To determine which applications to develop next, Feuer and Zito have been meeting with IT staff members and department heads from other county agencies to hear which projects they will be requesting and to determine whether Web services would be the appropriate tool for the job. "We expose the technical staff from those departments to the concept of Web services and what it could do for them," Feuer says. After department leaders have presented lists of potential projects and those projects are approved and funded, they go through a technical review with Feuer and his staff. "If Web services is the best fit, we'll recommend that for a project," he adds.

Feuer is also looking across all county departments to determine the functions and applications for which there is the most widespread need, such as a property tax application that could be used by numerous county agencies. He also expects some of the next applications to be focused on facilitating county employee self-service, including access to personnel, payroll, and time and leave systems.

To enable this ongoing development, Zito plans to reallocate staff and establish select developers for a special Web services group to provide development support. So far, Miami-Dade has invested approximately $400,000 in its Web services development. Of that, $150,000 came from the police department database-access project budget, and $250,000 from existing training and consulting budgets.

Feuer and Zito report that there haven't been any major technological obstacles. The greater issues have been and will continue to be retraining and reallocating staff and responsibilities. Those issues will play a major part in their efforts to bolster the Web services development. "The approach is bringing people in for projects and training them," Zito says. "It's going to take place on a project-by-project basis." She plans to strengthen Feuer's staff so that it can serve as a support unit to other developers within the county's IT department and at other county agencies.

As the county gets deeper into Web services development, Feuer also plans to deploy Web services monitoring and testing tools. "We want to know when things are breaking, why they're breaking and how they're breaking so that we can troubleshoot them quickly and fix them," he says. He expects to have such tools in place by the end of this year.