Results tagged “Microsoft” from FastGov: Where Government is Going

It will be a working weekend for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the contractor it hired to quickly rebuild recovery.gov in anticipation of this Saturday's state American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) reporting deadline.

The countdown to October 10 has been a particularly intense fire drill for Maryland-based Smartronix, Inc, the company that won the contract to get the federal recovery spending site ready for prime time.  (The contract is worth an initial $9.5 million through January 2010, with the option to almost double in value - $18 million - by 2014.)

The initial roll up of stimulus dollars comes with a myriad of challenges.  On the operational side, as recently as a month ago, only 14,000 of an expected 200,000 ARRA recipients had registered to report.  Also during the countdown, even registered recipients confronted still ambiguous data standards.

On the expectations side, the much anticipated inaugural recovery.gov rollup is a key test of whether the Obama administration can deliver on its promises of transparency.  What's more, the administration is also betting the mid term elections that the data will demonstrate that the huge $787 billion stimulus package is putting people back to work and goosing a moribund economy.  It will be judged by the administration's own data -- regardless of how clean or complete they are.

That is a lot to put on the shoulders of a website.  To further complicate the expectations game, recovery.gov has head-to-head competition from the private sector.  The data aggregator and reseller Onvia has built recovery.com (which it mirrors for the time being at recovery.org) through data mining and old school clipping services.  NPR compared the dot-gov and dot-com sites, and any unique value of the federal government effort was not clear to the reporter.

The board, working with the General Services Administration among other federal agencies and a handful of technology companies (including IBM, SAP and Microsoft), has been helping states and localities get ready for this Saturday's reporting deadline.

Stuart McKee, a former state CIO in Washington and now National Technology Officer with Microsoft, has been part of that campaign.  In criss crossing the country, he came to a number of conclusions about what we are about to see,

If the attempt is just to expose the data, I think that would be disappointing - just to say, 'here's the data - do with it what you want.' I think government has fiduciary responsibility to organize that information and present it in a way that people can digest.

Acknowledging that there are no second chances to make a first impression, McKee thinks the effort must begin again come Monday morning,

If the key stake holders at the federal and the state level particularly will gather together and create the next set of requirements with the lessons learned and set the expectations [for what comes next].  This is a learning process.  This isn't going to be perfect.  And we are going to get better and better incrementally each time.

Ever the optimist, McKee sees a promising second act for all things transparency,

If we can set that expectation, I think two things will happen. One, government will continue to improve and get better; and, two, citizens will be very, very pleased with the results.

To hear more of my conversation with McKee, listen to the most recent DS-50 podcast.  Download it here or subscribe to the series on iTunes.

Microsoft's new Bing decision engine is now powering the search function on the Washington state portal, Access Washington.

In a statement released today, Jim Albert, Deputy Director of Operations at the Washington State Department of Information Services (DIS), said "Adding Bing to Access Washington will improve the relevancy of search results on the portal, allowing users to find the information they are looking for faster and with greater accuracy." The statement also says the change to Bing comes "an no additional cost to Washington taxpayers."

The announcement comes the same week that Microsoft and Yahoo! unveiled plans to join forces and use Bing to take on search giant Google.  Indeed, Google and its search appliance enjoy high adoption even among state portals in the tricky business of getting search right.

For its part, Washington state was early to use a third party to create a better search experience.  It originally contracted with the parent company of ask.com to allow users to get answers to questions asked in everyday, natural language, as well as traditional keyword searching.  As a cousin to AskJeeves, the only state named for an individual named its search function AskGeorge in honor of its namesake president.

In an unrelated conversation last night, newly appointed state CIO and DIS director Tony Tortorice told me, "the governor is serious about government reform and we're going to get it done."  That apparently includes getting it done in big ways -- implementing enterprise shared services and building a new $300 million data center -- and in smaller ways, like going bing.

A new front in the battle for the central nervous system (if not soul) of organizations has been engaged in the clouds.  It is not a plot in some flavor of apocalyptic literature but it does mark the opening of a new chapter in the epic struggle between the now incumbent Microsoft and the upstart rival Google.

