Top Technologies To Sell To State Governments

In states such as Michigan and Kentucky, CIOs are dealing with an endless sea of legacy systems. They need more effective tools to bring those machines up to 21st-century standards--or they need to rip them out and replace them.

Iowa is looking to bring broadband to its citizens, no matter how far-flung they are. And in Delaware, the top decision-maker for IT purchases wants to make government disappear. That is, he wants government structure to be invisible to customers. But he needs better tech tools from VARs to do it.

In their quest to make IT work better for employees and citizens alike, state CIOs are opening their purse strings wider. State and local governments are spending $44.24 billion on IT goods and services. At a growth rate of 7.5 percent, state and local IT spending will rise to $54.96 billion by 2008, according to Gartner.

Most CIOs aren't seeking to reinvent the wheel. They just want to roll the wheel forward.

"We have the tools in place now for us to move ahead in providing better service to our citizens," says Delaware CIO Tom Jarrett. "What we need is higher productivity, tighter control on incident response and better security. If we can garner the benefits from these new products, we can become more agile and more productive."

Ultimately, what these CIOs want are utilitarian tech tools intended to improve customer service, information-sharing, security, data-analysis and speed.

"We don't go in search of technologies to use," says Matthew Miszewski, CIO of Wisconsin and president of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO). "We let the business needs of the state drive our acquisitions. In that area, however, there are a number of items that push us toward satisfactory technology solutions."

In interviews with GovernmentVAR, state CIOs shared where they would like to spend their IT dollars. Here's what they came up with.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

For years, state CIOs have viewed the Web as a way to break through the bureaucracy that separates governments and their citizens.

More than half of corporate CIOs polled in a recent industry report indicated that they'll be implementing SOAs, and state CIOs are pursuing the technology as well. Think about it: In your parents' generation, state government often took the form of a stodgy, faceless organization. Just consider that renewing a driver's license brought to mind images of labyrinthine hallways and endless lines. And even when governments were just getting started online, Web-site pages and portals were often confusing and hard to navigate.

In the past decade, state Web sites have improved greatly, yet their evolution remains a moving target.

"Portal solutions help us provide better services to the public by letting us design user interfaces that are responsive to customers' expectations without regard to government silos," says California CIO J. Clark Kelso.

Arizona has been trying to come up with a common business-licensing system for the past 10 years and is just now turning to a Web-services solution. "The new system standardizes the interface and allows the state to leverage one set of resources to service many agencies," says Arizona CIO Chris Cummiskey.

The call for these solutions isn't coming just from state governments; it's coming from customers too. If Delaware residents want to file a health complaint against a local farmer, why should they have to pay attention to what goes on among government agencies responding to their needs?

"The citizen should enter his request and receive the response without having to know which organization had to participate," Delaware's Jarrett says. "Is it reasonable to expect citizens to know in which Department of Transportation organization the Department of Motor Vehicles falls when they renew their license every five years? No. They should be able to go to the Web site and renew their licenses, regardless of how we've structured the executive branch of government. We want to use [SOA] technology to enable the citizen to go to one place--our portal--rather than several state buildings."

To achieve that, identity-access management has to improve as well. A government customer shouldn't have to register multiple times when dealing with the same state government. "We need to have the ability to recognize the customer, no matter which state service they are accessing," Jarrett says. "It would provide for reduced sign-on. Right now, customers need to remember unique user IDs and passwords for every service they choose to use."

NEXT: Wireless, VoIP and IP video

Wireless, VoIP And IP video technologies are in high demand across the board, but especially in rural states where they can bridge the gaps among widely dispersed populations.

"Our population density is very low," says Wyoming CIO Larry Biggio. "Often, people have to travel significant distances to conduct state business and obtain services. This results in increased costs and time. IP video can reduce those costs. The higher quality of IP video helps reduce travel costs for meetings, legal hearings and telemedicine appointments, for example."

VoIP is in demand for similar reasons.

"As our current local voice contracts come up for renewal, we need to look at how we can augment our current systems with new technologies such as VoIP as an opportunity to lower last-mile costs and provide mobility," says Kansas CIO Denise Moore. "That's particularly true in the event of a disaster."

The government of Iowa wants to establish a wireless broadband connection for far-flung customers currently served by conventional copper lines.

"A typical rural Iowa community that would be impacted would have one to two elementary and middle schools, a public library, a government-support service office and maybe a local hospital or clinic connected by copper T-1 lines," says Iowa CIO John Gillispie. "These lines are not only expensive; they're limited in bandwidth. A wireless solution can provide high-speed broadband access without the high cost of fiber installation and can meet customer demand for scalable broadband access."

Centralized, Statewide ERP

Many states want to move away from making piecemeal decisions about IT investments and take a big-picture approach to acquisition instead.

A number of CIOs say they want good ERP solutions. "We want a holistic view of an agency's IT spending," says South Dakota CIO Otto Doll. "Ultimately, we may want to prioritize across the entire enterprise when making any IT investment. To achieve business-process improvements, agencies must first have rigorous modeling of critical business processes."

Retiring Legacy Infrastructures

Many states are living with IT systems that are as old as--or older than--their operators. They're functional, but not efficient or practical in the Internet Age. Newer technology leads to a better user experience and lower costs.

"We can upgrade the skills of our employees in newer technologies," says Michigan CIO Teresa Takai. "And that will help us prepare for the pending retirement of many of our long-standing employees."

Beyond that, legacy systems are a bear to manage, and CIOs say they need better tools to do it.

"We must know what we have before we can manage it," says Mike Inman, commissioner of technology for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. "We're saddled with innumerable legacy systems. They encompass every aspect of the business. After that, there are the decisions to be made regarding fix or replace. We need solutions to help with both. Our entire effort to consolidate IT infrastructure began from the premise that we needed to reduce waste, redundancy and duplication."

NEXT: Data capture and storage

There are countless ways that state-government buyers would like to use data capture and storage technology to manage assets and operations.

In Iowa, for example, the powers-that-be would like to capture the business logic of Web sites, and the information they contain. To do that, Gillispie proposes the use of "blobs"--binary images in a single server database--and "Web-spidering."

"Using blobs would allow us to maintain all of the original scripting in a database so it could be retrieved and restored as needed," he says. "Web-spidering is a technology that begins with a single Web page, then branches out to subsequent pages through the links connecting them. The spiders automatically capture participating state-agency Web sites at specified intervals, providing a historically accurate snapshot of government activity."

Information-Sharing Tools

After 9/11, government purchasers demanded more information-sharing tools to deal with potential security threats. That changed the way state agencies began to view the concept of public service. The thinking goes like this: If law-enforcement agencies can operate better with more information being made accessible to all, why can't agencies such as social services, health and taxation do the same?

"We have many diverse business units and many diverse technologies, and each has a unique way of sharing data," Delaware's Jarrett says. "This makes it almost impossible to identify who's sharing what and where. Just as difficult to identify are the many data replications taking place and transformations needed to share data. We need to standardize how we exchange data and interact with our applications--to understand the relationship between our business units."