Category: Government

One problem government IT folks often have is how to judge the success and failure of their IT investments – including calculating the return on investment (ROI) for technology. Why? Government acts based on law, rule and regulation, so it’s required to undertake some tasks. At the same time, it’s hard to place a “cost” or value on government activities since success is often defined as improved constituent service. Consider these examples: supporting voting at elections, firefighters saving a life or attorneys defending the state. So if that’s the problem, let’s focus on those things that define good government! It’s all about improvements to how services are performed and how effective they are, and the metrics can measured as such: Reduced cost of providing services, reduced time and resources to provide service, protection or enhancement of agency or entity missions and furtherance of legal requirements or duties.

Back in 2004, I was involved in the creation of my department's website which coincided with the actual launch of the department. We were lucky because our department began at a time when websites were becoming common in government, and our director knew how important that website would be for our customers. Not everyone was sold on the idea, some pointed to the lack of email addresses for our towns and counties and asked whether it was fair to use a website to replace traditional government letterhead and correspondence. But then, an amazing thing happened. Within one year of our website launch, 100 percent of our county and town constituents had email addresses. Why? Because they, like the rest of us, liked the speed of an email response and being able to check for the latest grant announcements online. Our website had great traffic and we took fewer calls for basic information simply because a self-service option was available to our constituents.

Early one morning, during my state tenure, I watched the departmental file and e-mail server disappear in the company of some state security officers. Its contents were at the center of an investigation into how and why a lucrative tax credit was passed in my state. This was a first for me. Previously, I had not really thought about e-mail and electronic documents as being public records. Soon thereafter, a formal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request was made for all paper files. This provoked a huge and lengthy effort to find, copy and turn over all documents. Today, nearly a decade later, we are much more schooled in the public records, or FOIA, request. But that doesn’t mean the issues have been fixed. Concerns about the delays in addressing were highlighted this week when Ohio Auditor David Yost unveiled a new state program to track the time taken by municipalities to meet public records requests. The program seeks to address that by requiring logs to track requests and how long it takes to respond, which the state will then review for compliance with the municipalities individual records request policies. This program comes on the heels of the national Sunshine Week, when the federal government unveiled a new website devoted to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), foia.gov. All of these new developments are reactions to concerns about how public money is being spent, scrutiny that has been heightened by the tight budgets everywhere. Some counties and cities, however, are more than prepared for this effort – those with enterprise content management solutions.

Last time, I wrote about the quest for finding the real "total" in total cost of ownership (TCO). As you consider the "cost" of TCO, I would like to offer some thoughts that might be useful as you evaluate document management projects and cost proposals. During my time at my housing agency, it took me three times to get one line of business application right. I am not proud of this. When the prices came in, I was told to pick the lowest price and I did, despite my knowledge that the product's low price meant that I wouldn’t get updates. Also, I knew my users would hate the interface. But the worse part of the failed deployment was that users had months of discomfort as they transitioned to a new system, only to have to do the same thing again when we brought in another system. How do you estimate this "cost”?