Beyond silos: cross-boundary Internet service portals.

• Author: Backman, John

The Internet has the potential to transform municipal services and dramatically improve customer service--particularly if government agencies and departments are willing to look beyond traditional, "silo"-based service-delivery models. Unless we are willing to explore new Internet service delivery-models, we will lose an opportunity to meet the dual goals of improving customer service and helping contain the cost of providing services online. While most municipalities have implemented Web sites to communicate information to citizens--and even, in some cases, to receive information back from the public interactively--governments have only begun to tap the potential of online services. Most local governments use the Internet only to extend services as they exist at city hall, essentially creating taller service stovepipes in each agency or department.

Most local governments have neither the infrastructure nor the financial means to consider deploying a broad range of interactive services for their citizens and businesses. Indeed, the digital divide is likely growing between governments that are able to provide interactive Internet services and those that are not. In an era of tightly constrained resources, many local governments struggle just to provide the most basic content and information on the Web. At the same time, constituent expectations continue to grow as other segments of the Internet economy continue to expand. And providing services online is not likely to be a money-saving tool for local governments. Rather, the Internet opens an additional service channel that has the potential to save constituents time and money

In response to funding challenges and the growing technological gap between governments, a group of municipalities (1) located in King County, Washington, joined together to form an interlocal agency with a mission of providing Web-based services to their constituents. The result was the eCityGov Alliance, which has developed and implemented a series of service-specific Internet portals. The alliance business model is unique because the portals are not designed and branded for individual cities; instead, they are branded by service area and deployed as cross-jurisdictional Web services. The portals have been a resounding success and have simultaneously demonstrated the transformative power of the Internet.

This article discusses the difference between using the Internet to perpetuate business as usual and using it to transform the way municipalities interact with their constituents. It describes the eCityGov Alliance as a pioneer in that process and offers advice for other municipalities that are considering using the Web to drive cross-boundary collaboration.

CONNECTING ISLANDS OF SERVICE

As jurisdictions across the country have begun to plan and implement Web-based services, their natural tendency has been to build on what is known and familiar. It is fairly simple, for example, to take existing over-the-counter, phone, fax or mail transactions and extend those services to the Internet. System vendors and implementers have facilitated this practice by building their business models around this pattern of layering Internet services on top of existing systems. Additionally, most Internet solutions proposed for jurisdictions have been based on existing vertical organizational structures and service-delivery models. It is not surprising, then, that the first wave of Web-based applications for local government helped make existing organizational and service delivery silos taller.

It should also not be surprising that users often find a government's online services just as frustrating as offline services because they might not know to which government agency to turn for a particular service. Building a home in unincorporated King County, for example, requires development permits from at least four agencies. To be fair, the transactions completed by government agencies are generally more complicated than everyday consumer transactions, and each agency has separate legislative bodies and mandates. To further complicate the picture, agency resources are constrained and workloads heavy.

For businesses, one of the most popular online services--online shopping--is actually a fairly simple transaction process against a database of merchandise. Furthermore, online shopping is typically limited to a single line of business. If a consumer wishes to purchase a sweater, for instance, he goes to one kind of shopping site, but he knows he will have to go to a different kind of site if he is looking for financial services. This is an oversimplification, but when compared with the complexity and decision making required in many...