This is something a lot of people are taking steps to address, and we would encourage you to move faster toward an online-driven procurement system, because it will benefit all parties. Certainly there are questions of public participation, the digital divide, and how to get access to the broader population. We know there is public demand for this. A recent survey of U.S. adults found that 60 percent believe Internet access to local governments would strengthen ties and improve service, and 55 percent felt that governments should adopt the approaches used in the private sector. We have used the Internet as the core backbone of everything we do at our company.
Integration is absolutely essential to achieve velocity, and removing frictions from a transaction.
If you think about it, there is a lot of friction out there in the world in terms of how much time and cost is inserted into these processes. Information creates a vacuum that removes a lot of that friction. But it also requires a rethinking of processes. We can now deliver services that we could not deliver before. For example, we now turn our inventory about sixty times a year versus about six times a year for many of our competitors.