The State of New York has 57 counties, 62 cities, 932 towns, 554 villages, 707 school districts and 646 independent special purpose units working with each other, with citizens and businesses, and with about 100 state agencies and authorities. A project being conducted in this environment must deal with huge variations in financial, technical, and managerial resources, and seek to minimize the uncertainty of this environment on the project. A system that supports information exchange, transaction processing, or decision support between just two organizations is a challenge. A system which is integrated into the work processes of 50 or 100 or 1000 organizations is orders of magnitude more difficult.

Understanding the range of conditions under which both state and local organizations operate is key to ensuring that the system is designed to integrate with their business environments. The particular business process being addressed must be analyzed and understood by all participants. In most cases, state-local information systems projects are focused on standard business processes such as issuing a license, determining eligibility for a benefit, or recording a property transaction or vital record. However, these standard business processes are conducted throughout the state in very non-standard environments. Projects therefore need to focus on both the business process and the ability of individual organizations to adopt an information system to support that process. Tools such as data dictionaries, and process and workflow analysis help identify ways that different organizations can and should participate. Organizations unable to implement a sophisticated automated system in the short term can begin to transition their work environment by focusing simply on the new or improved business process. An organization that needs to retain its reliance on paper processing can still improve its performance and consistency by adopting the set of standard data definitions that are built into the computerized system. In this way, each organization can begin to integrate the useful elements of the new system into its own environment, within its own operational and resource constraints.

There are excellent resources available to help develop profiles of the various local entities. There are numerous state associations affiliated with counties, cities, towns, villages and virtually any other designation applicable to local governments. Often these associations have conducted extensive surveys of their members and at the very least have a working knowledge of the conditions their members face. The Office of the State Comptroller, Division of Municipal Affairs also has extensive information available on the state of local government in NYS.

In developing a working profile of the local participants, a project team should be able to better define the scope and possible solutions much earlier in the project cycle. For instance, if the majority of potential local users lack a fairly new, modem-equipped computer, then an Internet/ Intranet solution may simply have to wait, or a more incremental approach adopted. On the other hand if the majority of potential system users have already established Internet access, then it may make sense to pursue a system that takes advantage of this established resource. Our interviews revealed that many agencies are moving toward providing an Internet type option for their service but will continue to maintain paper and computer disk systems as well to meet the needs of all local governments. This may seem less than ideal but it is a realistic way to deal with so much local diversity.