Courtesy / GovWebworks
Tom Lovering
Updated: March 24, 2021
Q&A: GovWebworks says pandemic is driving new demand for online government services
Courtesy / GovWebworks
GovWebworks, a division of Portland software development firm Portland Webworks, has seen an uptick in pandemic-driven contracts.
GovWebworks, a division of Portland software development firm Portland Webworks, has recently seen an uptick in pandemic-driven business.
The GovWebworks team has partnered with 211 Maine and United Ways of Maine to make it easier to find help during the pandemic via the 211maine.org website. The developer has also been working with the Maine Office of Behavioral Health to create the StrengthenME.com website, which provides free anxiety management and resiliency resources for people experiencing stress from the pandemic.
Most recently, GovWebworks collaborated with the state of Idaho to create an online COVID-19 vaccine pre-registration system (see sidebar).
While GovWebworks focuses on applications for government clients, the parent company handles the private sector. Since its founding in 1999, revenue and head count have grown steadily, Portland Webworks says, with the staff increasing from 12 in 2008 to 28 by early 2020. After a slight contraction at the start of the pandemic, new positions are opening up again.
The focus on project-based work means the team works on four or five development projects at any given time, with a larger portfolio of maintenance and support for 20 to 25 clients. About 80% of revenue comes from public sector clients. Commercial clients have included IDEXX Laboratories, L.L.Bean, WEX and Sappi North America.
Serving state, local, and federal government agencies in states including Maine, Idaho, Washington and Minnesota, GovWebworks is part of a national movement to improve digital government services.
Mainebiz asked Tom Lovering, GovWebworks’ director of client engagement, about demand the company is seeing and the forecast for the future.
Here’s an edited transcript.
Mainebiz: Where does GovWebworks fit into this movement to improve digital government services?
Tom Lovering: Government struggles to attract and retain good talent, so they need to look toward contractors. There’s a whole industry that serves the government. It tends to be characterized by very big consultants that charge a lot of money. That’s great if governments can afford it. But smaller states like Maine or Idaho don’t always have that money.
That’s where we found our niche. We’ve grown our business on the message that we’re more nimble and agile, and we still have great depth of experience.
MB: How can digital government services be improved?
TL: Consumer expectations have changed. Governments have to meet people where they are to make their programs effective. They’ve had to modernize the way they deliver these programs. There’s a huge spectrum around what that looks like.
It can be as simple as making information more easily accessible, easier to understand and easier to find, and doing that online without people having to come into an office.
It’s been a long-term initiative for governments to try to make everything easier to do, because it has a payoff for them as well. It’s less overhead to handle applications online, for example. The lack of in-person service over the last year has driven some of that further.
MB: How did GovWebworks get started?
TL: Portland Webworks always had public sector clients. We worked with the state of Maine almost throughout the entire existence of our company and developed a portfolio of public sector success.
We wanted to roll that out beyond the state of Maine. But describing what we did was difficult. So we came up with a simple name, GovWebworks. It was initially just a placeholder, but it became such a hit that we stuck with it. We decided to do much more of our marketing and outreach under that brand, which has helped us to continue to grow our portfolio. Now we have about a dozen states we’ve worked in, from the West Coast to Maine.
MB: How did the vaccine preregistration system for Idaho come about?
TL: We’ve worked with Idaho for about eight years, on a number of projects. As a smaller company, we have the advantage of being more nimble and we were able to help them respond to the need to offer a statewide solution for vaccine preregistration. Idaho wanted to provide one signup for everybody and let the providers, on the back end, come in as they have vaccines available and claim people in their area. It operates as a clearinghouse.
MB: In what ways have you worked with the state of Maine on pandemic-related programs?
TL: We have a relationship with 211 Maine [a free information and referral service] that goes back a couple of years. Their website didn’t provide a great user experience. So they came to us and said, 'Can you help us improve the web experience, so people can find what they’re looking for?'
That was accelerated once lockdown happened a year ago. We were able to roll it out early last summer, and that greatly improved the experience of people going to 211 looking for help.
MB: Could you provide a user experience example that needed improvement?
TL: It was as simple as someone saying, 'I’m looking for a mental health resource in the Topsham area,' and then getting a list for the whole state. And then you’d get, say, a food bank in the list. What’s that doing in there? There were strange, muddled results.
MB: How do you fix that?
TL: Part of it is called data hygiene — digging into the data bank and refining the search.
We repurposed those same tools for the new StrengthenME campaign [offering free stress management and resiliency resources to anyone in Maine experiencing anxiety related to the pandemic].
MB: What’s on the horizon for your Maine-based projects?
TL: We are part of a team that is tasked with development of the Maine Department of Education’s Rethinking Remote Education Ventures program [awarded $16.9 million by the U.S. Department of Education to provide a centralized web-based collaboration hub for educators to generate innovative remote learning models.] The program predates the pandemic but was amplified by the sudden need to do remote teaching.
MB: Did the pandemic change your projects?
TL: Yes, it’s been a bit of rollercoaster. We had projects for a lot of government organizations whose priorities changed overnight. So a lot of development stopped on longer-term projects we were working on.
Other systems were immediately under pressure. One project we worked on in Minnesota, in workforce development, has helped match displaced workers with in high-demand positions. We were able to pivot and help them reassess their content.
It’s a bit anecdotal, but I’d say that, in the last month or so, we’ve seen planning and new project activity starting to return to the levels they were a year ago, before everything stopped.
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