BUSINESS IN BRIEF

Accenture and the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation have developed a portal that eventually will enable more than 900,000 professionals and businesses to register and pay for licenses and permits over the Internet. Its formal opening is scheduled for August. The DBPR system is expected to take two years to roll out agencywide.ACS announced a technology outsourcing agreement with the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California.

Under the three-year agreement, ACS will manage Stanford's NT and Unix server environment and provide onsite support staff to Stanford's Graduate School of Business. The agreement also includes providing a 24 x 7 help desk solution that supports the school's desktop needs.Ciber, Sun Microsystems Inc. and Isovia Inc. have developed a wireless case management solution called mGovernment Case Management. It enables mobile federal, state and local government employees, such as social workers and parole and probation officers, to input case data, update files, receive alerts and respond to requests while in the field, said Rick Bolin, Ciber's wireless national practice leader.

Prototypes of the solution, which is compatible with any cellular phone, smart phone, pager, personal digital assistant or Microsoft CE device, have been tested by government agencies. Ciber is talking to several states and one federal agency about adopting it.The U.S. Postal Service has tapped Lockheed Martin's Distribution Technologies unit of Oswego, N.Y., to upgrade the Postal Service's Integrated Data System in a contract valued at $16 million.

The system will integrate data from various information systems at Postal Service processing centers. The upgrade will let Postal Service officials get nearly real-time information on mail volumes and flow so they can better deploy workers to where they're needed to keep heavy volumes moving. Lockheed will lead a team of subcontractors that includes Compaq Computer Corp. and Microsoft Corp. Maximus was the sole bidder on the California Department of Health Services, Office of Medi-Cal Procurement. Maximus will provide enrollment broker services for a statewide health care options program.

The company's bid for the base contract was $182.6 million. The Maximus proposal also included additional enhancements to the scope of the program effort that, if selected by the state, would substantially increase the value of the contract.

The California contract is for three years with three additional one-year renewal options. The work is a continuation of the company's work in the revenue maximization area, under which Maximus personnel scrutinize grants from the federal government in an effort to collect any outstanding funds that might be available under those grants but not yet in the state treasury.
PEC Solutions announced that the Social Security Administration has awarded the company a contract to assist Social Security in the development of an agencywide strategic focus and direction for future public-key-infrastructure implementations.

PEC Solutions will survey other large corporations and government agencies to conduct a "best practices" assessment of other PKIs. PEC also will help SSA to develop a customer service strategy to support PKI by defining and documenting customer service requirements.

The company will evaluate current PKI pilot programs within SSA for technical and policy interoperability with other agencies and industry partners. Finally, PEC will provide SSA with a set of recommendations regarding architecture, hardware, software and staffing requirements to consider when implementing future PKI solutions.The move toward more modern voting systems after the Florida election debacle continues. After casting their votes through more conventional voting procedures, Cumberland County, Pa., voters tried the new technology through a partnership with Cumberland County officials and VoteHere, an election-software company.

The Pennsylvania Department of State contracted with VoteHere to supply its voting technology for pilots in three Cumberland county precincts. This is the state's first public-sector trial of a technology that may be the next step toward secure precinct-based online voting.

This system would connect the precincts to the counties, and increase the security, speed and accuracy of election results. The Governor's Voting Modernization Task Force is expected to evaluate the results and develop recommendations this fall.

These briefs are composed of selected excerpts from the BB&T Capital Markets publication, "A&D/B2G/B2E/G2C Weekly Review" by Thomas Meagher.