FastGov: Where Government is Going

New Podcast on the Digital States: Debut Edition focuses on the Stimulus Package

2009-06-26T15:50:22Z

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.

Storm Clouds: Google plugs in to Enterprise Outlook

2009-06-12T22:05:51Z

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 Transition: Is Procrastination a Public Policy Problem?

2009-06-11T18:21:27Z

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.

Utah.gov: This is the Portal you've been waiting for

2009-06-08T21:05:42Z

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."

CA shines Sunlight on State Contracts*

2009-06-04T22:50:52Z

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.

Digital States: Old Enough to Have a History, Smart Enough to Learn from It

2009-06-04T16:16:59Z

"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.

As the Cookies Crumble: Federal Web Restrictions outdated, says report

2009-05-26T17:42:46Z

Persistent cookies have been a perennial policy problem for government web sites. Privacy concerns drove early policy positions that prohibited or restricted the use of persistent cookies -- small bits of code stored on the user's computer that allows visited web sites to remember you -- on government sites. (Session cookies expire when the browser is closed, so they were generally exempt from the restrictions.)

A new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) says the old cookie policies have become stale, and deserve a fresh look and a new recipe. Author Daniel Castro sees an opportunity for the new administration to demonstrate its commitment to transparency by giving persistent cookies a legitimate place on the federal web site menu. Among his recommendations:

The Federal CIO should direct OMB to allow the use of persistent cookies on government websites.
In addition, OMB should be instructed to publish regularly updated guidelines outlining permitted uses of persistent cookies and guidance on best practices, such as specifying the maximum lifespan of persistent cookies.
The Federal CIO should also work to standardize the language used in website privacy policies across government agencies.

The ITIF has earned a reputation for working through intractable issues, most notably in divining a reasonable path forward on the complex and tricky issues related to broadband. That same sensibility has now been brought to bear on cookies.

Castro writes that persistent cookies provide another example of the perils of naming specific technologies in policy, noting:

"... citizens now have tools to ensure that online interactions with government occur on their own terms. Rather than restrict specific technology such as cookies, government regulations should instead focus on protecting civil liberties through continued government oversight on the collection and use of personally identifiable information."

If cookies are comfort food in the real world, a ban on persistent cookies is comforting for policy makers insofar as restrictions prevent bad things from happening. Castro's point is that the restrictions also prevent from good thing from happening.

Brainstorming Open Government: A Real Time Experiment

2009-05-22T19:38:39Z

The Obama Administration's Office of Science & Technology Policy and the National Academy of Public Administration is running a real time experiment in crowdsourcing this week and next.

The Open Government Brainstorm comes the same week as the launch of Data.gov and its companion mashup competition. The Brainstorm begins to model what the President had in mind when he issued the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government on January 21, 2009.

The live brainstorm also begins to demonstrate what Dr. Beth Noveck, deputy director for Open Government within the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, described in a recent speech to NASCIO as using social networks to move from complaining to changing government through an outcome-oriented platform. She outlined a short list of principles about the art of the possible in this regard (summarized nicely by Public CIO editor Tod Newcombe here).

At the midway point of the experiment, the Open Government Brainstorm had attracted 197 entries, which have been rated and ranked by other users. The rankings reflect a clear preference for unrestricted access to government records and data. Openness on the Internet is consistently highly rated, a proposal for openness through a CSPAN-cable news hybrid is getting a big thumbs down. While most of the entries are at least tangentially related to theme of transparency -- including one plea to define terms such as transparency, openness, collaboration and participation lest the experiment results in a festival of unmanaged expectations -- the limits of a public forum are also clear. No amount of rating and ranking can remove rants about Islamic banking, workers compensation and credit card abuse that are shoe horned into the forum.

The Brainstorm runs a new crowdsourcing tool called IdeaScale from Seattle start-up Survey Analytics. Its a coup for SA that competes in a crowded market of 60 or so online survey software companies, including Salesforce.com's Ideas application.

The official online dialogue continues through May 28. The results of the experiment itself, and whether it is a catalyst for any noticable change in the way the federal government acts, may provide the clearest answer to the project's central question, "How can we strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness by making government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative?"

The Data.gov Challenge: If you liked Apps for Democracy, you'll love Apps for America...

2009-05-21T23:46:05Z

In criss crossing the country talking with government technologists and business managers, I have been highlighting the experiment in co-creation of useful things by the District of Columbia. You will remember earlier posts about the all-skate data mashup that was Apps for Democracy. After 30 days of frenetic activity, the contest netted 47 new applications submitted by what might be best called "citizen developers," second cousins to citizen journalists (bloggers) who work in binary code rather than words.

These citizen developers are in growing demand. In fact, the federal government's launch of Data.gov this week came with a non-profit collaborative chaser. Nisha Thompson, Organizer and Outreach Coordinator with the Sunlight Foundation, dropped me a note earlier today:

You have been blogging about Apps for Democracy so I wanted to let you
know about the Sunlight Foundation's new contest Apps for America: The
Data.gov Challenge. As you might know Data.gov was launched today. To
take advantage of the new information available in friendly formats we
wanted to challenge developers to make creative applications.

