The Alaska Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) earlier this year put two of its most common transactions -- vehicle registration and the ordering and customising of license plates -- on the Internet. And already the agency is seeing the payoff.
"It hasn`t been live six months, and it has already paid for itself more than twice," says Mark Boyer, the state`s chief information officer. World Wide Web-based license registration has reduced the cost per renewal from about $8 to less than $1, and turn-around time on paperwork for vehicle registration has dropped from being six to eight weeks to three to five days. And with traditional wait times as much as two and a half hours at DMV offices, citizens can now renew their vehicles in about 100 seconds.
The state`s DMV, which spent $300,000 for the application, has done about 7,000 transactions over the Internet to date. Boyer estimated cost savings would only increase as more and more people switch to online transactions. The new system will also free up DMV staff members, who can focus on more complex, higher public-value transactions.
To do the job, the agency hired Software AG Americas Inc. to integrate its existing relational databases with the Web and interactive voice-response systems. SAGA used its EntireX middleware and iXpress Web development tools to create the application. The entire process took about six months.
"These tools give citizens Web access to the DMV process and do it at their level of technology, seamlessly," explains Eugene Frantz, director of marketing for middleware solutions at SAGA, based in Reston, Va. The Web-enabling tools are invisible to users, who are guided through an initial information gathering and authentication process and then to a secure part of the site where they can execute their transactions.
Boyer said he hopes to leverage this technology in all aspects of state government. "We want to take every renewal transaction - business licenses, occupational licenses, fishing and game licenses -- and put them into an electronic venue," he says.
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