MERRILLVILLE | A local company is working with Northwest Indiana governments to provide more services online to residents.

The company, which promotes smart e–government, has worked with several local communities to put services online that previously required residents to show up in person at government offices.

"I feel we've created a lot of services for people to do things from their homes without having to get into their car and drive to their local government office," said Mark Orciuch, president of Next Generation Solutions.

What originally started as a management consulting company for insurance firms in the mid–1990s, Next Generation Solutions morphed into a virtual company based in Northwest Indiana after Orciuch said he and his employees wanted to enter the public sector and eliminate their commute time to Chicago.

"Around 2004, we moved to focus on doing business in the public sector of Northwest Indiana," he said. "Our first project was to rebuild the aging Lake County website."

After revamping the website, the company moved on to start building a set of commerce services that included publishing Lake County court records online for public use. The system also allowed residents to pay traffic tickets online and request child support history.

"It was sort of a pioneer project because there was no other local government agency doing e–commerce at the time," Orciuch said.

Several agencies besides Lake County currently are using this service or some form of it, including Schererville, Merrillville, East Chicago, Hobart, Hammond and soon Lake Station.

Two of the most popular programs Next Generation Solutions has helped community governments in the area implement have helped improve the quality of life in the region, Orciuch said.

In 2009, the company launched ActiveNWI, a service that allows online registration for local parks and recreation departments. Merrillville, Schererville and Highland have signed up for this program, while Griffith signed up for E–Pay NWI, a service that began in 2010 that allows residents to pay their water bills online.

Orciuch credits his company's success to his employees and the help he's received from the Purdue Technology Center, which he has been affiliated with since 2007.

"They provided a lot of the guidance and mentoring for us from a business standpoint to be able to conduct business here in Northwest Indiana and network us with community leaders," he said.

Orciuch says the company still has struggled to build the business from scratch and convince governments to open up to the idea of offering more services online.

"A lot of the agencies are unaware of us despite all the different projects that we've worked on," he said.

Orciuch said his company continues to promote ways local governments can be more efficient, including ideas that were outlined in the Good Government Initiative, a study conducted in 2007 that outlined ways government can improve its services and save costs. His company also continues to support and promote usage of open source as a way to reduce costs.