You can see the contest information here:
http://sunlightlabs.com/contests/appsforamerica2/.

This is a wonderful, one-time opportunity to show the administration
the good that follows when they make information free. So we need to
seize it. And everyone's help in getting the word out is key. At the
end of the day, the more great entries the Apps for America contest
receives, the more likely government is to release more data - and the
more data government releases the more transparent, accountable, and
efficient it can be.

As it happens, Apps for America has become a regular part of our conversations out on the road but had not made it to a blog entry yet -- at least until now. The Data.gov challenge comes with over $20,000 in prize money -- it is what competition in the phrase friendly competition. The coding commences immediately with the announcement of winners expected at the end of summer.

For its part, Apps for Democracy is back with what it is calling the Community Edition. The sequel adds the dimension of community-based requirements definition -- that is, asking the people of DC what they would like -- during May, followed by a month of application development during June. Not insignificantly, they have found another $35,000 in prize money. There is even a code jam on June 6-7. Details are available on its website.

The similarly named initiatives do a number of things that are important. It is a real world test for the open source community and an opportunity for it to prove its worth in making government more transparent and the data it holds more useful. It is also a test for governments to explore the possibility of engaging citizens where they naturally congregate -- on social networks and around the small glowing screens of their iPhones.

As the open government or transparency movement shifts from the historic focus on public records to data, these feed-driven apps begin to show us what can happen when public data are actually public.

GFOA looks beyond Stimulus to Structure: Offers Online Training

2009-05-11T16:43:10Z

States begin to disburse hundreds of millions of new stimulus dollars in increased (and sometimes retroactive) unemployment benefits today.* The cash will hit the streets this week. It comes with the expectation that unemployed people will spend the extra money and it should provide a needed economic bump to local communities soon after.

This most recent cash infusion does not change the underlying fact that the size of the hole in the economy is much larger than any of the patches that come with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

It is timely then that the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) is expanding the conversation by returning to some of the core disciplines of public finance, cleverly adapted to the challenges of our time. GFOA makes a useful distinction between long term financial planning and the more urgent notion of fiscal first aid.

The first aid metaphor works. The promo piece from GFOA reads, in part, "Fiscal first aid tactics provide immediate relief from fiscal distress, and help stabilize the situation so that more comprehensive treatments can be applied."

The association is offering an Internet course on fiscal triage on May 21, 2009, from 2:00 to 3:40 p.m. (ET), featuring a trio of financial EMTs -- Melanie D. Purcell (Assistant Director, Municipal Technology Advisory Services, University of Tennessee); Timothy J. Soave (Manager of Fiscal Services, Oakland County, Michigan); and Shayne Kavanagh (Senior Manager, Research and Consulting Center, GFOA).

Like the first aid courses offered at your local fire house or community center, GFOA's fiscal rescue and survival skills course will "highlight a variety of fiscal first aid techniques, including their advantages and disadvantages and when it is best to use each technique."

Also like community events, GFOA is passing the hat to help cover its costs -- Government employees pay between $65 and $90 depending on whether they are an associaton member. Private sector folks are charged $110 (member) or $130 (non member).

To register for GFOA's Surviving Financial Distress: Fiscal First Aid Tactics, follow this link.

If you are interested in how information technology can help change the cost structure of service deliver, download a free copy of the Center for Digital Goverment white paper, Be IT Resolved, a guide to modernizing when you have no money.

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* States were able to adjust the benefits payment systems to accomodate the increased Stim benefits and eligibility periods. Many states missed a crucial implication of the one time stimulus money. Payments are typically charged to employers through the companion employment tax systems. For this exercise, the two systems had to be delinked. According to anecdotal reports, many states found themselves scrambling to make changes to avoid an unintended (and unauthorized) tax increase.

IT takes $2.5 Million hit in Michigan State Spending Cuts: Tech takes less than 1% of the pain

2009-05-07T00:08:35Z

Information technology is a curious artifact in government budgeting and spending. It is deeply embedded in almost everything government does yet gets called out with unique visibility when it comes to itemizing cuts.

The latest evidence of this trend comes from fiscally weary Michigan when the Granholm Administration announced the most recent mid course correction in order to meet the constitutional requirement to keep the budget in balance:

Executive Order 2009-22, the second issued during the current fiscal year, reduces spending by nearly $350 million, achieving $304 million in the general fund savings. The reductions will reduce services in some areas of government but will allow the state to protect critical functions of state government like education, health care, support for families in crisis, and job creation efforts.