Chris Thompson, who is the resident Google watcher for Slate's The Big Money, reports on the grand cloud compromise -- lowering costs, reducing complexity in Google's cloud while letting users keep the familiar Microsoft interface.  This is a big stakes confrontation -- it is an unvarnished assault on Outlook and Exchange.  Thompson writes:

On Wednesday, Google released a new plug-in that allows businesses [or other organizations including, presumably, government] to switch to Google Apps, but retain the interface of Outlook. Just download the plug-in, and Google will import your e-mail, calendar entries, and contact information over to Google's cloud, while keeping the Outlook interface intact.

It's not quite a hot knife through butter; ChannelWeb's Samara Lynn warns that when you deploy the plug-in, it may take up to 24 hours for Google to import all of your e-mails. But with this new tool, Google is taking square aim at Microsoft's enterprise customers, luring them into the cloud and away from software-based technology. Google has a number of natural advantages here; its premiere edition costs just $50 per person per year, and companies will no longer have to host servers on site, allowing Google to do all the heavy infrastructural lifting.

E-mail is an interesting target, particularly for state and local government.  We are still witness to incoming mayors, governors and county executives who vow to fix internal e-mail as a central premise in making government work.  It is a problem that should have been fixed long before now -- a new approach that brings with it a promise to make things better and save money could be an awfully attractive proposition. 

Competition between these two companies, bare-knuckled as it increasingly is becoming, won't make for easy or obvious choices.  But it will make for great watching.

"I wouldn't say that it is Microsoft making its peace with the open source community," said my friend Stuart McKee, national technology officer of state and local government at Microsoft, "but it is a microcosm of an awakening and maturing on all sides."

We were talking about Open eGov, the open source content management software developed by Newport News, Va., and subsequently merged with PloneGov, a repository of sharable software, with the participation of 55 other government organizations around the world.

"I agree with Stuart. It is a sign of maturity in the software market," said Andy Stein, IT director of Newport News and champion of the Open eGov collaboration. "It is the responsible thing to do."

Stein takes seriously his responsibility to expand capacity, share broadly and advocate for what he calls "fair and equitable cost sharing." That is all consistent with the tenets of the open source movement, but none of it is inconsistent with close ties -- organizationally and architecturally -- with commercial software providers. In fact, Stein said the next big project for Open eGov is to integrate the platform with Microsoft technologies, such as SharePoint and Active Directory. "Andy is astute on sharing and leveraging platforms that people want in creative ways," McKee said, noting that almost half of the 130,000 open source projects at SourceForge.net are built on Microsoft's platform.

The intersection of Microsoft, open source and public-sector IT hasn't always been this civil. Remember the high-stakes, career-defining dispute between Microsoft and Massachusetts just a few short years ago? It's too easy to attribute the changes to a shift from a set of quasi-ideological drivers in the open source movement (Massachusetts) to more pragmatic concerns (Newport News).

The blurring of the lines between commercial and open source software has accelerated in the interim. Consider that respected industry watcher Mark Anderson of the Strategic News Service said that at a post-Bill Gates Microsoft, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie is charged with finding the company's role in cloud computing -- where shrink-wrap is no longer king. Consider too that Microsoft now has an open source strategist and he is reportedly proposing a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack that can be used independently or as a platform for other components, but runs on Windows.

Stein said Open eGov is moving toward a WAMP stack too, but the collaboration needs Microsoft's help to make the integration work through access to SharePoint and other application programming interfaces -- the same stuff the average Microsoft business partner or independent software vendor relies on.

While he is waiting, Stein said Newport News has begun hosting Open eGov as a service for Franklin County, Va., at $260 per month. Simultaneously the collaboration has extended its membership to Waynesboro and Staunton, Va., and started merger talks with Plone-using Albuquerque, N.M. That leaves him with precious little time to bask in the reflected glory of the J. Robert Havlick Award for Innovation in Local Government, which Newport News picked up from the Alliance for Innovation in spring 2008.

Note: This post originated as a column in the October 2008 print issue of Government Technology/ Public CIO under the headline, Blurring the Lines. Its publication coincided with the GOSCON conference in Portland.