Tennessee renews NIC Web portal contract
The state uses a self-funded model to pay online services, in which the contractor pays for Web portal development costs but makes money from convenience fees.
Tennessee government officials have signed a new five-year, multimillion dollar contract with NIC to continue to manage the state’s Web portal.
The state issued a competitive bid to manage the e-government services this May after NIC's original five-year contract ended Aug. 27. Tennessee’s commissioner of finance and administration approved the new contract, which began Aug. 28.
The state uses a self-funded model to pay online services, which means that NIC will pay for their development and make back its investment by charging convenience fees for transactional applications.
In the past five years, the company has helped develop more than 130 interactive online services, such as driver's license renewals, state park reservations and professional license renewals. Since 2000, more than 31 million e-government transactions have been processed.
“The new contract is asking for a continuation of our portal management responsibilities plus an expansion of our online service offerings,” NIC spokesman Christopher Neff wrote in an e-mail. “Two such services that will launch over the next several months are a criminal justice portal and a one-stop business registration system.”
Neff said the contract is in the multimillion dollar range. He said he didn’t know the exact value because revenues may fluctuate when using the self-funded model, which is based on the adoption of existing services and the types of new applications that are launched.
The company, which is based in Olathe, Kan., provides portal management and online applications for 17 states and numerous local governments.