Brian Sweeting

Utopia is “a Utah interlocal agreement agency (17 founding cities) dedicated to accelerating economic development and quality of life for its citizens and businesses by deploying a publicly owned advanced telecommunications network over the last mile to all homes and businesses within member communities.”

I think Utopia is a great idea…individual agencies banding together, to build for its members, something that would be too costly for any single member to build on their own. It will result in first-class telecommunications infrastructure for its member communities as well as creating an economic opportunity companies in markets such as service providers (ISP, VoIP, cable television, VOD, etc), network electronics (switches, routers, etc.), network operations, physical plant construction and maintenance, and engineering.

I don’t believe this type of cooperation need be limited to telecommuncations infrastructure only. What about a similar agreement for providing an eGovernment services infrastructure that can be developed for the group as a whole and utilized by each one of its members. It is often said that local governments are slow to move when it comes to providing eGovernment services, and I believe the main reason for this is high cost and lack of understanding and resources. But if you can develop these services in an ASP (application service provider) model where they can be centralized, the cost and complexity is reduced dramatically.

Usually local governments have similar requirements to be met by an application. For example, multiple cities could use a single application for utility payments. Although there may be minor differences in the way it is implemented and in the presentation layer, the logic is essentially the same. (See a previous post on this concept.) I picture these applications being developed as a set of web services APIs similar to models used by Amazon and Google. This way we build open applications that can be interfaced using SOAP. This would better support the member organizations’ existing infrastructure and is completely scalable by extending the API.

Local governments have two choices when it comes to providing eGovernment services: 1) Develop it in-house or 2) Outsource it. Both choices are very costly. My proposal is choice number 3) Found an “interlocal agreement agency dedicated to decreasing the costs of taxpayers and increasing quality of service for its citizens and businesses by deploying publicly owned advanced eGovernment services to all residents and businesses within member communities.” Sound familiar?

For all those reading this who are involved with eGovernment, please share your comments by clicking the link below or send me an email..