Digital Government

March 1, 2001

By Joshua Dean

n November 2000, Government Executive's first issue of Digital Government outlined the evolution of e-government as agencies move from displaying their organizational charts on the Web to remaking themselves as agile, customer-centric organizations providing services seamlessly via fully integrated digital processes. Here we bring you the stories of four successful e-government efforts at various stages of evolution.

Agencies are remaking themselves as agile, customer-centric organizations providing transactions and services seamlessly via fully integrated digital processes.

"At the Dawn of E-Government: The Citizen as Customer," a June study by Deloitte Consulting, notes that only by linking front and back offices and integrating new technologies with existing databases can agencies overcome the technological hurdles to e-government. And only by becoming customer-centric will agencies be able to envision the next steps necessary in becoming fully digital. Each project highlighted here has embarked on this journey.

The U.S. Mint, for example, has become a Web e-retailer extraordinaire by adapting its business processes to enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that manages its supply chain, financial and other systems. The Mint also has undergone a cultural revolution that puts all the new data the ERP software generates to use serving customers. The Patent and Trademark Office is targeting two groups of customers-inventors and its own employees-on its road to fully digitizing patent application processing. Beginning in October, inventors were able to apply for patents online. But to fully eliminate paper from the patent process, PTO also is striving to meet the needs of 3,000 patent examiners, who face hourly quotas in processing 250,000 applications and issuing 169,000 new patents a year.

The Transportation Department also faced a demanding group of internal customers when it launched DIY, Do-It-Yourself, a set of Web sites for receiving payments and issuing permits and registrations. Winning over managers of a number of key programs was made easier by the promise of better performance and customer satisfaction. Indeed, since DIY put out its virtual shingle in 1999, several programs have eliminated daunting backlogs.

Back when Amazon.com was just opening its virtual doors in 1995, folks at the Clothing and Textiles Directorate at the Defense Supply Center Philadelphia figured an online bulletin board was their best option for putting their catalog on the Internet. Then they got caught up in the Web. In less than a year, they spun together Warfighter.net, a front door to a mainframe-based cataloging and ordering system that eliminates data entry for the supply center and vastly speeds and eases purchases. With specialized mini-catalogs, shopping baskets and order tracking, Warfighter.net rivals commercial Web e-retailers.