Former fed predicts big things for e-government
Online car registration will be one of the first electronic government successes, according to Oracle Corp.'s top government marketer, Jack Pellicci.
By Mark A. KellnerSpecial to GCNOnline car registration will be one of the first electronic government successes, according to Oracle Corp.'s top government marketer, Jack Pellicci.A retired Army brigadier general and senior vice president of the company's Global Services Industries group, Pellicci believes online registration is a logical extension of things already happening in the government.'A lot of activity is centered on electronic commerce,' he said, and a focus on e-business 'is consistent with the National Performance Review, which is not just about changed processes, but changing the whole way you do business.'Senior managers don't care about trends such as open source code, 'they care about how to create an organization that works better and costs less,' Pellicci said. They're 'interested not just in a technology but in a common concept' to run their systems.Pellicci sketched a scenario in which government e-business operations take advantage of computer-communications convergence, mass customization of services, the shift away from client-server models and eventually what he called e-everything, a mingling of e-business, e-government and e-learning.Under his scenario, government services via the Internet can accommodate users on wireless phones, as well as PCs. Such moves are beginning, he said, with Sprint Corp.'s wireless Web phone and the so-called Web clipping function and two-way e-mail of the Palm VII handheld device from Palm Computing Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif.Pellicci warned that agency systems administrators must take account of the ongoing shift when they design and implement Web systems. He suggested it is important to expose government users to the best of business applications to leverage their understanding.He pointed to European experiments such as Infoville in Valencia, Spain, and Bayern Online in Munich, Bavaria, as examples of what public-private partnerships can accomplish.In the United States, he said, Oracle is working with the Transportation Department to add the company's iStore software to various permit and fee functions. The first application went online last year, he said, at the Office of Motor Carrier and Highway Safety, where carriers can register online for operating certificates and truckers can pay fines via the Web.Pellicci said an Oracle consulting unit enhanced iStore for federal use, building an interface to Treasury Department-mandated services provided by Bixler Inc. of Washington, which accepts and processes the payments, letting Transportation bypass paper or voice transactions.Future DOT implementations, he said, will include stores for purchase of training materials, payment of pipeline assessments, and processing of Freedom of Information Act requests, civil fines, cargo and vessel movement statistics requests, and other payment-linked services.'The ability of iStore to present products and services to the public via the Web and to handle credit card payments fits well with government initiatives to provide better service and makes this one of the first federal sites to do so,' said David Kleinberg, deputy chief financial officer of Transportation, in a statement released by Oracle.Upcoming releases of Oracle8i will support the recently published SQL:1999 international standard. Oracle officials said the company is the first to implement the next-generation Structured Query Language's basic level of object-oriented features.Release 2 of Oracle8i has seen fast adoption, they said, with 5,000 organizations buying the software and developers downloading about 1,000 copies of Oracle8i for Linux.
Oracle's Pellicci sees less costly, customized services evolving from business-government partnerships
A new standard
A new standard