October 2009 Archives

Gary Robinson has been named the new chief financial officer for the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS).  Word of the appointment came in an e-mail announcement on Friday.

The move reunites Robinson with his former deputy at the Department of Information Services.  Tracy Guerin left DIS in July to assume the newly created role of Chief of Staff at DSHS in July.

Robinson's tenure as DIS director ended abruptly in December 2008.

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.

The federal government used the conclusion of its two day summit on distracted driving to announce a complete ban on text-messaging by truckers, bus drivers and railroad engineers, all of whom are subject to federal regulation.  It will also compel states to impose similar restrictions on drivers of passenger cars at the risk of losing federal transportation funding for local road projects.

Earlier in the week, the president signed an executive order prohibiting federal employees from texting while driving government vehicles or when driving private vehicles on government business.  Rules for enforcing the ban are due in about 90 days. [1]

In an earlier post, I suggested that analog and digital distractions should be treated the same way under law.  To those ends, I wondered allowed about how the summit would define distractions.  Much of the summit focused on digital gadgets -- cell phones chief among them. 

But as Tom Mutchler from Consumer Reports chronicled in his extensive postings from the summit, distractions were broadly defined and compared.  Distractions are not just a device or a thing.  Instead, risk changes with the behavior required by the distraction -- and the role of the person being distracted.  Mutchler's summary follows:

Dr. John Lee, a human factors expert from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, aptly made the point when he noted that when a driver changes roles--they become a mother/father, boyfriend/girlfriend, diner, or worker instead of a driver--their risk increases.
 
Indeed, there are plenty of old-school distractions--eating, drinking, grooming, talking to a passenger, dealing with children -- as well as cell phone use and texting. Making those illegal is even harder than proposing legislation on the design and use of electronic devices. But several presentations today made it clear that there is a difference in the risk profile of "old-school" and "new-school" distraction.
 
First off, scientifically, there are different kinds of distractions.

• Visual distractions take your eyes off the road.
• Manual distractions take your hands off the wheel.
• Cognitive distractions take your mind off the road.

Simple in-vehicle tasks like tuning a radio (assuming you're not navigating a complex in-car multidirectional controller) have little cognitive load, a slight visual load (a quick glance), and a brief manual load. Adjusting the radio is often accepted as a baseline for comparing the amount of distraction of other controls. Various other "old-school" distractions each register differently with respect to these demands.
 
But texting is a "perfect storm." It requires you to look at the keyboard, manually manipulate the keys, and think about what you're writing. This means texting is a visual, manual, and cognitive distraction all in one.
 
Beyond the science, there is naturalistic study data that show the relative risks of these behaviors. Data from Virginia Tech shows that texting increases your odds 23.2 times of having a crash. That's off the charts compared to drinking (even odds), eating (1.6 times), or applying make-up (3.1 times.) Some distractions, like talking to a passenger or adjusting the radio, actually improved safety and had a protective effect, possibly by combating fatigue or having the passenger serving as a collision warning device.
 
One particular "old-school" distraction was more dangerous than the others. Reaching for a moving object increased the odds of a crash by 8.8 times. It might make a mess, but it's safer to let your bag fly off the front seat and hit the floor than to grab for it. (It's even safer to leave it in the trunk.)

Marketers were busy during the summit.  My single post on the subject attracted dozens of comments from folks with something to sell.  Many of them argued that text to speech technologies can reduce the risk of digital distractions because it keeps your hands on the wheel, if not always your mind on the road.  My favorite pitch, though, was for a reinforced super bumper.  The manufacturer argues, essentially, that getting hit by a distracted driver is inevitable -- so we might as well armor up our vehicles.