Culture clash
DG researchers plumb the factors that make and break e-government partnerships
By Mack Reed
dg.o Communications Manager

"New Models of Collaboration"
	Researchers: • Project home page • Center for Technology in Gov't. Sites: • AccessIndiana.com • Firstgov.gov • IRS efiling

Public-private IT partnerships always look attractive on paper:

Government collaborates with industry, melding strengths and resources to deliver public services that are both efficient and profitable.

But as veteran public-private collaborators can attest, the struggle to leverage public IT resources with the muscle of private innovation can be a strain - a frustrating clash of cultures that often takes more time and money than expected and yields less-than-perfect results.

Soon, though, public-private partners will find the hazard-strewn path to success lit by results of an international Digital Government study.

Based at SUNY Albany's Center for Technology in Government (CTG), the research project "A Multinational Investigation of New Models of Collaboration for Delivering Government Services" has spent nearly two years examining the way planning, IT architecture and simple face-to-face communication can sink or save a public-private e-government partnership.

Researchers in the U.S., Canada and Belgium are studying all types of inter-organizational collaborations in the ongoing project, but some of the earliest results focus on domestic collaboration between government and the private sector.

"We wanted to try to understand better the development and operation of partnerships that governing agencies enter into to deliver services," says Sharon Dawes, CTG's director and primary investigator on the project. "This is a phenomenon that's happening more and more, not just in the United States, but all over the world."

Researchers at CTG, Indiana University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County interviewed hundreds of government and private-industry collaborators to learn what worked and what stymied them in setting up successful partnerships.

Quite often, the Mars/Venus dichotomy between public and private cultures, public and private IT standards, public and private business models shaped not only the projects' chances for success, but also the way that dialogues began and developed between the partners, researchers found.

"In order for these kinds of partnerships to be successful, they must have an active champion on each side," says Dawes. "There needed to be people who were high up in the organization who gave it much more than moral support. They had to be willing to get in there and solve problems as well, if that was called for."

Partnerships also began to thrive when they achieved an atmosphere not just of cooperation to fulfill a contract, but of co-development to craft strategies and practices that would lead to sturdier architecture for the IT products, the business models and the relationships themselves, the study has found.

"I think we all agreed that technology was hardly ever an issue, that people chose good technologies, and they managed them well," says Dawes. "But it was meshing the organizational network with the technological that made it a success."

Take the case of AccessIndiana.com, a portal that the State of Indiana began co-developing in 1995 with a private consortium called Indiana Interactive.

The partnership's first project was to bring the state of Indiana's Bureau of Motor Vehicles records online and develop a "premium service" to sell data extracts to automakers and insurance companies.

This income would eventually allow them to develop other, free web-based services for the general public while still working within the state's thrifty "self-funding" model that forbade any cash outlay for the portal.

Best practices

The research team has observed several crucial "best practices" for public-private partnerships that they found in their research. These include: Each party should have a highly ranked representative on the project who is an active champion for the collaboration. Establish an atmosphere for codevelopment, communication and negotiation for policies, practices and strategies. Leverage the project upon the technical and organizational strengths of each party. Don't re-engineer anything that doesn't need it. Develop a standard IT architecture that supports legacy systems while reflecting the state of the art in interface and delivery methods. Understand and agree on each other's mission on tactical and policy levels. Be willing to learn throughout the process: First attempts may not be perfect, but parties should continue working together toward the best results.

But one of the greatest hurdles would prove to be finding common ground on which to collaborate.

"It didn't happen overnight Ð It's taken five to seven years to really get down the practices so that both sides can work together to develop these applications," says DG researcher Jon Gant, a Syracuse University professor of information management and public administration who studied the partnership while at Indiana University.

Gant's research took the form of ongoing interviews with more than 20 players on both sides of the partnership, as well as private citizens appointed to a state oversight panel.

"We were looking at a number of different factors," he says.

"First, we were trying to get a sense of the history of this collaboration, how has it evolved. Secondly, we were trying to understand the design of the collaboration, the role that the state plays, the role that the private-sector vendor plays in managing and governing the collaboration.

"We were also trying to figure out how the broader environment influences the collaboration. The legal, institutional and political environments really do have an influence on the way the collaboration plays out, the way the decisions are made, the way e-government services are developed."

It was crucial Ð and particularly hard for the parties to establish upon an atmosphere for technological co-development, the minutiae of protocols and responsibilities. A series of intense, closed-door meetings eventually led to worksheets that laid out strict processes, lines of communication and ownership for all phases of development.

