Government portals where citizens can access and submit secure information are increasing in popularity. Many portals started simply as a collection of ”who to call” lists and links to department sites. Then, downloadable forms were added for printing, but a lack of online submission capabilities meant constituents still had to bring the completed paperwork to an office or staff had to manually enter data from paper that started as an electronic form.
Then came online transactions. Web-based applications could accept information entered by a citizen or business owner and then could do something with it, such as credit a payment for a utility bill or route a license application to the right employee. However, these “transaction-processing” apps were all created with custom code and did not have a direct integration into back-end systems like finance, case management and document management.
Checkout this Center for Digital Governnment’s Issue Brief on The New Government Portal.