Several factors are driving the new trend, not the least of which is the growing comfort by citizens toward providing personal and credit card information over the Internet.
But government officials also are feeling strong pressure from the 1998 Government Paperwork Elimination Act, which requires federal agencies to stop using paper to create, use or store official records within four years. That means they have to start offering forms electronically, accepting electronic payment and accepting electronic signatures by 2002.
"Citizens, businesses and even government employees are pushing this as well," said Gary Robinson, vice president of business development for the Association for Information and Image Management International, an industry trade association for document and business process management technologies in Silver Spring, Md.
"People have gotten used to going online and taking care of personal business on their own time. They don't want to go to an office and stand in line, or make a phone call or wait for a form or piece of information to be mailed to them," he said. "The need and demand for convenience is a big factor here."
Giving citizens and employees the ability to access documents and forms via a browser also cuts down on an agency's IT-related costs and resources, including cost of ownership, desktop configuration, maintenance and system deployment.
Technology breakthroughs also are paving the way to Web-based government service. Document imaging and work flow products, such as HighView from Highland Technologies, a provider of database and image management technologies in Lanham, Md., are making it easier for organizations to develop enterprisewide solutions.
Traditional document management vendors have switched their focus to providing Web-based content management. And records management systems, integrated with electronic repositories and imaging systems, have made it much easier to apply agency policies and rules on routing, storing and destroying official documents.
"The whole imaging industry has moved from providing basically an electronic file cabinet to a total management discipline of the whole document and records process," said Carl Muller, vice president and co-founder of Highland Technologies. "And that's so important, because once you move all this out to the Web and open it up to the public, there are tremendous legal ramifications."
Most importantly, perhaps, has been the development of XML, a standard and metalanguage that offers a data-structuring flexibility and sophistication far beyond the capabilities of HTML (hypertext markup language). With XML, users can move much more seamlessly between heterogeneous platforms.
"Formatting is a lot easier to do in XML, so the documents you put up on the Web look a lot more like the originals," said Nate Pruitt, a research analyst for the Giga Information Group in Santa Clara, Calif. "Viewing documents is easier in XML, searching for documents is much more accurate. You can author a document in numerous applications, store the document in XML and then open it in all different kinds of applications. It's just a great tool."
Although XML has been around for a few years, imaging, content management and electronic forms vendors really have begun to embrace the standard just this year. And because XML now eases the ability for agencies to put constituent self-service on the Web, it will become increasingly important to Web service as government agencies integrate their processes.
"Citizens will be able to fill out, say, a change of address form on a portal, and that information will go to every agency that requires it, like the [department of motor vehicles] and the IRS," said Bridge. "It will allow everybody to talk to each other, no matter what platforms are used."
