June 2009 Archives

There is a new way of talking about what it means to be a digital state.  Its a podcast called The DS50, which is part of the expanded year round program from the Center's Digital States Performance Institute (DSPI).

The debut edition focuses on the federal economic stimulus package, often better known as ARRA or just The Stim.

Our guests include Susan Gaffney, director of the Federal Liaison Center for the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA), Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), and Roy Cales, the former CIO of Florida and current strategist with NSI.

We also preview interactive online applications that provide fresh looks at public finance in Maine and Rhode Island.

You can find links to the podcast from the landing page for the DSPI or download them directly -- here for MP3 or here for M4A.

Please give a listen and let me know what you think. 

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.

DTV day, a deadline that has been deferred once but won't be delayed again, is tomorrow.  The transition to digital television is a story of procrastination.

FCC chair Michael Copps, appointed on the eve of the originally scheduled February 17 DTV cutover, recently told a Los Angeles audience, "We've got some humps and bumps to navigate; there's still a number of people who don't know what to do.  We knew this transition was coming, the government was late getting itself organized ... but we are where we are and have to make this transition."

Former Washington State Gov. Gary Locke, now Secretary of Commerce in the Obama administration, says its not all government's fault -- its ours. "There are so many people who are always waiting until the last minute, whether it is college students doing term papers, or people filing taxes, or people like me who wait until Christmas Eve to do their shopping."

South Dakota didn't procrastinate.  They cut over according to the original time line.  And according to state CIO Otto Doll (who also runs public broadcasting in the state) it worked -- and the demand for assistance from technical staff and a corps of volunteers was less than expected.  When we talked last month, he noted that the nature of digital signals -- that they are there or they are not without the fade-in fade-out forgiveness of their analog predecessors -- caused some outlying residents in his largely rural state to lose TV reception.  Doll is melancholy on this point, not so much for the loss of television signals per se but as another symptom of the marginalization (and depopulating) of frontier states.

The people whose TV sets became paper weights earlier this spring will have some company on Friday morning.  Nielsen, the TV audience measurement company, estimates that 2.8 million households, or 2.5% of the TV market, will be left behind, despite the efforts of government, industry and community groups.  Their efforts apparently did some good.  Neilsen final estimate is less than half the 5.8 million TV household who that were unprepared in February.

For those who are still are not ready, the FCC has pressed 4,000 phone operators into service to stand by through the weekend to handle calls coming through their information line. That number is 888-225-5322.

Of course, with so much television content archived and streamed from the Internet, there is at least an element of the 2.8 million left behind households that likely won't miss terrestrial TV.

State portals have never looked, or acted, like this.  The state of Utah launched a new Utah.gov on Monday afternoon.

After at least eleven months of development, with some elements in the works for as long as two years, Utah.gov has turned hard core on Flash.  The portal developers had long wanted to exploit Flash functionality, an industry standard program for creating interactive features for websites, but didn't want to leave anybody out.  They were surprised, pleasantly so, to learn from statewide surveys that fully 97 percent of their audience used Flash.

Utah.gov backstops the landing page with proxy detection that makes the version of the portal served invisible to users -- Flash for those with the player installed, a simpler version for those who do not, and a mobile version for those coming to the portal on a smart phone. 

Flash graphics grab your attention on first visit, coupled with a carousel of icons (with a distinctive Mac-like look and feel) that add a dynamic feel to navigation.  User feedback and usability studies had told them that real users thought conventional portal wisdom was wrong. 

Search is central to navigation, and is now central to the front page of the portal.  It is what the users said they wanted.  A prominent news section, which lists recent agency press releases, has always been a big deal for agencies but less so for users.  It is still there on the landing page, now organized thematically with horizontal tabs, but has been bumped lower by the prominent search function and a local information window.

"Local meetings and resources" as the section is labeled does a couple of important and useful things. 

First, it uses noninvasive Geo-IP technology to identify the area of Utah from which the user is coming so it can serve up a calendar of events, information and services that would matter to a person from that community.  (Visitors from outside the state default to Salt Lake City although that outsider view was still serving up surprises during final testing last week.)  Mapping the IP address of the visitor to location-relevant information and services finally delivers on the promise that people should not have to take a civics lesson to learn how to get the services they need. 

Second, Geo-IP mapping also screens out the clutter.  Even in a reasonably well ordered state such as Utah, there are still more than 50,000 government forms, 1,163 online services and terabytes of public information with which to deal.  What you don't have to see matters.

The carousel of icons take users to any number of dedicated portals on everything from tourism and traffic to data and sustainability.  The multimedia portal brings together the posts from 27 formerly discreet state blogs, tweets from over a hundred state Twitter feeds and even serves up state-posted YouTube videos in an environment free of Google's persistent cookies. 

