The environmental factors described above have specific consequences for the nature and effectiveness of the State’s information infrastructure. We use the term “information infrastructure” here to mean more than hardware and software. A complete government information infrastructure comprises policies, people, organizations, information, and technology.

Computing and communications capabilities around the state mostly reflect local or agency-specific decisions and investments. This makes it difficult or impossible to operate technology-supported programs in a consistent way from place to place and organization to organization. It also slows and complicates communication among state and local staff involved in the development of joint programs.

These variations are a challenge to project teams trying to develop and integrate information systems across a substantial range of participants. The range across New York State’s 932 towns is especially notable. North Hempstead on Long Island with a population of about 225,000 and Lebanon in the center of the state, with a population of about 1,265, illustrate the extremes. Lebanon hopes to add a fax machine to its technology infrastructure in the coming year while North Hempstead contemplates upgrades and substantial redesigns in its already sophisticated set of administrative and service systems. The implications of these variations are daunting. In general, each locality is responsible for its own technology investments. For many, advanced technology is beyond both their budgets and their specific local needs. As a result, most projects in this study were committed to developing new systems for use in some locations while maintaining older automated and manual systems in others. Total operating costs therefore remain high and initiatives that could take good advantage of a ubiquitous, consistent level of technology across the state remain out of reach.

• The NYS Office of Real Property Services Real Property System (RPS V 4.0) project team addressed this reality by forming a number of subcommittees to focus on the range of existing infrastructure and platforms most likely to be found in the localities. Development considerations for each level of infrastructure and each platform had to be accounted for in the overall system design. This makes both the design and the ongoing system support needs more complex and expensive.
• The Department of Environmental Conservation took a different approach early in its deliberations for a new Hunting and Fishing License system. Their solution was to provide the necessary equipment for each locality thereby eliminating the concern of local technical variation. However, this was problematic as well. The Hunting and Fishing License system, as initially proposed, would create a stand-alone system that local governments would have to work with along with all the other systems they had in place to serve customers. Further, the quantity of licenses sold in some localities did not, in the opinions of the local governments, warrant the use of an automated system at all. Political support for such a significant statewide expenditure was also a major concern in light of overall state cut-backs in spending.
• The NYS Department of Agriculture and Markets is responsible for dog licensing. As in the case of fishing licenses, the quantity of licenses issued across local governments varies widely. Ag and Markets faced the same range of local technical infrastructure, including the fact that more than half of New York’s Town Clerks are not “computerized” at all. In addition, many, but not all, of the Town Clerks who do use computers use one of several proprietary “Town Clerk Software Packages” to support their day to day work. These factors together prompted Ag and Markets to focus only on the towns with computer capability by working closely with software vendors to include a standardized dog license feature in their packages.

Clearly, neither “one size fits all” nor custom tailoring makes optimal use of resources. Both result in difficult and costly efforts to build and maintain information systems to meet program needs and statewide information requirements. With the variety of local conditions a one-size-fits-all effort may result in mismatches between the “problem” and the “solution.” In custom tailoring efforts, the level of resources required to address the range of possible conditions results in costly, non-standard, solutions.

In our study, we identified several common technologies being explored by more than one project. We found, however, that the project teams had little or no knowledge that others were conducting similar investigations and therefore little or no information was shared among them. These unconnected, redundant efforts cost both time and money.

• Telecommunications mechanisms. Many of the systems we looked at were relying on Internet connections to transmit information and transact business, but were independently exploring telecommunications mechanisms and standards to use for these purposes. The Aging Service Network, the Electronic Voter Registration System, the Electronic Dog License project, and Electronic Death Certificates, for example, all need to make effective use of the Internet as a communications channel.
• Security issues. System and data security concerns had to be investigated by a number of project teams including the Death Certificate and Immunization Projects. Each project stressed the need to ensure confidentiality of personal information and record integrity since these documents often are required for legal purposes or to access state services, but the projects were tackling these issues independent of one another.
• Central data repositories. Many of the projects were exploring the use of a central repository of data to be accessible by many users. These can provide users with easy local access to information that is maintained in a single, well-managed central source. This approach to data management is one that should be explored collectively since it has so many commonly useful applications and data management considerations, but these concerns were addressed independently in the Real Property, Hunting and Fishing License, and Voter Registration projects, among others..
• Electronic signatures. Many documents are not legally binding or admissible in court unless signed. Doing business electronically requires some form of legally binding authentication and a number of agencies were separately exploring the use and limitations of electronic signatures for this purpose. The Electronic Death Certificate and Voter Registration Projects are examples of systems that required this feature..

