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

The answer is in the room.  The room, in this case, was a discussion of changing the way government works at the conclusion of re:public VII: a gathering of those who choose to lead, an invitation-only event convened in Tucson, AZ by e.Republic's Center of Digital Government.

The answer is in the room, taken more broadly, recognizes the power and potential of internal initiative in changing the way organizations work.

As a case in point, Veterans Day came with a pair of announcements that new veterans-only social networks were launching, not by upstart newcomers but by incumbents that have been protecting and promoting the interests of veterans -- Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, working with the Ad Council, launched CommunityofVeterans.org on Tuesday and the Veterans of Foreign Wars brought www.myvetworks.com online this week too.

But that may be just scratching the surface.  Back in the room in Tucson, the assembled panel had all gone deeper in their respective jurisdictions.  Here are brief summaries of their case stories:

On the Spot: Open Source and Authority to Change

Vivek Kundra, CTO for the District of Columbia, says formal cross-agency agreements to surface and share data has made it possible to democratize DC's data -- for the good of the District and democracy itself.

It has resulted in the surfacing of 260 data feeds across DC government and a 30 percent reduction in requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

As noted in an earlier post, the internal initiative to create the 260 feeds was a necessary precondition to creating Apps for Democracy, the $20,000 competition to mashup the District's data.

This final judging is slated for this Thursday but the contest has attracted a steady stream (with at least one developed every day) of open source apps for platforms from Facebook to iPhones Apps -- including ones that let you know when the next metro train is coming, give you real time notification of crimes and disturbances in progress or allow you to customize tour routes in the DC based on your interests.

Kundra says the Apps for Democracy is part of a deliberate process to rethink the way government is done and in which "citizens and NGOs co-create" the future with and for government.

Kundra says that a future of that time involves confronting entrenched bureaucracies.  He asked for and received the authority to make hiring offers on the spot -- successfully attracting 100 new people into public service that would have otherwise been snapped up by the private sector before government-as-usual could act. A more startling HR move is a parallel mechanism for showing others to the door.  The district has also implemented daily performance reviews to identify people who are simply not working (out) and get them off the public payroll.  The daily performance checks enforce expectations that everybody gets something done everyday.  If you are not getting it done, you have until tomorrow or the next day to start.  And if you never start, your employment ends.

Building an Arc

The City of Sacramento, CA, is partnering with Westinghouse to vaporize and monetize trash.  So says Sacramento City Manager Ray Kerridge who, upon first meeting, appears to be the kind of guy who has a well thumbed first edition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  Listen a little longer and it becomes clear that he could write Zen and the Art of Repairing Government.

Kerridge enthusiastically detailed joint plans between the city (with a 5% percent ownership stake) and Westinghouse (the majority owner at 95%) to build earth's largest Plasma arc gasification plant.  Riiight, as in Bill Cosby's Noah.

Wikipedia helpfully describes Plasma arc gasification as "a waste treatment technology that uses high electrical energy and high temperature created by an electrical arc gasifier. This arc breaks down waste primarily into elemental gas and solid waste slag, in a device called a plasma converter. The process has been intended to be a net generator of electricity, depending upon the composition of input wastes, and to reduce the volumes of waste being sent to landfill sites."  Right.

That is exactly what Kerridge says the sacred northern California city will do.  Gone will be the expense of trucking Sacramento's garbage to far away landfills.  What's more, the scheme will redeem slag's good name because in this new brownish green economy, slag has economic value and a new name -- feed stock.

And Sacramento produces 5,000 tons of feed stock every day, which they will be able to sell as the raw resource for the gasifier.  The stuff that comes out of the gasifier has added value in the making of green products.  Under the agreement, Sacramento will get a cut of that too.  If that wasn't enough, Kerridge says the city is also looking at the possibility at taking garbage off of other cities (for a fee), provide it as feeder stock (for a fee) and take a third fee for its share of the value-added products.

Amid looks of disbelief and furious note taking in the room, Kerridge -- whose voice still carries a residual British accent -- reminded the audience of an old saying from his native England, "Where there is muck there is money."  The new world translation will be worth watching.

The Education Dividend

The Commonwealth of Virginia's strategic partnerships on infrastructure (Northrop Grumman) and enterprise applications (CGI) are credited for bringing hope to hard scrabble southwest Virginia.  The collaborations are on track to help create 700 jobs.  But the opportunities surface problems of their own -- what if the jobs go begging for want of workers with the needed education and skills? 

For all his work on creating and sheparding the partnerships, Virginia Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra loves the challenge that comes with these more complex, stickier questions.  The first part of the state's response is called plugGED In (notice how GED is imbedded in the name) which combines adult literacy, skills assessment, and workforce development.

