USPS Takes On E-Commerce, Despite Criticism
USPS Takes On E-Commerce, Despite Criticism
(09/01/00, 5:19 p.m. ET) By L. Scott Tillett, InternetWeek
The U.S. Postal Service this month embarks on a series of e-commerce initiatives designed to ensure the agency has a role in the Internet Age, even as some critics question whether it’s appropriate for a government agency to invest so much in e-business.
The Postal Service, a self-funded government agency, is increasingly competing with businesses that deliver information to businesses and consumers over the Internet. While some argue that the government should allow the private sector to take on more of the Postal Service’s business, postal officials stand by the projects.
“The explanation is that we’ll do what we do more efficiently as technology creates the opportunity for efficiency,” said Robert G. Krause, the agency’s vice president of e-commerce. “There’s nothing more efficient than avoiding the handling of a piece of mail.”
To what extent the agency will tap into the Internet is one of several discussion topics scheduled for a Senate hearing this week.
Meanwhile, the agency is preparing to launch a pilot of an initiative for turning electronic documents into printed mailers. Under the Mailing Online program, businesses will send the Postal Service electronic documents they want turned into hard-copy mail.
The businesses will also share mailing lists with the Postal Service, and the agency will farm out the print job to a regional printer or printers based on the region to be covered and their proximity to recipients. Once the job is printed, it would be handed off to a nearby postal center, which would take over addressing and mailing responsibilities.
The Internet shortcut to the printers should save the Postal Service several steps in the process of sorting and transporting mail across the nation. And it would cost the sender about 40 cents per item, including printing and postage, Krause said.
Also this month, the Postal Service will begin deploying Internet-enabled computers in a few post offices in rural America — such as in Alaska, Missouri, and North Carolina — to determine if the so-called “digital divide” between the nation’s wired and the unwired is dictated by economic or educational factors.
Additionally, the agency this month is expected to announce an expansion of a service that lets businesses use the Web or e-mail to check the status of their bulk mailings.
The projects might be a harbinger of much larger things to come. In an interview, Krause hinted at the possibility of the Postal Service becoming a secure hub that companies and individuals might use to conduct e-business with federal agencies, states, and municipalities.
The service might mirror the agency’s eBillPay service, which lets a user go to the Postal Service’s website and submit information on which bills to pay, to whom, on which dates, and from which bank accounts. The service relies on technology from vendor CheckFree Corp. The service was launched in April and already has more than 10,000 regular users, Krause said.
Bill presentment and payment via standard mail accounts for $17 billion of the agency’s $65 billion per year in business, Krause said. And that piece of business threatens to shrink as people turn to the Internet to present and pay bills.
What will make such a business service a snap for the agency is its head start in public key infrastructure (PKI), an information assurance practice in which a person who wants to send information uses as identification a digital certificate issued by a trusted third party.
The Postal Service was one of the first users of high-end PKI for its online stamps program. Security developer Cylink Corp. (stock: CYLK) is the agency’s PKI vendor. In July, the company rolled out a commercial version of the Net-Authority PKI package, a solution that had been developed especially for the Postal Service, said Bill Crowell, CEO of Cylink, Santa C
