The outgoing year has given us trillions of reasons to remember it by -
because it now takes 12 zeros to count how much economic trouble we are
in. The national debt clock in Times Square ran out of digits
in September. Operators initially removed the dollar sign up front to
make room for a bigger number and plan to add a couple of more digits
in the new year so the tally can run up into the hundreds of trillions
of dollars. And so went 2008.
As has become traditional each December on this page, with a wink and a nod to Father Guido Sarducci's Five Minute University, here are the five things we'll remember about 2008 five years from now.
1. Getting over IT's love affair with the general fund.
General fund budgets are easily oversubscribed in times such as these by just the big three categories of state government functions - educate, medicate, incarcerate. Studies updated this year indicate that only 28 states rely on the general fund as a dominant source for funding state IT programs. What were once characterized as "alternative" funding schemes have grown up largely under the radar are now essential to the new public sector IT funding mix.
2. Making green the new green.
While data is not the plural of anecdote, dispatches from the field indicate that the confluence of sustainability sensibilities, energy savings and telework is netting real results. Witness energy savings of 32% or an estimated $12 million in Virginia by refreshing 60,000 PCs with EnergyStar-rated machines. Or projected savings of $1 million a year in Washington state through installing energy management software on its existing PC fleet. Or a double digit spike in server utilization through virtualization in New York. Consider too that Utah has adopted a four-day work week for public employees that saves trips and saves money while maintaining service delivery thanks to a robust and proven suite of e-government self service offerings.
3. Putting the public back into public records.
As noted this time last year, disgraced former congressman Mark Foley should have provided a sufficient object lesson that e-mail and instant messages are public - read: disclosable - records. Former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick learned the lesson this year when 14,000 text messages made a liar of him on the stand. Resignation, criminal charges and conviction followed. As one legal observer succinctly put it, 'Send Now' May Go Public Later."
4. Getting us out of the way.
Human latency is the cold, clinical, science fiction-sounding term that engineers use to describe what is wrong with most business processes - the delays we cause through our apparent inattentiveness. Increasingly sophisticated machine-to-machine web services make human intervention unnecessary, and the presence feature in unified communications promises to track us down when we're needed - on the device of our choice, of course.
5. Confronting the point where mobility and utility computing meet.
Speaking of devices, mobility means that smart phones are more than cameras, e-mail clients and music players. They are computers that work really well in uncontrolled environments. Mobility has its own top level domain (.mobi) and is going mission critical with mobile ERP applications in the labs and soon on the streets. Imagine the possibilities.
On the threshold of a new year, there is at least the prospect that a viable and sustainable future is literally in the hands of the people government serves and figuratively in the cloud. Surely we can do something with that.
A version of this post was originally published as "Not that We're Likely to Forget" in the print edition of Government Technology magazine in December 2008.
As has become traditional each December on this page, with a wink and a nod to Father Guido Sarducci's Five Minute University, here are the five things we'll remember about 2008 five years from now.
1. Getting over IT's love affair with the general fund.
General fund budgets are easily oversubscribed in times such as these by just the big three categories of state government functions - educate, medicate, incarcerate. Studies updated this year indicate that only 28 states rely on the general fund as a dominant source for funding state IT programs. What were once characterized as "alternative" funding schemes have grown up largely under the radar are now essential to the new public sector IT funding mix.
2. Making green the new green.
While data is not the plural of anecdote, dispatches from the field indicate that the confluence of sustainability sensibilities, energy savings and telework is netting real results. Witness energy savings of 32% or an estimated $12 million in Virginia by refreshing 60,000 PCs with EnergyStar-rated machines. Or projected savings of $1 million a year in Washington state through installing energy management software on its existing PC fleet. Or a double digit spike in server utilization through virtualization in New York. Consider too that Utah has adopted a four-day work week for public employees that saves trips and saves money while maintaining service delivery thanks to a robust and proven suite of e-government self service offerings.
3. Putting the public back into public records.
As noted this time last year, disgraced former congressman Mark Foley should have provided a sufficient object lesson that e-mail and instant messages are public - read: disclosable - records. Former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick learned the lesson this year when 14,000 text messages made a liar of him on the stand. Resignation, criminal charges and conviction followed. As one legal observer succinctly put it, 'Send Now' May Go Public Later."
4. Getting us out of the way.
Human latency is the cold, clinical, science fiction-sounding term that engineers use to describe what is wrong with most business processes - the delays we cause through our apparent inattentiveness. Increasingly sophisticated machine-to-machine web services make human intervention unnecessary, and the presence feature in unified communications promises to track us down when we're needed - on the device of our choice, of course.
5. Confronting the point where mobility and utility computing meet.
Speaking of devices, mobility means that smart phones are more than cameras, e-mail clients and music players. They are computers that work really well in uncontrolled environments. Mobility has its own top level domain (.mobi) and is going mission critical with mobile ERP applications in the labs and soon on the streets. Imagine the possibilities.
On the threshold of a new year, there is at least the prospect that a viable and sustainable future is literally in the hands of the people government serves and figuratively in the cloud. Surely we can do something with that.
A version of this post was originally published as "Not that We're Likely to Forget" in the print edition of Government Technology magazine in December 2008.
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