In time, AccessIndiana developed into a massive portal to more than 175 custom-designed online applications and 190,000 pages of government information from more than 75 state entities that draw more than 6.5 million site visits per month.

Two more collaborations studied by the Digital Government team offer night-and-day comparisons of time frames and levels of cooperation that ultimately determined their degrees of success.

One Ð Firstgov.gov Ð came together in a whirlwind of presidentially-ordered, rule-breaking web development that ended in what most see as a relatively successful collaboration.

The other Ð The Internal Revenue Services' "e-file" tax-filing system Ð took more than 10 years to bring to fruition and is still in danger of failing to meet a deadline more than five years in the future.

"These were very different cases," says Patricia Diamond Fletcher, associate professor at UMBC's Policy Sciences Department, who studied the two partnerships.

Born of a presidential declaration in just 90 days, Firstgov.gov has grown into a reliable, versatile mega-portal for government services.

In June, 2000, President Clinton made a radio address announcing development of a one-stop government Web portal Ð an audacious project with a brutally short deadline that was quite unheard of in government circles, says Fletcher.

Inktomi chief scientist Eric Brewer (once a DARPA-funded grad student) offered free use of his search engine to the project and began to work with the General Services Administration to meet the president's goals. Inktomi set up a nonprofit organization called the Fed Search Foundation, which channeled his donation to the project and collected donations from other IT players who wanted to help build Firstgov, Fletcher says.

Many government CIOs joined in reluctantly, only to learn to their chagrin that the portal's powerful search engine was about to reveal to the public a disturbing array of irrelevant, improper pages on government servers, including pornography and personal Web sites.

Even after an initial housecleaning, the development team swept the government domains and found "a whole host of pages that needed to be turned off," Fletcher says.

But Firstgov.gov launched on time and on budget on Sept. 22, 2000, with portalized access to more than 47 million government Web pages - a number that has since declined somewhat as government sites tightened and streamlined their operations.

The short deadline was "a critical success factor" for Firstgov's development team, says Fletcher.

"It forced them to be innovative, it forced them to cut corners and do things they didn't usually do. Not having to go through the red tape and deliberations that usually accompany government procurement and development kept communication very flexible, very simple," she says. "There wasn't time to worry about some of the territoriality and turf issues, pecking orders, things like that. The president had announced it, so they knew it had to be up in three months."

By contrast, technical difficulties, privacy concerns and clashes of public-private ideologies have marred collaboration on the Internal Revenue Services' e-file system.

The idea of a public-private partnership for electronic filing of tax documents first arose in the 1980s, when tax-prep giant Jackson Hewitt approached the IRS. Over time, the agency attracted other big names such as H & R Block and Intuit to the project, and began development.

All seemed to go well Ð Block and Jackson Hewitt were offering advice and input, Intuit was offering a software package that saved the IRS precious time and money on development. But the IRS' desire to provide the service to everyone, rich and poor, ran afoul of the tax-prep firms' profit goals.

"They (the IRS) knew that the partners were in it to make money and were trying to support that," Fletcher says. "But they had to negotiate between the tax preparers, Congress and the public to do this."

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Even after collaborators worked out a compromise whereby tax preparers would make a reasonable profit from the system while allowing low-income customers to file taxes for free, other issues have prevented completely flawless operation of an otherwise sound online toolset: The IRS is still wrestling with data privacy issues with its partners, and it is struggling to make its deadline.

The 1998 Tax Restructuring Reform Act dictated that by 2007, the IRS must be conducting 80% of its transactions electronically.

Yet while usage numbers are growing, only 39 million returns were filed electronically in 2000 Ð far fewer than the number projected to meet the 80% success mark, she says.

Still, some best practices emerged from the otherwise stormy marriage: IRS participants told Fletcher that enabling competitiveness among large and small tax preparers helped push the project to fruition.

And though underfunded by Congress, they were able to get the system online by capitalizing on their private-sector partners' technical strengths. "They didn't have to try to develop the software, they didn't have to survey the market. That was one of the reasons they were able to get moving."

But some goals will likely remain out of reach for this collaboration Ð most notably the widespread adoption of e-filing by the pubic, Fletcher says.

"There are still many, many population groups out there who don't want to use the Internet, don't want to put their personal information on the internet and file taxes or send money or get their returns electronically," Fletcher says. "That's a big issue."