In this report THE 50 STATES THE 50 STATES: MONTANA to WYOMING

What’s up in your agency? For governments east of the Mississippi, call 301-650-2145 or e-mail chouse@gcn.com. For those west, call 301-650-2238 or e-mail twalsh@gcn.com.

By Claire E. House and Trudy Walsh
GCN Staff

ALABAMA
TEACHING TEACHERS. The Jasper school system is launching Technology Literate Teacher, a two-year training program, to get its teachers up to speed on technology.

The program will train and test instructors in computer operations, classroom instruction, communication, professional development and productivity. Each category has four levels: basic, intermediate, advanced and trainer.

A committee of teachers and technical staff members determined the skill sets for each category and level.

ALASKA
A REAL CATCH. US West Inc. of Englewood, Colo., and NBTel Global Inc. of Saint John, New Brunswick, recently teamed up on a two-year contract to provide an online licensing system to the Alaska Fish and Game Department. The site, at https://admin.adfg.state.ak.us/licpur.html, lets visitors buy fishing and hunting licenses, plus waterfowl stamps.

It provides security for credit card payments using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol plus VeriSign digital certificates from VeriSign Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.

ARIZONA
MINI GSA. MicroAge Technology Services recently won a three-year contract valued at $50 million per year. The Tempe company will provide hardware, software, help desk support, project management and other services to the state’s 35,000 employees.

The Bloomington, Ind., Web site uses RealNetworks technology to show live broadcasts of CityCouncil meetings and to provide an archive of past meetings.

Company officials described the contract as a miniature U.S. General Services Administration schedule, “empowering all state agencies to buy Apple, Compaq, Dell, IBM and other desktop products and servers” and services.

ARKANSAS
AND THE WINNER IS. Arkansas officials presented Electronic Data Systems Corp. with the Arkansas Quality Achievement Award for the company’s work on the state’s Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS).

The prize is presented to organizations that meet business performance objectives in areas such as patient and provider satisfaction, market knowledge, planning, and process management. The Medical Services Division uses MMIS to process more than 18 million Medicaid claims each year.

CALIFORNIA
DIGITAL DO. VeriSign Inc. recently became the first Certificate Authority for the Golden State.

The company will provide digital certificates to residents so they can conduct secure Internet transactions with the state government.

Bill Jones, California’s secretary of state, digitally signed a certificate he presented to VeriSign’s president and chief executive officer, Stratton Sclavos, commemorating the first transaction conducted under the state’s new digital signature rules.

COLORADO
READY FOR PRIME TIME. Pueblo County has saved more than $900,000 in phone charges during the past five years by replacing its private branch exchange systems with US West’s Centrex Prime system.

The company’s higher-bandwidth system offers voice, video, image and data connections to the county’s offices, including tax assessment, budget and finance, elections, public works, and social services.

CONNECTICUT
COLLEGE CREDIT. The East Haven Police Department was in need of year 2000-ready computers but had a limited budget. So it turned to Gateway Community-Technical College’s Office of Business and Industry Services, which serves government, business and community college employees.

The college bought 17 450-MHz Dell OptiPlex PCs, two for use as servers and 15 for tracking crime.

The college also trained the Police Department’s network administrator, webmaster and general users—all for less than $100,000, office director John A. Vincze said.

DELAWARE
EVERYONE COUNTS. The Economic Development Office has launched a Web site, at www.state.de.us/dedo/census, to involve Delaware residents in collecting data for Census 2000.

“The census count is the single most important compilation of information the United States has, and we in Delaware must commit to do all that we can to assist in this vital survey,” Gov. Thomas R. Carper said.

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
PUPIL PORTAL. Hine Junior High School is piloting the intranet-accessible D.C. Public Schools Education and Youth Services portal. Through the portal, administrators and counselors can access student data such as test scores and attendance records, principal Bennie Adams said.

The system uses Sequoia XML Portal Server software from Sequoia Software Corp. of Columbia, Md., to pull and compile data from multiple databases. FutureNET Solutions Inc. of the district is handling integration, training and support, and i3solutions Inc. of Sterling, Va., is building the portal. The district plans to deploy the portal citywide and ultimately provide access to all teachers, with varying security levels.

