No government information system stands completely on its own. Each system is implemented in a work environment that includes people, processes, organizational relationships, and other systems. State-local system initiatives typically augment or enhance rather than replace existing systems. As a consequence, design teams should aim for systems that recognize (at least) and integrate (at best) with the staff, activities, and existing information systems of both the state and local participants. To do this, the team needs to be aware of the existing components of work, optimistic about the potential for integration, and realistic about the willingness, resources and technical infrastructure that are necessary to change existing processes.

Understanding the user environment and customer expectations and factoring them into the design or re-design of a business process helps ensures that some diversity in these environments can be accommodated. Engaging in a collaborative effort to define standard business requirements and a standard set of data elements are two ways to help assure uniformity of purpose and content while allowing for some customization in implementation. Armed with these commonly developed requirements, local agencies can often work with both state and local resources to implement a sensible system. Local MIS Departments, where they exist, can be valuable partners in working through the issues of integration at the local level. Sometimes local MIS staff are bypassed in the connection between state and local program agencies and this usually means an important point of view and source of expertise has been left out of the equation and local technical staff are then unprepared to support the system locally.

Systems need to be integrated at the state level as well. In our study, we saw many examples of multiple systems created by different units of a single state agency that were developed at different points in time for different programmatic reasons, with no attempt made to connect to existing systems in the same agency. The same problem exists in the need to connect systems across different state agencies.

Government programs and systems also affect people and organizations outside of government. Some programs link government agencies and non- profit service providers or commercial businesses whose own processes need to be harmonized in some way with the government system. If the functional ability of these external players is important to the success of the state-local system or program, they need to be at the table along with their public sector counterparts.