Doing IT yourself

Over the past two years Kleinberg has been on a quest to improve the way DOT and its operating administrations take in payments.

His ability to draw the department's program managers into the fold may be the key to Transportation's success with DIY, the Do-It-Yourself series of fee payment and registration Web sites that have revolutionized the way the department does business and interacts with citizens and businesses. The success story also offers a model for other federal executives to follow as they comply with the 1998 Government Paperwork Elimination Act, which gives agencies until 2003 to put their forms online. And DIY holds true to basic e-gov tenets. The site encourages managers to transform their processes rather than just posting electronic copies of key forms.

Home Improvement

In early 1999, Kleinberg and his team decided they needed a better way to take in licensing, registration and fine payments. The system would also need to communicate with a new financial management system that is still being integrated Transportation-wide. By Octo-ber that year, Kleinberg's team launched DIY's first online incarnation.

"Our objective is this: Every place we request funds from the public we wanted to have an integrated payment capability so they can do so simply and quickly," Kleinberg said at the time.

A year and a half ago, this was a bold statement. The federal information technology world was consumed by the year 2000 problem. Yet Kleinberg's words were a foretelling of life after Y2K, as if his was the voice of an oracle whispering, "e-government."

The DIY project has followed the principle laid out in the movie Field of Dreams: "If you build it, they will come." Today, DIY has eight Web sites with a total of 19 different payment and registration applications. In its first year, DIY conducted more than 9,000 transactions and took in more than $3 million.

Insiders say the key to the project's success has been the cooperation of program managers throughout the department, such as David Donaldson, who manages the Hazardous Materials Registration Program in Transportation's Research and Special Programs Administration (RSPA), and Mike Curtis, a division chief at the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA).

"The program people own the processes," says George Molaski, former chief information officer at Transportation and former co-chair of the federal CIO Council's E-Government Committee. "It's important that we help make e-gov move ahead at the program level. Kleinberg is exceptional in this area." It turned out that program managers across DOT were ready to embrace e-government. "The most receptive ears were those in the programs themselves," says Leonard Bechtel, former team leader of the DIY project, who is now team leader for information and human resources at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Two reasons the program managers were enthusiastic were the boosts in performance and customer satisfaction the new system promised. Tom Park, director of Transpor-tation's Office of Financial Management, notes that several programs have already seen measurable benefits from the new approach. Through the use of DIY, FMCSA eliminated a five-week backlog of applications for motor carrier licenses. The Hazardous Materials Regis- tration Program also was able to eliminate its backlog of applications.

"FMCSA is approaching 40 percent of its total transactions being done on DIY," says Gayle Sienicki, a program analyst at the Office of Financial Management. "That is over 1,000 transactions per month." DIY started slow at RSPA, but really took off in May 2000, taking in more than $1 million in registration fees.

Kleinberg says the DIY model can work for other departments and their constituent agencies and bureaus. He has three pieces of advice for them:

• Make a deal with the Treasury Department for accepting credit cards over the Web.
• Require accounting departments to build a utility to process incoming transactions over the Web. This ensures Web transactions are recognized by the agency financial management system.
• Proceed carefully. "You have to work at not threatening [internal organizations] so that they don't feel like you are taking over and getting between them and their customers."
  

  The most important element in DIY's success has been the fact that the sites are easily replicable. "The key thing with DIY is that it doesn't really have a single storefront," Kleinberg says. "It is made up of 15 to 20 different locations. We only had to program it once."
  

  Creating DIY was a joint effort between Transportation, Govolution, a Washington-based company that handles the credit card transactions, and Oracle Corp., a Redwood Shores, Calif., IT firm. "We all defined the initial requirements and worked to fit the Oracle architecture in with Transportation's existing sys- tems," says Bill Chang, the director of Oracle's customer relationship management and e-commerce consulting practice.
  

  Steven Perkins, senior vice president and general manager of Oracle's federal division, says Transportation's experience shows agencies can move quickly with e-government initiatives. He recommends that agencies find a place where they can start small, and work on a business process they completely control. Once the process has been chosen, agencies should implement a model that is replicable. "The users have to be driving the process," Perkins says.
  

  Because Kleinberg's team focused on a site whose processes could be easily replicated, the DIY project was able to minimize costs and maximize the effort that went into the initial development. "The software was the biggest cost," says Bechtel. "It cost us under $70,000, and we bought it off the General Services Administration schedule."
  

