Every information system operates in a larger context that includes the policy, legal, and economic environment; program rules; business processes; management techniques; and human and organizational limitations. Our review of the goals, methods, and problems encountered across the eleven projects revealed several environmental factors that made all systems more difficult and costly than they might have been. The figure below shows how these factors combine to produce these undesirable consequences.

Systemic Constraints on Effective State-local Systems

Roles and relationships. The roles of state and local government are complicated, changing, and often poorly understood. The two levels of government operate on shared and separate bodies of law, they interact differently with citizens, attract and rely on different kinds of professionals. They are organized according to a mixture of constitutional, programmatic, financial, traditional, and geographic dimensions. In addition, they engage in a variety of relationships with one another: collaborative, contractual, regulatory, and adversarial.

Variety. Local governments, especially, exhibit great variation. For example, New York has 57 counties, 62 cities and 932 towns. There are also thousands of special districts that manage schools, fire protection, sewers and water systems, transportation services, and other specialized activities. Within each kind of local jurisdiction there is an infinite variety of specific conditions based on population characteristics, economic conditions, and physical geography.

Missions. Every level of government tries to carry out a large number of unrelated missions: build roads, educate children, protect the environment, fight crime, create jobs. Even in the same agency, specialized programs usually serve to divide rather than connect groups of people with similar responsibilities. Systems that support service programs reflect this “stove pipe” way of organizing work.

Technology. The 1980s and 90s have introduced powerful new computing and communications technologies to government operations. However, the electronic revolution has not reached into every corner of our society or every government office that serves local communities. Wide discrepancies in technical capacity from one place to another severely limit the degree to which these new tools can be applied to program management and information sharing goals.

Adaptability. The very structure of our government allows change only when there is agreement among a number of individuals and institutions. By codifying governmental activities in law and regulation, we ensure stability in operations, but also make change difficult to achieve. The budgetary process, civil service requirements, and procurement and ethics laws all act as brakes on the ability of any one actor to make and implement decisions. Moreover, federal, state, and local electoral, budgetary, and legislative cycles may not coincide, making intergovernmental initiatives even more difficult to define and implement.

The environmental factors described above have specific consequences for using information systems effectively:

• Technological capacity (hardware, software, networking), and the ability to pay for it, vary widely from place to place.
• Inadequate intergovernmental, interagency, and inter-program communications lead to fragmented and duplicate development efforts.
• Program-specific funding and legal requirements encourage stand-alone, single-purpose systems.
• Voluntary local involvement in state-initiated projects results in uneven local participation in new systems, often requiring state agencies to support two or more variations.
• Inadequate development and retention of a technical workforce reduces the ability of both state and local governments to take advantage of new technologies.