed in three years."

VERMONT
The Challenge: Getting deadbeat dads (and the occasional MIA mom) to pay up

The Project: The Decision Support System from Alexandria, Va.-based integrator/VAR Buchanan and Edwards

What Happened: By 2001, the State of Vermont Office of Child Support knew it needed to step into the 21st century to go after estranged dads who shirk off their child-support responsibilities. (And, in some situations, moms who owe dads who have parental custody.) The organization, which administers approximately 27,000 cases and collects more than $54 million in child support a year, has approximately 125 employees spread throughout its central administrative office and five regional offices. So information access statewide is crucial. In the end, child-support decision-makers went with a plan to launch the innovative Decision Support System integrated by Buchanan and Edwards, tapping on business-intelligence products from San Jose, Calif.-based vendor Business Objects.

The result was a solution package that allows even technophobes to access child-support case information quickly, and provides more effective ways to analyze the data. From the desktop, state child-support staff can track more than 20 years of data, loaded into a Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and determine which cases need the most immediate attention. The system offers better data mining that helps caseworkers determine whether a parent is at risk to stop paying support and the reasons why. "Our primary goal has always been to help children, and we also hope to create a model for other state child-support agencies to follow," says Jeff Cohen, director of the Vermont Office of Child Support. "We all need an end-user-friendly system to give case managers, management and staff the ability to look at data in a variety of ways, while easily accessing all the information that is needed." There is also a compliance component--the project has increased the state's ability to report statistics to the federal government, as well as detect and correct case errors. These are crucial requirements to remain in good standing for federal funds.

The biggest challenge? Cleaning up data that gets transmitted from the operational legacy system into the new solution's data warehouse. Some of the data was spotty, as a lack of oversight in the old system resulted in some information gaps in the new solution's system. Ultimately, staff using the new system was able to identify problems originating from the source system and close the gaps, and is completing the integration work as projected, by the end of the year.

"It's going to allow individual case managers to serve the state's children better," says Tony Parchment, principal for Buchanan and Edwards, "and at the same time, provide state executives with access to high-level data and metrics to ensure that what they're reporting to the federal government is accurate."

The Upshot: The solution is expected to reap no less than an additional $500,000 in annual child-support payments being collected, as it now segues from management deployment to deployment on the part of its caseworkers in the trenches.

IDAHO
The Challenge: Overhaul a voter system to avoid disasters like the 2000 presidential election

The Project: ElectioNet, a statewide voter-registration system from two integrators, Farmington Hills, Mich.-based Covansys and Bloomfield, Conn.-based PCC Technology Group

What Happened: Idaho needed help to upgrade the election system used in all of its 44 counties statewide. Not only was the existing system antiquated, but there was pressure to meet compliance mandates from the federal Help America Vote Act, enacted because of the controversial Florida ballots in the 2000 presidential election. The resulting project, ElectioNet, however, will ensure more than just accurate results; it's overhauling the very dynamics of voter and elections-data management. It will provide a state-agency interface for vital records such as voter-registration information; voter validation; detection of duplicate voters; poll-list generation; voter-history information; and voter-registration card scans, with digitalized signature support. For the voters of Idaho, the project will support online voter registration using a centralized repository and increase customer service by standardizing and centralizing the registration process throughout the state. The system also will cross-integrate data from Idaho's Department of Transportation Division of Motor Vehicles driver-license system to provide election staff with more centralized tools to verify and analyze information--a critical need to meet the requirements of the new federal mandates.

"The voting-technology market is prime for vendors who have solutions that can help states meet the federal mandate," says Arvind Malhotra, senior vice president of Covansys' Public Sector Practice. "This system can be developed and implemented with virtually no ramp-up time or additional cost to the customer."

The Upshot: Work on the $3.4 million project should be wrapped up by July 1, 2005. Covansys and PCC expect the Idaho project to present a compelling test case as it pursues other state and county customers.