FLORIDA
CRUEL IRONY? A Florida Supreme Court justice caused an international stir and a server shutdown when he included gory photos of an electrocution in a dissenting court opinion posted on the court’s Web site in October.

“We’ve posted all our opinions on the Web since 1996, and we do not censor,” public information director Craig Waters said.

The number of hits destroyed the program that tallies them, Waters said. The court upgraded its server as a result. Waters said many of the 1,000-plus e-mail messages he received from the public supported the justice’s action, calling it a crime deterrent. But, Waters said, the opinion was pushing for an end to electrocutions in Florida as cruel and unusual punishment.

GEORGIA
CRIME FIGHTERS UNITE. For $17 million, Hitachi Data Systems Corp. will build the Fulton County Comprehensive Justice Information System, a relational database setup that will let County Court officers better manage case workloads.

The countywide system will run Oracle Corp. databases and applications, and Hitachi hardware and storage systems. After the courts, the Police and Sheriff’s departments, and the District Attorney’s Office are linked, CJIS will minimize redundant data entry, speed up turnaround of information requests and track court operations.

HAWAII
HAWAIIAN EYE. Hawaii officials recently redesigned the Aloha State’s Web site, at www.state.hi.us. Gone is a cartoon of Gov. Benjamin Cayetano. Amid a background of yellow hibiscus flowers, the new site features links to agencies, rulings, directories and year 2000 information. The page view fits on a computer screen, so visitors don’t have to scroll down for information.

IDAHO
STATEWIDE PORTAL. The Administration Department’s Purchasing Division announced its intent last month to award a contract to National Information Consortium Inc. of Overland Park, Kan. NIC will provide the division with an enterprisewide state Internet portal called Access Idaho.

Idaho officials described the contract as budget neutral, which means the company will make its profits from selling services to vendors and the contract won’t cost the state anything. NIC officials said they might have the project online by next month.

ILLINOIS
OPEN WIDE. Unicon Conversion Technologies Inc. of Mission Viejo, Calif., is converting the state Veterans Affairs Department’s applications written in Wang VS Cobol to Open Systems Cobol.

The department’s three nursing homes run customized business and medical software apps containing nearly 750,000 lines of source code. The conversion will unbind the applications from proprietary hardware and let them run under Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 over an Ethernet network.

INDIANA
CABLE CHANNEL. Bloomington is broadcasting a local cable meeting channel on its Web site, at www.bloomington.in.us. The channel, run by the Monroe County Public Library, shows the meetings of local organizations such as city councils and school boards.

HoosierNet Inc., a nonprofit community network, handles the setup. A regular cable TV line plugs into a VCR for backup taping. The VCR then links to the video capture card of a 400-MHz Dell PowerEdge 2300 running Red Hat Linux 6.1 from Red Hat Inc. of Durham, N.C. The RealProducer Plus suite from RealNetworks of Seattle streams the video for viewing through the company’s RealPlayer freeware. HoosierNet also archives broadcasts.

IOWA
GO WITH THE FLOW. The Human Services Department is using a workflow and imaging system from Eastman Software Inc. of Billerica, Mass., to migrate its paper-based child support recovery process to an electronic format, saving the images as .tif files.

Five child support offices connect to an Eastman optical storage jukebox in Des Moines over the department’s Ethernet WAN. Each office runs the imaging software on a Compaq ProLiant 5000 Pentium III server with 256M of RAM.

“Two people can work on the same case simultaneously,” said Jon Neiderbach, management analyst for the Bureau of Collections’ Child Support Unit. “Before we switched to the imaging system, the file would be tied up with one person.”

KANSAS
LIQUID ASSET. Smack-dab in the middle of the country, Kansas is not the first state you’d think of as a boater’s paradise. Yet the Sunflower State recently put its boating permits online to speed service to the state’s 100,000 registered boaters. The state has 25 federal reservoirs, some of which are thousands of acres in size.

As of this writing, the site, at https://www.ink.org/cgi-big/hunt_online/online_sales.cgi, had sold more than $123,000 worth of hunting, fishing and boating licenses since it went online Sept. 1.

