The gradual transformation of government business is taking place on many levels. When government began implementing information systems to manage their information, they developed them on an agency-by-agency, or program-by-program basis. Each agency built their own system for a specific agency or program purpose, not to be connected across the agency or government to other systems. This phenomena has become known as the silo or stovepipe approach because the business and systems is viewed up and down and not across. One of the visions of e-government is to break down these silos, integrating business processes, service programs, and streamlining information management.

Many times the best solution to a problem has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the way work is being done. Business process reengineering often accompanies technological implementation. The words "government bureaucracy" produce the image of paper-laden processes that are both people and time intensive. It may not be efficient, but that's the way we've always done it, is one of the arguments. That was the case when the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles set out to reduce the amount of time it took to process titles. Before investing in a costly document imaging system, the agency conducted a thorough workflow analysis that demonstrated how a 20-step process could be cut by more than half while substantially reducing the process time.¹² While the answer to improving DMV's slow paper process was not electronic government, it was the technology that provided the incentive to examine the process and explore different ways it could be improved.

The e-government vision is a vision of integrated information and services. Information collected by state and local government agencies can be a valuable resource on which to build e-government programs. Thousands of files, databases, and data warehouses have been developed. But they aren't always compatible and in many cases contain duplicate information, which makes sharing and integrating data a great challenge. Besides new business processes, changes in policy, security, and information management are called for to "share information across agency and program boundaries, to discover patterns and interactions once hidden in millions of separate paper records."¹³

When New York State's Bureau of Shelter Services in the Office of Disability and Temporary Assistance set out to build a prototype Homeless Information Management System (HIMS) to help government and nonprofit organizations in program planning and decision-making about homeless services in the state, the effectiveness of the prototype relied on the willingness of the necessary parties to share information.

New models of collaboration for achieving e-government are popping up everywhere. In Bremen, Germany, a public-private partnership between city government and private industry works together to provide Web-based services to citizens. The Foundations Project in Minnesota used a multi-agency collaboration to develop a Web site that provides environmental and natural resource data.¹⁴