MICHIGAN
The Challenge: To bring the state's emergency-response system into the 21st century with e-data, real-time mapping, collaboration toolsets, GPS upgrades and other applications

The Project: The new Critical Information Management System from San Diego-based Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC)

What Happened: In 1999, the Emergency Management Division within the Michigan State Police determined it needed to automate much of what it was documenting manually, such as record-keeping of criminal incidents and highway accidents. What little digital data was collected--faxes, handwritten notes, work-processing documents and phone messages--was stored on multiple-user hard drives. SAIC was brought in to integrate the Critical Information Management System, and tapped crisis-management software from Los Angeles-based ETeam and geospatial applications from Redlands, Calif.-based ESRI to get it done.

The key system components include GIS, emergency and data-management and collaboration tool sets and, eventually, real-time messaging/alert applications. By the end of 2002, real-time online mapping services were put into place, so emergency responders could better pinpoint locations and see real-time status and have real-time situation awareness of disasters, hazards, incidents and accidents. Then, in 2003, the state expanded the system to all state, county and local emergency operations. All would have online, real-time access to data relating to facilities, manpower, intelligence gathering, "what-if" disaster preparation and a host of other mission-critical topic points. With this, the state of Michigan will allow state agencies to gather, manage and share information about disasters and emergency incidents. Whether employed by the state or a local county or town, employees will be able to access the information in real-time in the office or in the field. To date, the system has been successfully used for state-planned exercises such as chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive monitoring and evacuations. It has also been put to the test for "real" emergencies and disasters as well, including flu outbreaks, tornados, floods, dam breaks and power outages.

The Upshot: SAIC's stake in the contract is $3.3 million, and it should complete the project by August 2005

GEORGIA
The Challenge: Eliminate long lines at DMVs

The Project: A portal-integration package called GeorgiaNet from Santa Clara, Calif.-based integrator Sun Microsystems that is serving as a backbone for e-government projects in Georgia

What Happened: Face it--going to the DMV to get a driver license renewed probably ranks dead last on most citizens' "things I love doing" list. Thanks to an economic boom in Atlanta, the state of Georgia has seen huge growth for well over a decade, and its Department of Motor Vehicle Safety (DMVS) was feeling the strain. State officials and the Georgia Technology Authority teamed up with Sun to come up with a plan: Develop a solution package named GeorgiaNet that would not only allow citizens to renew licenses via mail and telephone, but also through an enterprise Web portal. And cutting down queue time for the state's drivers was just the beginning. The online driver-license-renewal application is the first of many anticipated to come out of the Sun integration effort, as the Georgia Technology Authority will leverage the same enterprise portal architecture for a host of future e-government projects.

EzGov, an Atlanta-based software vendor, was tapped as the partner to develop the application using its FlexFoundation platform, which reduces the need for custom-code development and allows for greater customization and flexibility. Using the new application, citizens can renew and pay for their driver licenses via telephone as well, thanks to its incorporated interactive voice-recognition technology. Because the delivery channels both operate from the same set of code, citizens can begin the renewal process online and later continue the transaction via phone without having to start over.

"We knew that the enterprise portal and services-oriented architecture would allow us to offer better services to the state's citizens in a more efficient manner," says Gina Tiedemann, GeorgiaNet director at the Georgia Technology Authority. "It's exciting to see that the program has already achieved measurable results, and that citizens are reaping the benefits of new services."

The Upshot: With the $1 million project completed in 2002 (in under 15 weeks), no less than 76,000 citizens renewed their licenses online. Several DMVS branches have closed because of the decline in demand for on-site registrations. The latest project for the state? The Georgia Technology Authority worked with the U.S. Small Business Administration, the IRS and EzGov to launch a business-registration application through the new enterprise portal. The application allows new small-business owners to combine state and federal-registration processing in one, quick step. In the first nine months, more than 5,200 Georgia businesses have used the site.