TO: ���� ����������� INFORMATION RESOURCE OF MAINE (InforME) BOARD
FROM:����������� KELLY HOKKANEN, INFORME STAFF
DATE: ����������� SEPTEMBER 26, 2001
RE:������������������ MINUTES OF THE SEPTEMBER 26, 2001 INFORME BOARD MEETING

MEMBERS IN ATTENDANCE:

Secretary of State Dan Gwadosky
Tamara Dukes
Jaynie Higgins
Deb Carson
Dick Davies
Marilyn Lutz
Val Wood
Rudolph Naples
Anne Schink
Jeff Harmon
Gary Nichols

OTHERS IN ATTENDANCE:

WELCOME

Chairman, Secretary of State Gwadosky, began the meeting by welcoming all board members present.

SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS

Note: Val Wood is designee to vote for Dick Hinkley at this meeting.

Secretary Gwadosky introduced the first topic for the Board's consideration, the fee for Interactive UCC Filings. He mentioned that this completes the initial wave of services for SOS negotiated with InforME. InforME's share would be $1.50 per transaction. Tim Poulin from CEC is here.

Poulin: Uniform Commercial Code filings are legal filings against commercial companies (liens). Currently the office processes 80-90,000 filings per year (on paper). Recent changes in legislation now mandate the office to have a 2-day turnaround on filings and 3-day turnaround on UCC searches. The UCC Interactive Search service was put online in August of this year. So far, our figures show that greater than 50% of all searches are now being done online, and searches overall have increased about 20%. Users are principally banks, financial institutions, and law firms. The online filing application will be well received by customers since it will greatly enhance the speed of the filing process. The State of Kansas initiated online filing in July and has an acceptance rate of about 80%.

Dukes: SOS office has been preparing this population for some time for electronic services. But to achieve this adoption rate (for Searches) so fast is really unprecedented. We will be allowing people to file whether they are subscribers or not. Individuals can pay the statutory filing fee by credit card.

Poulin: We are also adding the ability for users to save a file, get approval from their customer or client, then come back to the site to officially file it.

Chair: What is the timeframe?

Poulin: We are putting together the first user testing within the next 30 days.

Chair: Where do we stand with the Corporations "virtual office"?

Poulin: Washington and Deleware are doing this - just a handful of states. We will be on the leading edge.

Board Member: Move to approve
Board Member: Second.
Vote was unanimously approved.

Secretary Gwadosky welcomed our guest, Dan Boutilier from the City of Portland, to present an additional service for the City of Portland: online payment of parking tickets.

Dukes: We have more than 20 SLAs with municipalities now, because of Rapid Renewal. This service represents our second municipal service. We are acting as an ASP (Application Service Provider). We create an application once and then invite people to join it. The larger communities will be very excited about adopting the Parking application as well. The fee will be $1.50 per transaction for this service. The City chose not to add the fee on top, but to absorb the fee, so that there will be no disincentive to paying online.

Dan Boutilier (City of Portland): Parking tickets is one of the most difficult challenges for the city and seemed an ideal candidate for an e-commerce application. We have noticed that people do pay their tickets when they realize they have outstanding tickets. We've begun marketing the new service with the Rapid Renewal letters - they will have the address "portlandparkingtickets.com." Our new parking tickets will also contain the web address. This will also help us with tickets issued to folks from out of state - we have no way of billing them right now.

Question: I know there is a forgiveness policy. Is it easier to administer that policy when handling payments online?

Boutilier: Yes

Comment: I will be interested in your adoption rates, since this seems similar to our Violations application.

Board Member: Motion to accept SLA.
Board Member: Second.
Vote was unanimous to approve the SLA.

Question: What are the other e-commerce applications that Portland is interested in?
Boutilier: Dog license renewals. Inspections. It was a very smooth project, and I'm very impressed with how quickly it went. Shaye did an excellent job.

Chair: Other items we will be discussing today: GM Report, an issue about IF&W, new Board position open. Cindy Butts, the Exec Director of the Realtors Association will be filling the position (it is in the works). We are still waiting to fill the Banking position.

GENERAL MANAGER�S REPORT

Tamara Dukes presented the highlights of the General Manager�s Report.

Our most exciting news since the last meeting is our 3rd place award in the Best of the Web contest. The awards, sponsored by the Center for Digital Government and Government Technology Magazine, are the "Oscars" for us. There were 396 entries for state and local websites, more than just state portals. California was first, Pennsylvania was 2nd, Maine 3rd. This has shown us that we can be a small state and still make a big splash. The Governor's office held a press conference where we were recognized by the Governor for this award. The Governor specifically thanked Secretary Gwadosky and the Board for their leadership.

The Center for Digital Government's judges told us that the state portals overall have really improved in the last year. Thank you to the Board for the part you have played in this achievement. We also received a #2 rating in the Digital State Survey for e-commerce and in business regulation.

Chair: We are going to include a note about those awards when we send the Strategic Plan to the legislature.
Dukes: We also ranked well in the recent Brown University study. Maine had moved up dramatically since the previous study.
Davies: I'd like to recognize your staff for all the work they have done that contributed to these awards.
Comment: I'd also like to compliment the programmers specifically. They make "invisible skyscrapers", the amazing things that go behind the applications.
Dukes: Thank you!
Back to the General Manager's report�I want to mention again the remarkable adoption rates. Marketing by the agencies themselves has made a huge difference in these services. Our time has changed somewhat in that we're spending a lot more time supporting the services we've built, rather than just building applications. These services are never done. They continue to evolve and need some changes.

More towns have launched for Rapid Renewal.

InforME: In two weeks we�ll be at the MMA conference talking about RR and Portland Parking Tickets, and we expect there will be increased interest after that as well.

FINANCIAL REPORTS

Dukes: We included July�s report.� We�re concerned about growth, and there are some revenue-negative services that we�re operating right now.

Any questions on the GM Report?

Question: Do you share applications with other portals?
Dukes: Yes we do. We can offer applications to our other NIC states and we can use applications they have created, to be customized for our needs.
Question: Are there applications here that we can share?
Dukes: RR, professional license renewal, campground reservations�
Comment: I wonder, if we know what is available, if it might trigger ideas here.
Dukes: We have a NIC marketing conference next week and each portal will be showing its top 10 applications, and we will be bringing that information back here.

Chair: Page 11 financial report - I'd like to talk about IF&W for a moment. We signed a SLA 2 years ago with them. They didn't have a backend for license fulfillment, so InforME agreed to do that, anticipating that it would switch over to MOSES. InforME has been doing licenses manually. I have concern whether that is a disproportionate resource allocation on our part, to continue to do this, especially based on revenue. The total revenue for us through IF&W is a negative $885 (from January through today). We've talked with Rick Record about this concern. He indicated this morning that he understands this is a problem and my understanding is that they are willing to take over fulfillment after December this year. I don't think we need to take any action as a Board at this time.

NEW BOARD MEMBER

Chair: Mentioned earlier Cynthia Butts. Hopefully she�ll be at our next meeting. We�re working on filling the Banking slot.

FUTURE MEETINGS

October 17, 1-3

November 15, 1-3