Creating an effective Web service requires a significant investment of resources. It is easy to underestimate the costs and overstate the benefits because the technology is so attractive. Once an agency has investigated the capabilities that the Web offers, and decided that the technology can provide significant benefits to important stakeholders, the next question is “How much of an investment is it worth?” A Cost/Performance Model was developed to help agencies answer that question. The complete model and explanations can be found in Developing & Delivering Government Services on the World Wide Web: Recommended Practices for New York State on the CTG Web site .

The model serves two purposes. First, it identifies expected costs and benefits that are components of the investment decision. Second, it quantifies these factors in the form of explicit expectations about expenditures and performance improvements. Together, they enable a pre-implementation evaluation and a post-implementation assessment of whether the project has achieved its goals.

The benefits of a WWW initiative typically fall into three performance categories: services that are better, cheaper, or faster. WWW technologies can enable all three types of improvements, depending on the specific goals and objectives of the proposed service. The following list of sample performance improvements was drawn from a number of sources, including the experience of the Testbed agencies.

Cheaper (for customers, for general public, for other agencies, for own agency)

• Time savings: personnel
• Cost savings (direct): telephone, mailing, printing, travel

Faster (for customers, for general public, for other agencies, for own agency)

• Reduce response/waiting time: 24-hour availability; on demand
• Reduce information distribution time

Better (for customers, for general public, for other agencies, for own agency)

• Consolidation of services: one-stop shopping, fewer steps in a process
• Innovation: new services, new ways of using information
• Improved access to services: people use more appropriate services

Some measures will be relatively easy to describe in quantitative terms, especially those in the cheaper and faster categories. Others will need to be described in more qualitative terms that, nonetheless, can be translated into empirical measures that can be quantified. For example, “increased client satisfaction” can be operationalized by “an increase of at least 25 percentage points in the number of clients who answer ‘Satisfied’ or ‘Highly satisfied’ on the customer feedback questionnaire.”

In general, costs for developing an Internet-based service fall into five categories:

• Getting the organization ready to support the service
• Internet access for end-users of the system
• Training and help desk support for end-users
• Resources to develop the content of the service
• Computer facilities to host the system

In each of these categories, there may be one-time costs that are necessary to get the project started, as well as annual maintenance and development costs to operate the service and keep it current. The five categories of cost are identified in the worksheet presented in Figure 4.

Each category contains two types of costs: infrastructure and human resources. While it is relatively easy to predict the types of hardware, software, and communications equipment that will be necessary to develop the service, the harder-to-quantify human resource costs typically dwarf those for the electronic infrastructure. In making estimates, agencies should account for all the staff time necessary to launch and operate the service. For example, there are two elements to consider in estimating training costs: the cost to buy or develop and deliver the training program, and the cost of having staff actually attend the training classes.

The cost worksheet can also be a useful tool for planning the evolution of a Web service. Consider completing a worksheet to represent the costs of a site which provides very modest services such as basic information and pop-up e-mail, then for a more complex site which provides interactivity such as online requests for information or online registration. Finally, complete a worksheet outlining the costs associated with an elaborate service which includes support for transactions and real time database queries. Outlining the costs associated with short term goals (6 months to 1 year) as well as with longer term goals (1 to 2 years) is also a useful way to plan the evolution of a Web service.