Thanks to internal initiative, the commonwealth was able to stand the program up in only 6 months.  But they did not do it alone, particularly in the area of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) where the education gap was particularly pronounced.

Virginia reached out to a non-profit "open course" start-up, the CK Foundation, which describes itslef this way on its website:

Our mission is to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide, but also to empower teacher practitioners by generating or adapting content relevant to their local context. Using a collaborative and web-based compilation model that can manifest open resource content as an adaptive textbook, termed the "FlexBook", CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality, locally and temporally relevant, educational web texts. The content generated by CK-12 and the CK-12 community will serve both as source material for a student's learning and provide an adaptive environment that scaffolds the learner's journey as he or she masters a standards-based body of knowledge, while allowing for passion-based learning.

Generating and adapting content relevant to a local context was exactly what is plugGED In needed. Chopra says they issued an open call for contributors and collaborators for their own untextbook that focused on the skills the commonwealth sought to develop.  They received responses from over the country, with would-be collaborators ranging from an 11th grader to major research universities.  The result: a custom open source physics flex book that will be available in February 2009, which Chopra proudly points out is the speed that the market needs and puts the conventional textbook industry to shame.

On the exit question, the panel offered a few random elements on the secrets to change that you can believe in -- and get done:

• Be bold enough to take on entrenched bureaucracies (and have the necessary air cover from your appointing authority in place before you hit the streets);
• Convince your people that their lives will be better;
• Remember that attorneys answer the questions that they are asked -- "what are the barriers to doing this?" gets a very different answer than "how can we do this?";
  
• Push innovation down as far as it can go in the organization.  Innovation is embraced downstream when the people in the trenches believe its theirs;
• Create a war room to prosecute the change with military-style discipline -- but only build a war room if you are relentless about it and willing to stake your career on it; and,
• Remember that innovation cannot come at the cost of consistent and reliable service delivery -- blocking and tackling on the front lines buys permission to keep working on the next new thing just behind the curtain.

There is a lot here to digest, and this summary may not have done their cases justice.  Expect a return to some of these ideas in subsequent posts.  And your thoughts are welcome and encouraged by adding your comments below.

Asian stock markets began the new week at 26 year lows and a sharply lower Dow futures market was a harbinger of more bad news domestically.  And some of that bad news came from a new report on state government revenues.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities surveyed 15 states and the news was universally downbeat.  Revenues for the quarter just ended were lower than in the same period in 2007 in the majority of surveyed states.  When adjusted for inflation, total revenue collections are below last year's levels in all but one of the 15 states covered in the survey.

The median state experienced a 5.5 percent decline in total tax revenue after adjustment for inflation. The sales tax story was even worse.  The report says, "Revenues are down in every one of those 15 states, with a median decline of 7.3 percent after adjustment for inflation."

The report says the numbers can be explained by the crisis in consumer confidence that is seen throughout the economy, and reflects the anxiety created by the loss of a half million jobs between September 2007 and September 2008.

The report's authors expect government service delivery to pay the price for the constitutional requirement on states to balance their budgets:

Many of the actions states take to balance their budgets will be harmful to families and to the economy.  State taxes pay for state aid to K-12 schools, support for public colleges and universities, health coverage for children, families, seniors and people with disabilities, public safety, and transportation.  States are enacting cuts in all these areas already.  They are also increasing taxes and fees.  Both spending cuts and revenue increases take money out of state economies, deepening the nation's economic problems.

State finances have not been this tight since 2002 when states slashed spending on health care insurance and education.  That could happen again this time around or, borrowing a page from Wall Street and the financial services sector, the federal government could step in with loans and a bail out package for political subdivisions.

The hardest hit states among the 15 in the CBPP survey -- when adjusted for inflation -- are: Washington (11.3%); Tennessee (9.5%); Idaho (9.1%) and Virginia (9.0%).  On a percentage basis, the country's largest states did moderately better -- with California experiencing a 6 percent decline and New York revenues off by a 1.3 percent.  

As road trips go, a journey to visit each of the Top 10 states as ranked in the 2008 Digital States survey (conducted every two years by e.Republic's Center for Digital Government) would cover 12,928 miles (if done in order) from coast to coast, with stops in a number of state capitols in between.

In the spirit of those famous 5-day tours of Europe, here is a busboy's recap of an only-time-to-hit-the-highlights trip to the eleven states that earned the distinction of being a Top 10 Digital State. 

The tour begins in the industrial heartland and ends, after crisscrossing the country at least three times, in the emergent new mountain west.

