Within New York State, we spoke with people involved G2G portal projects in the State Education Department (SED), The Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), and Department of Civil Service. We also spoke to people from several NYS agencies involved in a shared human services initiative, CentraPort, which is a collaborative effort among five state agencies and local social services departments. These projects are summarized in Table 2. One, the DEC initiative, is fully operational. The others have some operational components but are also developing new features or expanding to new users.

When New York State Education Department (SED) set out to comply with a federal mandate that required them to implement an application for school district hearing officers to submit electronic reports, they decided to design a portal that would allow several applications to be completed through a single sign-on mechanism. They created an application for electronic submittal of reports from hearing officers and added this and other applications within SED to the portal. They also developed a role-based system where individuals in school districts could access several applications that they would have to otherwise access individually.

The New York State Department of Civil Service examination staff offers county civil service departments the ability to order examinations online. Because the idea was well received by local civil service offices, the state agency began to look at other possible online offerings such as general information and utilities. After conducting an informal survey of county civil service departments, the New York State Department of Civil Service began pursuing other services that would be useful for local offices such as online forms, training information, and tests.

In 2002, the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) launched DECALS (Department of Environmental Conservation Licensing System), a computerized licensing system for hunters to apply for and receive Deer Management Permits. DECALS is a stand-alone system that connects local clerks to DEC for the sole purpose of transacting hunting and fishing license permits. The system allows the clerk to scan an applicant’s NYS Drivers License to add the hunter to the database and allow him to purchase a resident license. The information is then electronically submitted to the DEC.

Five NYS agencies worked together to develop an Intranet portal designed to connect counties to New York State health and human service agencies so that they can exchange information and access commonly used applications and Web pages more efficiently. CentraPort, as the portal is named, links county social services departments to information and applications that they need from four different state agencies – the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA), the Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS), the Departments of Health (DOH), and the Department of Labor (DOL). CentraPort co-locates access to related human services applications on a single Web site. Each individual’s rights are assigned and managed by that person’s employer and all participating organizations use the same rules and procedures. CentraPort co-locates both Web-based and older legacy systems. Users still need to sign on separately to the legacy systems, but they do not have to leave CentraPort to use them. Centraport also offers search tools to help users locate documents, statistics, training information, and Web sites within the Office of Temporary Disability and Assistance network and the New York State Human Services Intranet. While many of applications are operational, almost all are still in some form of development to expand current functions and, in some instances, to provide services that require cross program integration.

Table 2. Summary of New York State projects reviewed.