I think they tracked about a 20 percent drop in paper transactions within the government agencies since the beginning of 1995. It's just a matter of making people more productive. For example, I communicate with my commissioners quite often. Rather than call them and not know if they are going to be there at that time, I can just sit down and bang out a couple of sentences, send it off, and I'll have the answer within a matter of minutes if they are around, or in hours if they are not. Government generally is faced with the same imperatives to increase productivity that the private sector has been through in the last 10 years.
Government is sort of the last to get it.
If we were a company, the analogy would be that we have falling revenues and fiercer competition. Ever since the invention of the hammer, technology is the way to increase the productivity of an individual. That's the way I see technology within our state. E-mail is just the tip of the iceberg. You can share the information faster and more broadly.