Accenture puts pedal to e-gov

With a solution aimed at bringing governments and their citizens together in the online world, Accenture this week unveiled its eGovernment Accelerator at the Microsoft Government Leaders' Conference in Seattle.

The Accenture eGovernment Accelerator is designed to help governments operate more efficiently by providing tools to deliver government services seamlessly across agencies via the Internet. It also offers a vehicle for governments to move from paper to online transaction processing.

"The eGovernment Accelerator is a combination of tools and services that will help clients achieve their objectives of bringing valuable services online," said Iain Lopata, a partner at Accenture. "These tools create an environment that allow a client to start small but scale fast, increasing citizen and business satisfaction and reducing the cost of delivering services."

Bill Gates, Microsoft Corp.'s chairman and chief software architect, demonstrated the solution, which is powered by a number of companies, including Microsoft's own .Net Enterprise Server technologies. The eGovernment Accelerator also incorporates Avanade Inc.'s infrastructure and development tools and uses JetForm Corp.'s e-forms solution for the deployment of electronic forms and data capture.

Most of the eGovernment Accelerator's government clients are at the federal and state level, but Accenture has also worked with large cities and counties, Lopata said. He added that government users are already requesting wireless and mobile enabling of the eGovernment Accelerator, and Accenture is working on adding that feature.

The new tool's price depends on the size of the implementation, but "clients have successfully run pilot programs for under $150,000," Lopata said.