Many localities voiced frustration and concern that state agencies generally develop new applications that operate without regard to related systems and processes. This is especially problematic for local governments that deal with multiple state programs whether these programs are administered by one or several state agencies. Local officials opposed the use of stand-alone applications to solve state agency-specific problems because these “solutions” ignore the multi-purpose and cross-functional nature of most local operations. From a state agency point of view, these systems are dedicated to a clear mission, but from a government-wide point of view, they prevent useful data sharing that could reduce the cost of related systems and improve the ability of the state to understand program dynamics and policy outcomes.

• Town Clerks offices tend to experience this problem most dramatically. Since the Clerk’s public service counter is the access point for a number of state-sponsored and local services, it is congested with information systems and forms that emanate from separate state agencies plus those that are related to entirely local programs. Each system or process makes sense on its own, but seldom takes into account the fact that they may, and often do, conflict or confuse other systems and ongoing business processes that operate in the Clerk’s office.

State agencies depend upon information from local program offices to support the planning, implementation, and evaluation of statewide efforts. There was a time when state agencies could depend on full participation of all local jurisdictions in these typically paper-based systems. This situation has changed dramatically for two reasons. First, local governments have convinced their representatives that state-imposed local mandates must be accompanied by state funding for their implementation. Second, the increasing shift to automated systems has not been accompanied by a consistent level of local capability or willingness to participate in an automated solution. In recent years, state elected leaders have made a conscious policy decision to allow a considerable amount of local latitude in systems participation. The resulting uneven participation in new systems often means parallel operations at the state level to accommodate automated, manual, and hybrid approaches at the local level. While local choice is a significant local benefit, it comes at the cost of projects that are more difficult to manage, systems that are more expensive to build and maintain, and results that are less uniform than they would otherwise be.

• The Aging Services Network, and Automated Financial Reporting projects are just two that will require the sponsoring state agency to support both paper-based and electronic systems for the foreseeable future. These projects redesigned business processes and identified common information requirements to be shared between the state and the localities. They then developed parallel operations to support these redesigned processes in both paper and electronic systems. Ideally, the non-automated localities will make a transition to the electronic system over time, but years of parallel program management lie between then and now.

As technology has rapidly permeated our society and most of our institutions, government organizations often lag behind others. Due to minimal staff development budgets, government staff are often ill-informed and poorly trained in how to use information technology effectively. This is particularly true of the newest technical tools and platforms. Public employees, both users and technicians, seldom have ready access to skills training or professional development that continuously upgrades their knowledge and skills. Conversely, technical staff typically have few opportunities or incentives to learn the goals and operational realities of service programs and therefore tend to focus too much on the technical tools and too little on the programmatic reasons for new systems.

Providing a stable and reliable computing environment that supports day to day program operations requires a technical workforce that is expert in the functions of existing information systems and their supporting infrastructure. While maintaining these legacy systems, staff also need to acquire new skills to adopt emerging technologies. In an employment market that highly values the newest technical skills, public employment is becoming less and less attractive. Agencies find that they either cannot attract people with the new skills or they lose well-skilled people shortly after making significant training investments.

• The opportunity cost of insufficient technical resources must be considered along side the gamble of investing in the development of technical staff. The experience of the Office of Real Property Services SALESNET project is instructive. ORPS invested in its own staff by securing training that would give them in-house expertise in the use of the Internet. Unfortunately, the result was the loss of those staff to higher paying private sector positions, setting the project back by months since the needed skills were no longer available.
• The Immunization project found that all the technical staff in the Health Department were devoted to other priorities at the time their project was underway. As a result, they contracted with private companies for all or nearly all the system design and development work. This can be a good solution, but it requires sufficient funding (the Immunization project has a sizable federal grant) and strong contract and vendor management skills.