Mashups smooth bumps between citizens and services

Volunteering at a soup kitchen occasionally or hammering nails for Habitat for Humanity might have satisfied some people's altruism, but Bobbie Wilbur went one better. She started a new career. In 2005, using her talents from a successful stint as a conultant for Deloitte LLP, Wilbur helped create The Center to Promote HealthCare Access in Oakland, Calif. and develop its One-e-App, an online service that targets a vastly underserved market: people in need.

One-e-App is a unique online service that marries a deserving individual or family with available benefits offered by state and local governments. For example, if an injured or sick person walks into a local clinic in California a staff member at the facility can use One-e-App to determine whether the patient is eligible for benefits so the clinic can be paid for medical services.

Using intermediaries to get people benefits is fine for now, but long-term it's ideal to push access to individuals. That, after all, is the power of software as a service. However, government agencies in California, whose cooperation is essential to the Center, have mostly been reluctant to eliminate the go-between process.

But in Arizona, Wilbur says, government agencies are hip to the value and efficiency of SaaS and citizens there already have direct access to One-e-App. She says a pilot program in Fresno will let individuals use the service themselves.

Before One-e-App Wilbur says benefit applicants had to hunt and peck their way through one agency after another to uncover the existence of benefits then file for each discretely, often with much of the same information. Many would give up before locating government services they qualified for.

One-e-App eliminates those inefficiencies by connecting the 2,222,922 users enrolled with the service through a simple browser to state and local government agencies' backend systems and their relevant benefit programs. The Center used mashup tools from Denodo Technologies Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif. to build and maintain its SaaS offering.

Wilbur says the mashup tools bridge differences between Web-to-client-server systems, Web-to-mainframes and Web-to-Web applications. Denodo's technology handles authentication and integration tasks as well as transforming an applicant's information for the various agency application forms and following each agencies unique business processes from beginning to end.

"It's complex and ever-changing," she says.

Although supposedly in the loop when an agency makes a change to an application, something that happens constantly, once in a while changes are made without notification. It doesn't take much of a change to create upheaval for One-e-App. Simply altering the coordinates of an input field can break things.

When that happens, Wilbur says, "we're caught in a scramble almost overnight make the change on our end."

Like many IT professionals, Wilbur seeks to impose order and logic onto chaos. She faces everything from ancient Unisys mainframes and their green screens to scads of Unix, Windows and Linux systems and their various user interfaces, adding up to a staggering number of application modules touched by One-e-App.

It's daunting work that's always in flux. But Wilbur is determined to get help to those in need as fast and as efficiently as possible.

"I just want to make it more rational for the people and the agencies," she concludes.