KENTUCKY
DRIVING FORCE. The state Transportation Cabinet has hired Complete Business Solutions Inc. of Farmington Hills, Mich., to design a Web-accessible vehicle registration and titling system. Contracts for implementation and maintenance are not yet final, but the project will cost an estimated $2 million.

The system will let citizens register cars, boats and other vehicles through the Web, and it will help Kentucky assess vehicle taxes, support insurance compliance, process apportioned registrations, manage inventory, maintain financial records, and process dealer and other licenses.

LOUISIANA
BLOCK PARTY. The U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department recently honored Louisiana’s Administration Division Offices with HUD’s 1999 Best Practices award.

HUD applauded the Community Development and Information Services offices for piloting a project to transmit Community Development Block Grant data from the Community Development Office database to HUD’s Integrated Disbursement and Information System database using electronic data interchange.

MAINE
NO PARKING. During snowstorms and other severe conditions, Portland bans street parking from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. so it can maintain the streets. The city’s Public Works Department set up an e-mail and paging notification system to help get the word out.

Residents enter an e-mail address into a form in the department’s Web site. Public Works’ Novell GroupWise system then confirms the request and adds the address to the notification list.

The department sends pager notification manually but plans to soon let the computer do the notifying with AlphaPage from InfoRad Inc. of Cleveland, communications coordinator Peter DeWitt said.

MARYLAND
KEEPING WATCH. Bowie High School is monitoring student computer use with Silent Watch from Adavi Inc. of Dunkirk. Silent Watch lets administrators monitor the contents of up to 49 users’ screens at any moment.

Although Bowie High career and technology teacher Silvia Shaw sometimes uses the program to make sure students are working on appropriate tasks, her main objective is to assist students if they get stuck on assignments, she said.

The program can block content by keyword, phrase or Web address, and it can prompt audible alarms to an administrator’s PC. It records every keystroke taken and Web address visited by users for a specified amount of time, and it clocks idle time.

MASSACHUSETTS
CITY CENTRAL. Cambridge city agencies are handling customer service—and will be handling a whole lot more—with a centralized system running Hansen Version 7 enterprise software from Hansen Information Technologies Inc. of Sacramento, Calif.

The city’s Public Works Department manages work orders and is compiling data on all the city’s assets through the system. Next will be a citywide permitting module, Public Works project manager Martha Bavaro said.

Cambridge plans to add other applications to the system, which runs under Unix on a Compaq Alpha 4100 server, stores data in an Oracle8 database and runs reports with Crystal Reports from Seagate Software of Scotts Valley, Calif.

MICHIGAN
FILE BY PHONE. Beginning this month, Michigan residents can file state taxes by phone through a system from Frank Solutions Inc. of Denver.

The company’s TelePath voice response software runs under Windows NT 4.0 on a 550-MHz Compaq ProLiant 1600 server that can handle 144 calls simultaneously.

The server communicates with a state-owned IBM mainframe that holds data and system rules, Frank sales director Greg Trainor said.

MINNESOTA
GET SMART. Gov. Jesse Ventura recently signed a document digitally using a smart card from DataKey Inc. of Burnsville.

DataKey’s cryptographic smart cards store digital signatures on a plastic card. DataKey partner ID Certify Inc. of Seattle will provide digital signature certification and repository services to the state.

MISSISSIPPI
GOING ELECTRONIC. The state is looking for a vendor to develop and manage an electronic benefits transfer system encompassing EBT processing, settlement and reconciliation; card production and distribution; point-of-sale links; and a call center and help desk.

The state annually issues $19 million in food stamp benefits over the counter or via mail, and $1.5 million in temporary assistance for needy families benefits by mail. It plans to first run a pilot in Rankin County and expand the program state-wide if the Legislature approves funding.

MISSOURI
BIG MOVE. The Transportation Department recently completed an e-mail system migration from IBM Profs, a mainframe messaging system, to Lotus Notes Version 4.5.

DOT officials used Missive Version 3.5 from Wingra Technologies of Madison, Wis., to connect the two messaging systems. DOT officials ran Missive under AIX Version 3.2.5 on an IBM 570 server with 64M of RAM. All 3,000 DOT employees are now using Lotus Notes Version 4.5 and will move to Version 5 soon.