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August 27, 2002
Credit Card Fees and eGovernment
Yesterday's Deseret News ran an article on credit card fees for online services:
Are you one of the Utahns who were a little upset when you found out you had to pay a $3.50 "special fee" to register your car online this past year? Nearly 213,000 people coughed up the special fee — a total of an extra $745,500 Utahns had to pay — from August 2001 to July 2002 to renew registrations on cars, trucks, snowmobiles, trailers and boats...
Three quarters of a million is a significant chunk of change. The article quotes the Governor and I on the issues surrounding fees for online services and strategies for reducing them. The biggest challenge we face is that most of the revenue collected through fees is already appropriated, so an agency like the Tax Commission isn't free to use some of the money they collect for licensing a vehicle to pay the credit card company. They have to get that money somewhere else. The somewhere else is usually a special "online fee."
10:41 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Book Review: Strategies for Web Hosting and Managed Services by Doug Kaye
I've just finished going through Doug Kaye's book on web hosting. Doug describes the web hosting options available and describes strategies for outsourcing, risk management, modeling traffic, and other issues. This is the most complete collection of information about hosting I've ever seen. The information in the book is a great start for someone looking at a hosting effort that's too large to just turn over to a shared hosting service.
This book stops short of getting into what it takes to design, build and operate a multi-tiered transaction oriented web application like eBay or Amazon. That is kind of the next step from this book. Still, this book serves a real need and I'm sure there's plenty of people out there wishing they knew what's in this book. I'll be sure to recommend it to my class.
08:48 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Utah.gov Email
About a year ago, I wrote a paper about using the utah.gov URL for state business instead of the state.ut.us domain. State agencies took this to heart and I'm happy to say that most state web sites now sport the utah.gov domain and we're building brand with some advertising and things like the messages you hear while you're on hold.
Another thing I asked was that employees adopt utah.gov as their email domain. Previously each department (or division) used a different domain for email. We set up a translator service and about 4000 people signed up for a utah.gov email. Eventually the translator service became unwieldy. We just finished (thanks to the hard work of lot of folks) creating a single master directory tree along with a unique UID for each employee in the executive branch (around 22,000). Now everyone has a utah.gov email address and a UID that will stay with them regardless of where they work in Utah State government. We've also got the infrastructure now to support single sign on for state employees. This is a huge step.
07:51 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Open Source for E-Government Conference
I'm speaking at the Open Source for E-Government conference in Washington D.C. on Oct 17th-18th. infoDev, the Cyberspace Policy Institute of The George Washington University, and the UNDP are the sponsors.
12:42 PM | Recommend This | Print This
National States Geographic Information Council
GIS systems play an important role in government IT at all levels. Utah's group is among the best int he nation. I've been asked to speak at the annual meeting of the National States Geographic Information Council on Sept. 10th at 2pm. I'm going to give them an XML message. That may not be what they had in mind, but its what I think is important that they hear.
11:26 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Ogasawara's Open Source in Government Website
Todd Ogasawara has put together a blog on open source software in government. Todd made a presentation at OSCON on a project he'd done in the State of Hawaii using open source.