The carousel of goodies also includes a link to an initial pair of iPhone apps built by Utah.gov - the first for search (there's that user priority again) and another to look up the status of any licensed professional in the state. 

This newest Utah.gov is the product of, in no small measure, heavy lifting by its portal partners at the NIC subsidiary Utah Interactive.  In an interview days before the re-launch, Operations Manager Sara Watts said that so much was new in terms of form and function of the portal that it took six times the resources of an average development effort.

What was the hardest part in getting to consensus on the new portal? "The icons.  [The fights over them] have been going on for two years," she chuckled, "but that's why we made them easy to swap out."

The government of California's approach to transparency became a little clearer this afternoon when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered the posting of state contracts and audits of state agencies on its transparency website. 

The site, launched earlier this year, added new tabs today to coincide with the signing of Executive Order S-08-09, which requires all state contracts worth $5,000 or more to be posted on the site.  In addition to contracts, the order directs executive branch agencies to post information on operations, budget and programs and (at least) a list of all audits dating back to January 2008.  State CIO Teri Takai is on point for making it all work.

The Reporting Government Transparency Web site, as it is known, already provides a repository for travel expense claims by public employees and financial disclosures by senior staff and deputies in the Governor's office, agency secretaries and undersecretaries and department directors.  These first two tabs for travel and financial disclosure demonstrate that Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis is still right --  sunlight is the best disinfectant.

The move is another example of seeing what happens when public records are actually public.  While the Executive Order is silent on the issue, the service would be made more valuable if it flagged those contracts that were awarded without competition, or were the solicitations resulted in only a single bid (which, by definition, is also non-competitive). 

Single bid awards are a symptom of a procurement system -- particularly in information technology -- that is experiencing a policy failure and market failure simultaneously.  They should be treated as indicator of the relative health of the system until the underlying disease moves beyond diagnosis to treatment and cure. 

To use another but equally useful analogy, flags on single bid awards would also be roughly equivalent to the asterisks (*) dotting once-storied baseball records -- bringing with them the caution that things may not be as they appear.

"If you screw up today, you are going to have a lot more people paying attention to the screwup than you would 10 years ago. And conversely, if you can lead a success, there is a lot more potential interest and power behind the ability to organize a success story, to organize a project and bring it to fruition."

This aptly describes the promise and pitfalls of being digital. It's the observation of Jeffrey Eisenach, generally credited as the father of the Digital State Survey. But he isn't talking about today's mobile culture of text messaging and tweeting, which overdiscloses life's mundane details. Eisenach's comments are from a 1997 Government Technology interview in which he insisted "the digital revolution is very real to the average citizen today" and "states, localities and nations need to move much more rapidly than they are right now to get digital." That was 12 years ago, but the complaint still resonates.

In many ways, technology's finally catching up with Eisenach's vision of what government could do. But even in the mid-'90s, he and others saw possibilities that came with a more fully connected world. "There is a lot more ability to build coalitions and bring a lot more people into the process than you could before, and a much bigger payoff if you are successful," he said.

Gentle competition among states has been a catalyst for ad hoc coalitions that have formed and operated informally for more than a decade. Under the tutelage of the survey's adoptive parents -- the Center for Digital Government (CDG) -- the singular Digital State is now a community of Digital States. There are three distinct tiers: a dozen top-ranked states with a common view of the future, a second tier intent on challenging for the top 10 and a third group that shares a strategy to leapfrog onto the charts.

The Digital States Survey is the nation's original and only sustained benchmark of state IT programs as a whole -- from citizen-facing applications to the policy framework and technological infrastructure that makes it all possible.

If competition organically morphed into informal collaboration, a group of states and the CDG recognized an opportunity to do something more formal and structured. Something that tallies a Digital State's defining characteristics -- now and in the future as efficiency, transparency and performance become the watchwords of governing in the economic recovery age. Something that builds on the biennial survey's reputation with a year-round program of ongoing original research, analysis and practical aids in the strategic planning process through regional events, webinars, podcasts, online communities and panels and -- of course -- a Twitter feed.

All this coalesces this summer with the launch of the CDG's Digital States Performance Institute (DSPI), a community to modernize and improve government. It's intended to extend the value of the survey's benchmarks through documenting and sharing best and emerging practices by states that are committed to meeting today's needs and tomorrow's expectations.

The DSPI is where states can collaborate and co-create in unique Web 2.0 fashion. Eisenach understood the importance of getting on with it and getting it right, back when the Web didn't have a version number. "It is a national issue that is in the hearts and minds of the majority of the American people today and will continue to grow in importance."

 

Editor's note: This column originally appeared as Competition and Collaboration in the June print edition of Government Technology magazine.