by James Schultz
For any revolution to succeed, ordinary citizens must be persuaded that the cause is worthy of their participation. For the upheaval in e-government now picking up steam, that persuasion may arrive in the form of a suite of powerful enabling technologies that will encourage taxpayers to make easy, quick use of the pending array of e-services envisioned by local, state and federal agencies.
And in order to deliver on e-government’s promise, officials are accelerating public-sector investment in next-generation systems. The numbers back up the assessment.
According to Christopher Baum, vice president for electronic government at market research firm GartnerGroup in Stamford, Conn., information technology spending in the United States on hardware purchased for use by governments should reach $21 billion by 2003, up from $18 billion in 1999.
By 2003, Baum expects that public- sector-related software buying will surpass hardware expenditures for the first time. He projected $22 billion in such software expenditures that year, an increase of $7 billion over the 1999 figure.
Those companies that support agencies with e-government-related products and services also should do well: Public-sector external services spending on IT should grow substantially, from $18.5 billion in 1999 to $29.5 billion by 2003, according to GartnerGroup.
“There’s a lot of money to be made out there,” Baum said. “There’s a whole new breed of portal-services company that will make money not only on the transaction model, but also selling banner ads and having links to commercial products.”
Many observers believe that electronic portals — one-stop, Web-based gateways that present multiple options for citizens to act on — will be the primary means of, first, establishing e-government and, second, of guaranteeing reliable deployment of government-related e-services.
Spurring portal development is the fact that consumers are increasingly becoming at ease using the Internet.
That accompanies the public desire to reduce from using a multitude of Web sites to a handful, or even one site, that must be navigated in order to obtain information or services.
Not everything, however, will be amenable to keyboard explorations through cyberspace.
“E-government isn’t a light switch,” said Harry Clarke, director and general manager of federal operations for BMC Software Inc., based in Houston. “It’s a spectrum. At one end you get instantaneously what you’re looking for. At the other end there are still some things, like getting a passport, that will still take time.”
Nevertheless, portals do appear to be first among the e-technologies of choice to power the move to e-government.
According to an IBM Corp. white paper on portal development and evolution, portals’ chief advantage is the creation of a community of utility: They provide a personalized and adaptive interface for individuals to discover and track applications and content while interacting with other like-minded folk.
Furthermore, portals provide a means of passively or actively unearthing expertise and delivering it directly to desktop computers, without the need for human go-betweens — at least, other than those who devise the portal or who make themselves available for queries or consultancy.
According to the IBM report: “The concept of stovepipe applications are a thing of the past ... Users want consolidated access to their important contacts, applications and content. Organizations want easier control to design their desktop in a layout that suits them ... Portals [will] have a membership-services layer for user authentication, single log-on and credential mapping. Users demand the highest level of security, but the least amount of annoyance.”
The more portals are used, the report said, the more they will develop a characteristic look and feel, tailored to meet emerging interests and affinities. And although portals may look slick and be easy on the eye, they nonetheless must exhibit robust capability.
They must be able to access and display simultaneously multiple, heterogeneous data stores, including relational databases, multidimensional databases, document management systems, e-mail systems, Web servers, news feeds, and various file systems and servers that include audio, video and archived still-image capabilities. In other words, the whole package.
“Portals enable a client to see one single source of information, when in reality we may be amalgamating 20 to 30 sources on the back side,” said Bob Lewis, president and chief operating officer of Enterworks Inc., an Ashburn, Va., company that specializes in delivery of online services in supply-chain management, health care and criminal justice.
