Coordinated state-local information systems offer the hope of integrated services to citizens, and streamlined operations within government. Many government and professional organizations are searching for ways to make these essential systems more successful. But we lack reliable information about what makes state-local projects succeed or fail. A state-local information system is one that links state and local agencies together in a coherent service delivery or administrative environment. Such a system facilitates information sharing for the achievement of mutual program or administrative goals.
The Best Practices in State-Local Information Systems project, sponsored by the New York State Governor's Task Force on Information Resource Management, identified and documented a set of practices that led to effective state-local systems in eleven such projects.
Information needed to support the project objective was gathered in four ways: a literature and current practice review, standard project description, a survey of both state and local participants in each project, and focus group interviews with the project teams.
The final report discusses the findings of the project by detailing the systemic restraints on effective state-local information systems, and recommends next steps for mitigating the effects of the constraints.