Earlier this month when Van Buren Township announced a new service to send interested residents “public safety threats and community events via web, e-mail, and cell phone,” the small metro Detroit government was embarking on a new approach to providing basic government services.

michigan website stillWith the Jan. 14 announcement, Van Buren Township joins the swelling ranks of governments across Michigan experimenting with new e-government offerings that typically promote citizen convenience and often lower costs, recognizing a new public sector reality to do more with less.

“It’s a no brainer,” says Forrest Morgeson, an adjunct lecturer at Eastern Michigan University, referring to Van Buren Township’s new community information service. “It’s extremely inexpensive for government to do this kind of thing and it creates essentially a new service, an up-to-the-minute interaction between government and citizen.”

Morgeson, also a researcher with the American Customer Satisfaction Index, adds that it’s all part of a new trend toward virtual government, especially moving services to the internet.

“I think a vast majority of how government interfaces with citizens is open to being moved online,” he says. Moving services online is appropriate, he says, “whenever you have a process that in the past required going to a physical location.”

He adds that saving trips to government offices not only saves money and time for both government and citizen alike, there’s also a simplifying dynamic even if he couches it in language that might sound hostile to person-to-person interactions. “In all likelihood, embracing e-government makes the process less complex and less difficult because you’re taking other human beings out of the equation,” he says.

Part of the same technological advances that gave birth to ATMs and travel websites like Side Step, displacing many bank tellers and travel agents in the process, e-government can seem a perfect fit for cash-strapped governments struggling to cut costs wherever possible.

Larry Freed, president and CEO of Ann Arbor-based ForeSee Results, a website customer satisfaction research firm, describes the trend as a classic win-win scenario.

“What e-government really allows governments to do is get the best of both worlds. Very rarely are you able to lower your costs and improve the products or services you’re offering, but e-government is the opposite of that,” he says. “The operating costs via the web are a fraction of the cost of printing public documents or staffing branch offices. So there’s a huge opportunity to save money.”

State government updating e-services as fast as possible

Michigan Department of Information Technology spokesman Kurt Weiss boils down the state’s approach to e-government to a catchy slogan.

“Moving everything online to get you out of the lines, that’s been our little tag line here,” he says.

Weiss ticks off a long list of services now available to users of state websites, including the Business One Stop, Helping Hands, and a new online criminal history access tool called ICHAT that for a $10 fee provides all public records contained in the Michigan criminal history records maintained by the state police information center. Those services are above and beyond many other more basic e-government services, like online license plate renewals, applying for unemployment benefits or searching for birth, death, marriage or divorce records.

Weiss concedes that one of the state’s most recent and ambitious online service offerings — a caseworker social services tool called Bridges –- has provoked some controversy. Bridges launched statewide last September, eliminating much of the paperwork needed to process eligibility for public assistance programs like food stamps, but it also included a learning curve for its users.

“Caseworkers are now having to learn a new tool, a new technology tool in order to process the eligibility claims for people in the state,” he says. “The pain there is the DHS workers have to learn a new tool, but the good news is it goes from them having to use three different systems to one automated system.”

Weiss adds that Bridges is “the largest IT implementation the state has ever done,” taking three years to complete.

Freed, whose company routinely measures customer satisfaction with government websites, gives the state of Michigan’s many websites a better-than-average grade, but he faults the lack of standardization across the sites.

“If you just go to their site map and click on one of the departments you’ll get one set of navigation, and if you go to the homepage of Michigan.gov, you’ll get a different set of navigation,” he notes as just one example. “Those are the kinds of things that are a challenge because each department, each agency’s function often controls their own website, and it’s really hard to standardize across all those groups, but it would be a huge advantage and a huge improvement to the user experience.”

Detroit still a bit behind the curve

Asked how Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is embracing e-government alternatives as a way to enhance city services and shave costs, Edward Cardenas, the mayor’s press secretary, tells Michigan Messenger that it’s a work in progress.

“In the coming weeks and months we are looking to use social media for the mayor and members of his administration to better connect with the community and share his programs and goals,” Cardenas says, adding that the city currently accepts online payments of property taxes and parking tickets. “These services are a convenience and help reduce trips downtown,” he says.

Cardenas added, however, that it’s too soon to know if any of the Bing administration’s current efforts can help, even marginally, with the city’s mounting budget deficit.

“We are not at the point of being able to determine whether there will be cost savings (certainly there will be with the replacement of hard copies, etc. with on-line content), or just an increase in efficiency and message delivery,” he writes in a follow up e-mail.

Freed describes Bing’s desire to better utilize social media as a communications tool as a plus. But he adds a cautionary note.

“The one thing I would add to that is the volume of visitors searching for information on the (city’s) website is going to still dwarf the volume of visitors searching for information on Facebook or Twitter,” he says.

A higher value proposition, Freed adds, is for local government’s like the city of Detroit or the state of Michigan to understand a concept he dubs “channel completion.” He sketches an example to illustrate the point.

“If you have a bad experience at irs.gov you’re not going to go pay your taxes in Mexico instead. There’s really no competition. You’re going to pay your taxes. But there’s actually completion among the channels, that if I have a bad experience on the web or can’t find what I’m looking for I’m going to go use a more expensive channel,” he says. “That’s what makes the satisfaction and usability so important for these websites.”

Freed says governments across the board need to “understand why people are coming to your websites, and why they’re going to the wrong places” in order to respond effectively.

Morgeson says going forward, there’s really no alternative to the cost-saving possibilities of e-government, especially in a state like Michigan.

“Certainly Michigan, with its budget problems, would be better off moving as much as they can to cheaper and cheaper forms of interaction with citizens,” he says. “And frankly, given that the public labor pool here is being shrunk because of budgetary problems, I don’t think they’re going to have a choice in the long run.”