This professional report attempts to examine, evaluate and analyze how state governments plan and implement electronic government (e-government) systems. The primary focus of this research is the State of Texas e-government system, TexasOnline. However, I also evaluated programs in California, Iowa, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Washington.

The goal is to compare these states' e-government planning and implementation processes to reveal the pattern of best practices necessary to develop an effective e-government system. Most importantly, the report asks the questions: 1) what resources and investments are being made? 2) who are the decision makers (i.e. investments, planning, design), 3) Who chooses the skilled professionals to design an e-government system and troubleshoot any technical issues? Theoretically, after these and other questions have been answered some patterns should emerge in these areas to reflect how state public leaders choose to finance, plan, and implement e-government systems.

Finally, various qualitative research methods such as: interviews, surveys, participant and non-participant observations, literature reviews and content analysis assist to extract and analyze the data. The anticipated outcome of this research report is to add to the existing "best practices" guidelines to planning and implementing an effective and efficient e-government system, to include safeguards for the issues of accessibility and uniformity of online documents.