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Partners in State-Local Information Systems: Lessons from the Field

Abstract

Executive Summary

Chapter 1. Project Overview

Chapter 2. Government-wide Issues & Recommendations

Appendix A. A practical guide to state-local information systems: a summary

Appendix B. Project Participants

Appendix C. Selected References
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Executive Summary

Recommendations for increasing government-wide system effectiveness

The principles and practices described in Tying a Sensible Knot can help government managers avoid or reduce many problems. However, state and local government officials, as individuals, cannot change the environmental factors that make public sector work so complicated. The recommendations which follow are designed to mitigate their negative consequences by capitalizing on both the findings of this study and the infrastructure-building work already underway in New York State.
  1. Expand existing efforts to build a statewide information infrastructure encompassing technology, data, and human resources. New York’s new statewide secure intranet, the NYT, offers many benefits to state and local participants. It needs to be accompanied by education, demonstration, and incentive programs that encourage localities to connect. Existing efforts to establish preferred technology and data standards should be augmented with greater local involvement. A technical workforce assessment recently begun, should recommend ways to improve recruitment and retention of technical staff as well as more effective use of contracts at the both the state and local levels.
  2. Establish formal linkages and communications mechanisms that encourage awareness of other models and experiences. Peer reviews are already being required by the Office for Technology for major new system initiatives and voluntary best practice presentations are conducted on selected topics. These should be expanded to include periodic peer consulting sessions to help project managers define and design new state-local systems. This should be augmented by two additional efforts: a Web site containing up-to-date descriptions and contact information about current state-local systems projects and an ongoing program of communications and information exchange among state and local agencies.
  3. Establish and support a project management “academy” for both state and local managers. Traditional government services provided by a single agency are giving way to complex service programs that require many exchanges of information involving not only public agencies but often private and nonprofit organizations as well. The best practices guidelines produced by this project amply illustrate the importance of partnerships, collaboration, and entrepreneurship in bringing state-local system initiatives to successful implementation. In addition, public managers now face the complexity of negotiating and then managing contracts for functions and services they traditionally operated themselves. All of this calls for new management skills that take advantage of information as the key resource that ties all these parties together. Public managers would greatly benefit from a well-organized program of training and development that prepares them to guide projects from inception to evaluation in this complex new environment.