The Good, Bad And Ugly of E-Government

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At their best, state and local governments' Web sites allow for easy, user-friendly navigation. Citizens can pay their taxes quickly, and VARs can look up the latest bid opportunities without getting lost in a cybermaze.

When they're less than stellar, though, they merely serve as community bulletin boards full of indecipherable government jargon that seldom gets updated. As a result, user traffic is nonexistent, and VARs looking to expand business opportunities remain in the dark.

That's the verdict to come out of an ambitious new study by the Washington-based National Policy Research Council (NPRC), a nonpartisan think tank, on the online efforts of state and local governments. The council examined and evaluated the Web sites of all 50 states and the nearly 40,000 U.S. counties, municipalities and townships. The criteria included ease of navigation, the availability of interactive feedback forms, the presence of foreign-language tools and enhancements for disabled users, and the amount and relevance of useful information.

On the whole, states earned a median grade of C-plus. Large and midsize counties received a C. Small counties and towns earned a C-minus. The most common flaws? Smaller government sites tend to remain static, and public-sector sites, in general, often strike users as cumbersome and difficult to navigate.

"Too many sites have a 'top-down' approach, assuming that the user citizen knows all of the internal language of that particular government," says Bob McArthur, director of the study. "If you need to pay your water bill, you may not know that this is handled by the board of public works, utilities or a department that's actually named 'water department.' So you shouldn't make users search for information that way. Instead, there should just be an option to click on a link that says, 'Need to pay your water bill?' If we had trouble navigating through a given site while we were doing the research, it's very likely that John Q. Public would have similar problems."

Another key quality that determined the sites' rankings speaks directly to the needs of VARs: the quality of information about contract opportunities and procurement, especially when it comes to updates on RFPs, bids, award information and procedures for doing business with a particular government customer.

While nearly all states and large counties offer procurement as an indexed feature online, only a minority of smaller counties and cities/towns do the same, the council reports. And even when procurement links were indexed, the quality of such links was spotty.

"If you're a reseller or a vendor and you want to do business with a local or state government, you need to have something on the site that says, 'This is the way we do business,'" McArthur says. "We didn't see enough of that. In many cases, there isn't even a procurement option. Many larger ones fail to maintain any kind of registration for potential contracts. And even fewer allow for online bidding, which is simply a more effective way of doing business."

NEXT: The States take a creative approach.