Over the last 30 years, America has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on telecommunications and information systems. While business and industry have been at the forefront of these investments, federal, state, and local governments have joined this initiative. These government entities have a decided advantage in that they can learn from the lesson their colleagues in business and industry have learned in their early entry into the arena. For North Carolina state government departments and agencies, they can compare their potential in the following areas to determine the most productive investments.
One of the services with the most potential for economic developers is transmission of Geographic
Information Services data between the Center for Geographic Information Analysis (CGIA),
Department of Transportation, and local governments to facilitate industrial recruiting.
Other General Government Applications
Just as North Carolina’s vast highway system has proven that where there is access there is growth, the NCIH will also crisscross the state bringing new kinds of electronic broadband benefits. They are many current and potential applications that will benefit from the state’s telecommunication infrastructure, including the broadband capabilities of the NCIH.
Initial applications in this category include the interconnection of LANs. The number of LANs in state government are growing rapidly. Two underlying factors contribute to the rapid growth in LANs: (1) advances in technology have made it economically feasible for many employees to have desktop computing devices, and (2) existing data processing operations are changing from centralized to distributed processing. As LAN users benefit from sharing local and distributed databases, the need has emerged to inter-connect LANs. This expands the sharing of databases and requires high speed data links. (Narrowband access will deliver the information, but creates a network bottleneck for large volume transmission). Interconnecting multiple LANs enables state employees to share resources and information locally or remotely on a timely basis.
The Geographic Information System (GIS) and its related software are emerging as the standard for depicting databases of a geographic orientation. These applications require network transmission based on the thousands of software instructions which are necessary for each pixel (a picture element). The use of these programs for industrial recruitment and decision-making is widespread. A GIS is possible over the NCIH. GIS could search more than 50 databases to produce a map portraying features such as water and sewer lines, traffic lights, schools, roads and topographical and zoning information. This image-based application would be used for community planning and company site selection. Again, because the software instructions that populate a computer screen with graphics are so extensive, the time element becomes the most critical in operations heavily geared to image transport. As more and more image-type applications are put to use, a higher speed network to accommodate these user-friendly applications is required.The use of video teleconferencing enables state employees to participate in face-to-face meetings without leaving their offices. By transmitting high quality images and voice from one location to another, effective meetings can take place with minimal travel, reduced expense to the taxpayer, and more efficient use of the state’s time.
The 1995 General Assembly revised the state’s Public Records Law (GS.132-1) to require that a local government or state agency prepare and index when creating a computer database. The intent of this provision is to facilitate public access to the state’s electronic information. State government has numerous creative sites across the state where information is being created and stored. In addition, hundreds of databases are also being created in our educational and medical services arenas. Many of these databases could also be shared if the population knew of the databases and had appropriate access.The benefits of telecommuting are becoming increasingly apparent. This is where employees use their home as their primary office and electronically handle much of their assigned responsibilities. An example of this is a study more than 400 telecommuters in Los Angeles, conducted over an 18 month period, found that telecommuter productivity increased an average of 12.5 percent, or $6,100 per telecommuter, when compared with the productivity of comparable non-telecommuters. When other benefits were quantified, employers saved: an additional $2,400 per year for each telecommuter; 4,000 kilowatts in energy per year, as a result of reduced fuel consumption; and 30 percent in office and parking space. This study also showed that telecommuting afforded handicapped persons new employment opportunities.
Telework is another emerging reality which goes beyond telecommuting. Telework involves a headquarters that consists primarily of mobile workers who are equipped with the best portable computers and telecommunications devices. They spend the bulk of their time working independently from the headquarters site.
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