10.    Pennsylvania
(Image: Pennsylvania Portal)

COMPASS brings together these programs in a simple fashion - the customer does not have to have the detailed understanding of federal, state and local policy knowledge and focuses on 3 key steps - Click, Apply, Benefit.    A customer is able to access a wide variety of human service programs online that are spread across 20 different bureaus, agencies and departments. COMPASS began by integrating the various forms of state Medicaid assistance programs offered by DPW and Insurance and integrated healthcare access to individuals, pregnant women, families and children who are in need of healthcare assistance. Through the much publicized "Cover all kids" program, Pennsylvania expanded access for healthcare to all eligible children, and COMPASS is the primary access point for the commonwealth. In addition to health related access, including access to long term care and home and community based services, customers can access benefits for food assistance, school meals, and Women and Infant Children programs online. COMPASS expands access to critical emergency programs such as fuel assistance and general assistance for needy residents.     COMPASS improves customer service by providing electronic features to report any coverage changes, and allowing access to benefit and service information similar to online banking features.

10.    Tennessee
(Image: Tennessee Maps)

Tennessee.gov maps drivers license stations, schools, county clerks, state parks and other public facilities.  Below the covers, the state has consolidated three-quarters of what had been 1,600 widely dispersed servers and more than 200 IT functions into a shared data center.

9.    Maryland
(Image: Maryland DG Promo)

Service Access and Information Link (SAIL), a web-based screening and application tool open to all Maryland residents, provides online tools to determine potential benefit eligibility and examine various social services offerings. SAIL is available publicly and DHR has partnered with many community-based organizations such as the United Way of Maryland to encourage awareness and promote access. In addition to allowing individuals to pre-screen for benefit eligibility and explore information about social services programs.

8.     South Dakota
(Image: South Dakota Open SD)

On information: In addition to more than 180,000 pages of information already available on state government websites, OPEN SD provides financial information about state government, in a searchable format, which currently includes over 106,000 different financial records.

On services: Residents can now apply for UI weekly benefits through Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or the Internet and have his/her weekly payment delivered by direct deposit or debit card. The automation also provides the citizens 24x7 access to track their current claims process through online self service. Mailing and printing cost have been eliminated or reduced.  Client trips to the Career Centers have been reduced or eliminated resulting in lower costs for citizens.

7.     Kentucky
(Image: Kentucky Tech Trooper)

Kentucky State Police officer demonstrates a mobile data terminal, scanner and digital driver's license in his cruiser near the State Capitol in Frankfort.  Kentucky is emphasizing wireless delivery of state services as part of its e-Government strategy.


6.    Washington
(Image: Artist rendering of Washington Tech State)

With newly implemented systems in the corrections and personnel departments, and new initiatives in e-health and master business licensing, the Evergreen state has turned its attention to sustainability: 2/3 of agencies use energy conservation software on their PCs and laptops (with $1 million in estimated annual savings); and embraces industry standard sustainability practices for environmentally preferable purchasing and disposal.

5.     California
(Image: California YouTube Channel)

The home state of silicon valley relaunched its portal with new video, blogging and social network entry points while moving mission critical systems that do the heavy lifting of determining eligibility, administering and delivering social services to modern technology architectures.

4.     Arizona
(Image: Arizona @ Your Service)

Building on success of online self service, the Arizona Health Care Containment System has transitioned 20 percent of its workforce (300 people) to full time teleworkers, saving $667,000 each year, cancelled the leases on two office buildings, with employee productivity up by up to 45% and turnover down by 16%.


3.    Virginia
(Image: Virginia CMOC)

Virginia's Centralized Management and Operations Center for information technology at theChesterfield Enterprise Solutions Center, a key element in a ten year $1.9 billion partnership with Northrup Grumman to create a standardized, shared statewide computing utility.  It is expected to save $120 million in the next ten years in energy costs alone.

2.    Michigan
(Image: Michigan Self Service Station)

Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) - In 2007, the Governor's emergency financial advisory panel called for structural transformation of public service delivery. Across every state program the directive was given to eliminate fraud/abuse, streamline operations and get critical services to the citizens needing it most. In just two years, BICC has become core to optimizing outcomes and measuring programs, through successfully integrating BI and performance management. Results include:

• Compared food stamp records for 429,000 kids (4-19) against our student database, automatically qualifying 337,000 for school lunch assistance without filing out a single form;
• Matching health screening records against birth records identified thousands of newborns eligible for but not receiving free screening;
• By comparing day care benefits against wage records, detected over $17 million in fraud/abuse;
• BICC influenced policy when data analysis found that many homeless were eligible for, but not utilizing, program assistance, leading to the statewide homeless initiative, proactively getting assistance to at-risk families before they lost their homes; and,
  
• Cross-referencing children's metabolic screenings against immunization records allowed parent notification, increasing immunizations for high-risk kids.
  

