Tuesday, July 15, 2003

eAngler eAngler is an online business that sells fishing equipment and provides all kinds of information to the serious fisherman.  They also support the online application for fishing license sales for the state of Florida.  In addition, they link to online fishing license applications from 13 other states.  One problem: a lot of the links are out of date, such as those to Georgia and California which error and give no forwarding information.  Nebraska's goes to an error page, but the Game and Parks Commission was kind enough to provide a forwarding address.  Hopefully, going forward, states will be mindful of the manner in which businesses link to them and avoid these kinds of things.  For example, Fishwest links to Utah's fishing license sales and embeds it in a Fishwest frame.  I wonder why eAngler doesn't link to Utah's online fishing license app since it was one of the first.  Maryland has posted a PDF form and calls that an online application. 5:20:54 PM    comment []

Website Proliferation According to a recent report, Moving to a Customer-Centered Web Presence, the U.S. Department of the Interior has about 31,000 websites presenting 3 to 5 million pages of information.  Annual spending is estimated to be between $110 and $220 million.  That's a pretty big range!  Here's an interesting Interior website: the Office of Aviation Services.  Now, I wonder why Interior houses the Office of Aviation Services, why not Transportation?  And why is Interior providing interagency aviation training as opposed to FAA or some other DOT agency or even GSA which provides other types of interagency services?  It probably occurs both places, one of many wasteful things that occur in government.  And why does OAS link to a page like this? 5:00:07 PM    comment []

Local eGovernment Brian Sweeting, webmaster for the city of Spanish Fork, is proposing more cooperation among local governments to achieve goals associated with online government: "My proposal is... found an "interlocal agreement agency dedicated to decreasing the costs of taxpayers and increasing quality of service for its citizens and businesses by deploying publicly owned advanced eGovernment services to all residents and businesses within member communities." It's a great idea and with the right people working together it could really work well.  Several years ago, I put together the Utah Intergovernmental IT Council.  We did some interesting things, but I ran out of time to keep it going.  It was sort of an extension of the cooperation we had during the Y2K transition, when every entity had their own Y2K coordinator.  We have cooperation in some key areas like GIS where cities and counties have been major contributors to the State Geographic Information Database.  Local governments are also key partners in our One-Stop Business Registration project and the Utah Wireless Integrated Network.  Brian, the state actually has a contracted entity that could support your proposal, it is UII, a team with a great deal of expertise in egovernment.  The contract is available to local governments and I'm sure that Al Sherwood, the contract administrator, would entertain new projects that supported a group of local governments working together. Brian also mentions a nice article in the Daily Herald that summarizes egovernment services in Utah County.  There's some good things happening there, as well as in Davis County, which is preparing to implement a new portal site. By the way, check out the latest live views of construction on Capitol Hill.  The two wing buildings are progressing nicely. For several years, the Utah Telehealth Network was budgeted funds from the Capital Facilities and Administrative Services committee.  Here is the result. Don't miss the Danish Whitepaper on Enterprise Architecture.  It's a great piece like about everything else John is involved with. 7:59:58 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 David Fletcher.