Utah's Office of Rural Development has launched a new website: rural.utah.gov. I think its great to see these kinds of sites come up. One thing that struck me, however, is that this is very much a single agency site (just DCED). I think it would be more powerful if the Dept. of Agriculture were involved as well. This ought to be a joint site between at least those two agencies, maybe others as well.

Getting a single online focus from multiple agencies is one of the hardest things for government to do. The primary reason this is hard is because of how budgeting happens. DCED and Agriculture get separate budgets and the budgets create the silos. Utah has a great Web presence, but they've got to solve this split personality problem to get to the next level. Utah's done it before with sites like business.utah.gov, which bring together mutliple services from many agencies. This is the way is should be since not many people care about which programs are in which agencies. They just want help and information. A site like rural.utah.gov is a great opportunity to give them that single face, if its done right.