1.    Utah
(Image: Utah Digital Library)

Libraries provide an additional access point to Utah.gov's vast array of online services and information.  In 2008, Governor Jon Huntsman dedicated the new digital library at Utah Valley University.  Also:

• Launched in 2007, Utah GovCast is a comprehensive multimedia portal, providing access to over 27 unique channels and several hundred streaming videos, as well as blogs and online radio;
• Utah teamed with CrimeReports.com to present a more comprehensive view to crime information from over 40 state and local law enforcement agencies;
• Utah Geosights help students develop greater understanding and appreciation of Utah's diverse geology.  Standard Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files, enhanced with imagery and other information, allow citizens to perform virtual flyovers using Google Earth, or simply create map views with tools like Google Maps or Microsoft Live;
• Utah interacts with citizens through a variety of social media including Swivel, where the Utah Data Group presents visual charts of state data; and,
  
• Utah is working to improve the overall efficiency of its data center operations.  In 2007-08, numerous state and local agencies created efficiencies by working with DTS to move their operations into the two primary data centers in Richfield and Salt Lake City.  The connectivity between the two centers is being upgraded to 10Gb in 2008 in a cooperative venture with the Utah Education Network

As part of the state's sustainability program, Governor Jon Huntsman implemented a four day work week for state employees in August 2008.  The move promised to save trips but the Utah plan called for closing governments each Friday.  Closed buildings can go dark and cold, netting energy and cost savings from reduced heating, air conditioning and lighting use.  Significantly, the governor was satisfied that the state portal, Utah.gov, and its suite of more than 600 online transactions were sufficiently broad and deep that the public would be able to conduct business with its government even when the buildings were dark and the employees were at home.

This ability to go green -- or, more precisely, introduce a four day work week in the name of going green -- is a function of having a robust suite of online services.  This table shows, on a percentage basis, the implemtation of major transaction types by state governments over the years.  The first thing to notice is that the majority of transaction or application types have matured out -- that is, all the states that are going to implement a particular online transaction likely have.

The other thing to notice is that those applications with the lowest implementation rates are those that require more sophisticated inputs to complete the transactions - VIN validations, vital records, credential lookups and drivers license renewal among them.  These categories lag the others categories because they are tougher nuts to crack.  The harder work requires rethinking the data sharing needed to complete the transaction.  The data exists somewhere, and the Web 2.0/3.0 challenge and opportunity is to get the data from where they are to where they are needed.  This involves machine-to-machine Web services - the type of Web service that we don't think about because we don't see or touch it.  By definition, it does not involve human intervention or - the way the machines see it - human latency.

The Center's analysis of the data will continue into 2009 with ongoing reports and commentaries.

How Did We Get Here? (Or, About the Digital States Survey)

The Digital State Survey from e.Republic's Center for Digital Government is the nation's original and only continuous assessment of state government's use of information technology (IT) in service to the citizen.  The 2008 survey, conducted with the underwriting support of Verizon Business, included more than 175 questions about citizen self service - including Internet portals, applications and Web 2.0 features such as blogs, wikis, social networks, mashups and viral video.

As importantly, the Digital States survey provides a comprehensive view of state information technology programs as a whole, with measures of the alignment of the architecture, infrastructure, policy, planning, methodologies and organizational maturity of delivering on technology's promise for improved service delivery and operational efficiencies.  The 2008 Digital States survey results also provide a first-in-nation benchmark of state sustainability activities, particularly in the area of the greening of IT.

The most recent Digital States was the most competitive in the survey's decade long history.  The top ranked states include a number of jurisdictions that have consistently made government modernization a priority over time combined with those that have made significant gains more recently. 

The top states reflect the whole country - large and small, red and blue, and geographically diverse.

(This post was prepared with the assistance of Janet Grenslitt of the Center for Digital Government.)
 

The Center for Digital Government released the rankings from the 2008 Digital States survey on the eve of this week's NASCIO conference in Milwaukee.  The 2008 survey, administered biennially to assess government modernization efforts nationwide, introduced a benchmark on the greening of IT as part of state governments' sustainability programs.  Only half of responding states reported that the state green IT efforts are aligned with the executive's larger climate-related initiatives -- an indicator that we are witness to a work in progress but, at least, there is a degree of candor on how far they've come.

Less surprising is the claim by 98 percent of states have or are pursuing data center and server consolidation and virtualization, in that way stretching a green veneer over things that they have long wanted to do.