  Transportation's accountants and financial managers say that's a worthwhile investment, given the reliability of the system and the increased efficiency it brings. "With DIY, there are fewer documents going into our accounting system," says Bob Kingan, chief of Transportation's Financial Management Business Practice. "With DIY we don't have to worry about bad checks."
  

  Hazardous Materials
  

  David Donaldson emerges from behind his vast computer monitor revealing himself to be a tall, slender man with a graying brown beard. When he speaks his tones are soft and muted, and he resists calling himself an executive. And though Donaldson works with technology every day, he doesn't view himself as being at the forefront of an e-government movement. But the manager of DOT's Hazardous Materials Registration Program is leading a transformation. He says that if DIY hadn't come along, his office was going to have to find a way to enable electronic registration itself.
  

  Any company, large or small, that wants to transport hazardous materials by highway, rail, ship or air must register with Donaldson's program. "There is a lot of hazardous material cargo [shipped] by rail," Donaldson says. "And while there is not so much by way of water routes, when companies do transport hazardous materials over water it is in enormous quantities."
  

  Small businesses pay $300 for each license to move hazardous materials, while large businesses pay $2,000. "The law says that you can't transport these materials without being registered," Donaldson says. All money collected is funneled into a grant program whose end is to help train fire departments, police departments and emergency medical technicians around the country in how to handle hazardous material spills. The program keeps no profits. If it collects in excess of what the law allows, it must adjust its fees.
  

  Donaldson says one of the main benefits of his program is ensuring emergency response personnel are adequately trained in dealing with hazardous materials. Plus, he says, truck drivers are killed more often than anyone else by spilled hazardous materials, so the program helps those working in the industry.
  

  By virtue of its registration and payment features, the HazMat program lends itself to e-business automation. Kleinberg and his team recognized this and went courting. "They approached us," Donaldson says. "I was excited." What Kleinberg proposed was not a new idea to Donaldson. In fact, he and his office had been contemplating doing online registration and fee payment on their own because they recognized the short- and long-term benefits of adding another service channel. Donaldson says he even went so far as to talk with the Treasury Department about doing monetary transactions on a secure server.
  

  Like a true entrepreneur, Kleinberg hit the market at the most opportune time. For DIY, it all comes down to the simple capitalist market rules of supply and demand. The program managers had the demand and Kleinberg had the supply: a single idea that fit multiple business processes. Plus, the technology was there for DIY, so it was an enabler, not a complicator. "Now, the biggest demand for DIY is coming from the customers," Kleinberg says.
  

  When Kleinberg came along, Don- aldson put his own entrepreneurial hat on the shelf and left the development to the DIY team. He wasn't a pushover, though. "I talked with them about what I wanted to see," Donaldson says. "I asked for a lot. The DIY team was good about talking with us and finding out what we needed to do to be most useful to our customers."
  

  The hazardous materials office has always relied on technology. DIY, says Donaldson, simply "offered us a convenient way of getting done what we had to." Now, when businesses and individual truckers go online to register and pay their fees, they can do in 20 minutes what used to take two to four weeks.
  

  "We give them a certificate with a license number as proof that they have met the legal requirements," Donaldson says. "Most of our customers are repeat customers and they can come in and look themselves up. They can use existing information to fill in as much of the form as they can." And with just two people dedicated to the registration program and two more dedicated to the grant education program, the office benefited from the additional automation provided by the DIY site. "Now we don't have to pay someone to do data entry," Donaldson says.
  

  DIY also offers Donaldson data and reports previously not available. "Being able to manipulate data is important if you are going to manage it," Donaldson says. The site also handles refunds and provides methods of checking to be sure registrations and payments went through. With such features, Donaldson says, DIY's "benefits vastly outweigh the costs."
  

  WWW.DIY.DOT.GOV Money collected online: $3 million Number of online transactions: 9,000 Payment methods accepted: American Express, Discover, MasterCard, Visa and automated clearinghouse payments that enable automated bank drafts and bank-to-bank transfers Key players: David Kleinberg, Transportation's deputy chief financial officer; Len Bechtel, DIY Team Leader Most active participants: Federal Motor Carriers Safety Administration, Research and Special Programs Administration Key technologies: Web storefronts and centralized payment processing Software costs: Under $70,000 Firms involved: Oracle Corp., Govolution

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