Minnesota Technology Magazine - Fall 2005
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Ted Mondale’s Nazca Solutions is bringing sophisticated IT solutions
to county governments.
In the race to see who can adapt to technology slowest, government has long run a neck-and-neck race with the health care industry. But if Ted Mondale has anything to say about it, governments may just drop out of that contest by transforming themselves into customer-centric, IT-driven enterprises.
Mondale, a former Metropolitan Council chair, state senator, and unsuccessful 1998 gubernatorial candidate (and the son of former vice president Walter Mondale) has switched roles. The ex-politico is now a high-tech entrepreneur, launching Minneapolis-based Nazca Solutions Inc. in April 2003, with former IBM sales rep Jason Hepp. That’s not to say Mondale has left politics. It’s just that he’s now hawking software and services, and government—specifically county government— is his target market.
In a nutshell, Nazca aims to reduce the costs of governmental transactions by integrating massive piles of public data and making it easier for businesses that depend on government information to access it digitally. Ho hum, you say? You wouldn’t think so if you were a surveyor, appraiser, tax preparer, title company, or any of the other 109 customers that regularly do business with Stearns County, Nazca’s inaugural customer. With Nazca’s “information brokering engine” in place, a title company representative subscribing to the system can go online and research the county’s tax database, property liens, delinquent tax information, and the like with a few clicks. No trips necessary to the county recorder’s office. Time saved, money saved.
Mondale says “constituent portals” also can be built off of Nazca’s proprietary software, opening digital-data services to citizens interested in everything from shopping for lakefront properties to finding work to assessing community water quality. The first of those portals is being built in Stearns now.
He admits entrepreneurship has been a struggle: “We were trying to build the airplane and fly it at the same time.” But Nazca is gaining momentum. Already, Mondale says, deals either signed with counties or on the verge of consummation cover roughly 60 percent of Minnesota’s population. Most of the state’s exurban counties, several southern counties, and Hennepin—with its 1.2 million residents—are onboard. Meanwhile, the company is in discussions with counties in other states as well, from Missouri to Michigan.
Nazca grew out of Mondale’s previous job with Fingerhut, held while simultaneously working part time as Met Council chair. Mondale, Hepp, and system architect Dominic Coates helped devise a complex customer management system for Fingerhut to bolster its e-commerce presence. Leveraging that technology, Mondale and his colleagues launched Nazca with seed money from Fingerhut chieftains Tom Petters and Ted Deikel. Including both fulltimers and independent contractors, the company now employs about 30.
“Basically, what we do is we create virtual data sets that fit with a customer’s business process,” Mondale says. “And with a virtual query they go out and look up [information]. We have about 150 pages in our front-end drive and we hydrate them with data all from all over hell’s half acre.”
—Kevin Featherly
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