Friday, March 17, 2000 BOSTON HERALD.

Boston's Web Site lives in the Past

By Thomas M. Keane Jr

     It's a tale of riches to rags.
     Boston's Web site, once hailed nationwide as the country's best municipal site, is now in tatters, ignored by the administration and wasting its potential.
     First unveiled in December 1995, the site (it's at www.cityofboston.com) has won a slew of awards. As recently as last October, Government Technology magazine named it Best of the Web.
     Let's see how good it is.
     One section lets you look at the mayor's schedule. The most recent item listed is a Christmas tree lighting on Mission Hill.
     Click on "public notices." There's one for the entire city, and it's for June 2,1999. How about the Boston Redevelopment Authority? The last press release was from April 1999. The most recent hearing listed was last September.
     The school department prominently notes that it is seeking applications for two seats on the School Committee. Those slots were filled in December.
     The Police Department offers 12 menu items. Five (including "department initiatives" and "news") are blank. The department's list of its "most wanted" criminals is from late 1998.
     The events list for Roxbury has only two upcoming items. One is Patriot's Day in April 2000. The other, an "evening of comedy and music," is put on by the West Roxbury Community Center.
     West Roxbury? Who's running this Web site? Californians?
     My personal favorite, however, is the Web site's section on the 'Year 2000 program." Remember Y2K? That was the computer "crisis" that was going to throw all of us back to the Stone Age.
     There we find a message from the mayor, solemnly intoning in words that are a cross between FDR and the Boy Scouts of America, "There's no reason to be afraid. just be prepared."
As far as the city's Web site is concerned, it's still 1999.
     So what happened?
     Designed by a young team of Web enthusiasts, the city's Web site truly was once the best in the nation. But those people, underpaid and frustrated by an administration that didn't support them, have all left. Now Boston's Management Information Services Department has gone from nimble and cutting edge to bureaucratic. It's run by Bill Hannon, an admittedly decent man who, tellingly, came from the city's printing operation,and has no computer background. When asked if there were any problems with the site he said there were none.
     With no one there to champion its cause, the site is being ignored. The city's Web site was designed so that people working at all city departments could update it daily. They did once; they no longer do. A quick tour, makes it clear that virtually no department has kept its information up-to-date (the exception being the Purchasing Department, which lists over 30 bids for this month alone).
     But the problem, goes deeper than simply a lack of maintenance. One sign of a good Web site is that it acts like a billboard, communicating information. But governments don't like to communicate information. For instance, there's a neat feature in Boston's site called "Who Am I?" Type in your address and it comes back telling you your neighborhood, your ward, your precinct and where you vote. But it won't tell you what day trash is picked up. Why? Public Works didn't participate.
     The City Council doesn't post its weekly agenda, or the minutes of its meetings. You can't find out what hearings are coming up before the Licensing Board, the Zoning Board of Appeals, or the Entertaining Licensing Board either.
     The second sign of a good Web site that it's interactive -- you can do things on it. Boston's Web site allows you to do a few transactions on line, but not many.
     The Assessing Department lets you enter an address and find out who owns a property, how much it was bought for and what it's worth today. You can even find out if your neighbors or your favorite politicians have been paying their property taxes. For example, two city councilors are currently listed as overdue on their property taxes -- one owes over $1,000, the other a paltry $5.64.
     Now if I were the city councilor who owed $5.64, I would quickly pay that on-line, the same way Americans pay for everything from books to plane tickets.
     But not in Boston. After much effort, the Web site's designers were able to persuade the city to allow them to let people pay auto excise taxes and parking tickets on line. it stops there, however. Insiders from MIS blame the city's chief financial Officer, Ed Collins, for imposing a freeze on any new e-commerce transactions, supposedly because of the fees charged by credit card companies. Collins denies this, but offers no explanation for why the potential for the Web site remains untapped.
     That potential is huge. Citizens and businesses interact constantly with City Hall. There is no reason why nearly all of those interactions couldn't be via the Web.      Back in 1995, when the site was launched, the Internet was little used or understood. No more. In December alone,' Boston's Web site had over 3,million hits.
     Boston's Web designers say their goal was to put people "on- line instead of in-line." But noon at City Hall still finds surly crowds wasting their lunch hours to transact business with the city. Meanwhile Boston's once promising Web site is broken and neglected.