One-stop licensing portal project comes with challenges, says West Virginia’s CIO
West Virginia’s top technology official said she’s facing an aggressive timeline to develop a portal for accessing all of the state’s permitting and licensing information from a single online location.
The effort, outlined in a bill introduced during the state’s legislative session this year, is to culminate with a “one-stop shop” where residents can apply for hunting licenses or renew their driver’s licenses. Heather Abbott, the state’s chief information officer, told StateScoop in a recent interview that she only has one year to get the portal online, a rapid turnaround given some of the technical challenges she foresees.
“We have a large percentage of our state that’s on older systems, so there may be a need to rewrite some of these systems to get them where it will even interact with what we have,” she said. “So there could be efforts there in modernization, which is a good thing. Any excuse to modernize and make things better is a great thing.”
A growing number of states are developing “single sign-on” applications or “one-stop” portals where residents can access a host of services without needing to create separate accounts for numerous government websites.
Developing software isn’t necessarily difficult, but taking an inventory of the state’s many agencies, programs and technical platforms, and then finding a way to make them all work together can get complicated, Abbott said.
“Funding is going to be [another challenge], because at this point we’re not sure how much it’s going to cost yet,” she said. “We don’t know what we need to do as far as application development, what APIs we might have to use to pull information in, and once we have all that information we’ll have a better idea of what the cost is going to be.”