Some 41 percent of responding states say they have established metrics and installed instruments to measure energy efficiencies, a necessary but non-trivial task if they are ever going to be able to claim progress toward the green goals set by state executives, directed by state legislators and expected by state residents.

Still with the Digital States survey, 80 percent of states report that their PC, Laptop and server refresh policies reflect energy efficiency best practices, which is what you would expect from a public sector IT community that puts a premium on industry best practices.  Scatch the surface, and the use of named best practices drops significantly.  Only 15 percent of respondents reported using The Green Grid in optimizing their data centers and other enterprise computing environments.   The numbers are more encouraging at the server and PC level where two-thirds (66%) of responding states say they have used the model practices developed by the Climate Savers Smart Computing Initiative.

It was interesting then to have Bill Weihl, Google's Green Energy Czar, and someone who was present at the creation of Climate Savers, on a panel at NASCIO (see Green is the New Green post below).  He found the level of state government adoption encouraging even while describing the ongoing efforts to figure out how to measure complex things that have never been measured before -- including but not limited to a carbon footprint (which has seized the imagination of political speechwriters but the metrics of which remain elusive).

Weihl, joined by Michigan CIO Ken Theis and Peggy Ward from the Commonwealth of Virginia, provided color commentary on some live audience polling of state CIOs, their deputies and (in some cases) vendors.

When asked whether green-related emerging best practices such as Climate Savers and The Green Grid were sufficiently well known and mature such that they could be relied upon in policy making, operations and measuring performance, a quarter of state attendees (24%) choose "absolutely not," almost two thirds (61%) straddled the fence with a tentative "maybe," and a supremely confident 15 percent chose "absolutely."  The larger audience was asked to assess the current state of the many IT goods and services marketed as green.  Again, a supremely confident 13 percent described them as transformational and mission critical out of the box.  Others were more circumspect, 28 percent thought today's green-labelled technologies added meaningful value now while another 39 percent thought they were merely transitional -- that is, they would be great once they get the kinks worked out.  For his part, Weihl took comfort in that only a fifth of the room (20%) thought the current offerings were just 'green washed' or window dressing.

Theis described Michigan's experience as one of the initial six states to sign on to Climate Savers, describing it as a jumping off point for the larger set of initiatives set out by the governor (to protect the environment while restructing a state inextricably linked to the automobile industry in an era of $4-per-gallon gasoline) while helping to bring some discipline to what and how things got done.  (Theis also teased a rumored high level appointment of an Muppet to the position of state energy officer who had intimate knowledge of being green, and that it wasn't easy.)

Ward, who serves as Virginia's CISO and internal auditor within the Commonwealth's technology agency (VITA), spoke to that state's experience with telework, the direction for which was codified in legislation with specific date-certain targets.  The governor has amplified those goals for executive branch agencies with a view to normalizing telework, rather than it being treated as an exception or alternative.

We returned to the audience for their views of telework, which 60 percent of attendees thought would (finally) get traction thanks to the political energy around sustainability.  (One audience member questioned our assumption that telework was consistent with sustainability because it just shifted energy consumption from the office to home.  The assertion went unchallenged.  After the session, Dr. Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) said the question has been asked and answered in favor of telework -- due in large measure to reducing trips.  Atkinson also told me about three recent studies that showed that one dollar in IT investments saves $7 in energy.  Check back for a follow on post with the citations.)

Finally, in the mother of all white board exercises, the auditorium was turned into a big conference room with the familiar bureacratic task of identifying the potential benefits and barriers to widespread telework.  The results are presented here in rank order:

Benefits

• Increased employee productivity (38%)
  
• Reduced fuel consumption (31%)
  
• Reduced real estate cost (12%)       
• Less traffic congestion (10%) 
• The Comforts of Home (8%)

Barriers

• Perception  - If I can't see them they aren't working (67%)
  
• Increased  information security concerns (43%)
• Training managers to understand the advantages (29%)
• Added strain to the IT infrastructure as employees log on from home (20%)
  
• Employee reluctance (Need social interaction) (11%)
  
• Equipment costs (11%)
  

That almost a third of the audience (29%) thought managers needed to be trained about the advantages of telework (read: help them let go of old practices) was a catalyst for a discussion of what kind a cultural problem governments were dealing with.  It was the consensus view of the panel that management -- not union or other employee groups -- posed the most significant cultural barrier.  The consensus was not challenged by anyone in the audience -- a plurality of which, earlier in the day, had anonymously identified itself as leaning conservative.

Of course, audience response sessions are only snap shots and, like all straw polls, are unscientific.  But there are clues here as to what we might see as state government takes on a green hue.