The 23-page executive order provides an agency-by-agency itemization of the reduction package. It lists the programs that will take hits, and how large they will be. And in that respect, information technology is treated as a program (rather than just infrastructure or overhead). The named reductions to IT projects and other tech spend include:

Agriculture: $89,000
Attorney General: $6,400
Civil Rights: $22,500
Community Health (Health IT Initiative): $1,072,600
Human Services: $165,000
Management and Budget: $200,000
Military and Veterans Affairs: $3,200
Natural Resources: $2,400
Department of State: $300
State Police: $860,000
Treasury: $75,500

The spending cuts take $2,496,600 out of modernization efforts -- an unwelcome development to be sure. But seen against the $304 million in general fund reductions, IT's share is only eight-tenths of 1% -- compare that to a record (inflation adjusted) 23.5% year over year drop in state revenues. All things being equal, it is probably less than a fair share. But not all things are equal. IT still holds the unique promise for changing the cost structure of service delivery in ways that no other program, overhead or infrastructure can. Perhaps that helps explain why the cuts were held to less than a single percentage.

All of that from a state that is fresh out of options. The announcement included the now familiar recitation that moves were made necessary to eliminate a budget shortfall "caused, in large part, by the massive restructuring in the domestic auto industry." Perhaps that now goes without saying, given that the announcement also came the week that this John Rich single was at Number 12 on the CMT country music chart:

While the boss man takes his bonus paid jets on out of town
DCs bailing out them bankers as the farmers auction ground
Yeah, while there living up on Wall Street in that New York City town
Here in the real world their shuttin Detroit down

Washington State names new CIO: Tortorice from LA Unified Schools

2009-05-05T21:27:46Z

After a four month search, the state of Washington has named a new state CIO. The word came today from the governor's office. The full text follows:

Gov. Chris Gregoire today named Tony Tortorice, a California Information Technology executive with more than 25 years of IT experience in both the private and public sectors, to head Washington's Department of Information Services.

"Tony brings the unique background and wealth of experience required to be successful in this role," Gregoire said. "Our state, like any other business, has to make technological advances if we're going to be successful. I am confident that Tony's strong technology experience will greatly benefit Washington as we develop strategies to streamline state government - which will better serve our communities while improving our bottom line."

The Legislature created DIS in 1987 to make government information and services more available, accessible and affordable. The agency now employs nearly 450 workers who provide more than 100 technology services. The agency also provides technology leadership and guidance to government agencies across the state.

"Information technology has tremendous potential to improve government's services to citizens. I came to work for Governor Gregoire because of her commitment to tap that potential," said Tortorice.

A California resident for the past 30 years, Tortorice, 57, is the chief information officer for the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second largest public K-12 school system. There, he led the recovery of a troubled HR/Payroll implementation. Tortorice was also the senior IT executive for the Los Angeles Community College District, the largest system of community colleges in the nation. Before working with the community college system, he was a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Prior to beginning a doctorate program in public administration at the University of Southern California, Tortorice served in the U.S. Navy, where he started his career in IT by installing his command's first word processing system. Tortorice holds a master's degree in systems management from USC, and a bachelor's degree in history from the University of State of New York.

"Tony Tortorice will be an outstanding Chief Information Officer for the State of Washington," said Scott Griffin, former chief information officer at Boeing who served on the interview panel. "He comes to the job with a wealth of technology and public service experience, and is aligned with Governor Gregoire's priorities for our state. Tony's leadership and experience will be a great asset as we move our state forward in the information age."

Gregoire commended DIS Interim Director Jim Albert, who has led the agency since January, when former Director Gary Robinson retired from state service.

"I want to thank Jim for his leadership at DIS. I know it will be an easy transition thanks to Jim's commitment and dedication to the agency," Gregoire said.

Tortorice will begin at DIS July 1, where he will earn an annual salary of $147,000.

Tortorice comes to the role just as the Administration won legislative approval to build a new data center, for which DIS will be the general contractor. He also faces the challenge of working on relationships with customer agencies that have become strained over time as DIS repositioned itself from being a discretionary service provider to a control agency.

$9 Billion Shortfall won't stop New WA State Data Center

2009-04-30T22:37:04Z

Last December, Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire promised a state budget with something for everyone to hate. Well, not everybody. To be clear, there is a lot to hate in the painfully balanced budget, which made deep cuts to higher education and health to balance the budget in the face of a $9 billion deficit. But a new state data center will rise from the budget ashes.

Interim state CIO Jim Albert says that the governor saw the data center and adjoining office complex as so central to her campaign for government reform that the administration held on tight to the new data center as budget negotiations came down to the wire last week.

The new data center would bring the state Department of Information Services (DIS) under one roof for the first time in the agency's history. It would also provide a fully modern and green platform for the technology component of the administration's shared services strategy, a priority in the administration's reform agenda.

An earlier cost estimate for the new state data center was pegged at $242 million, which would buy 160,000 square feet of data center and another 160 square feet of office space for DIS. The final deal includes another 80,000 square feet of office space, the occupants for which will be decided by the Office of Financial Management.

The secret sauce in getting a new data center through a nightmarish budget season is the financing structure. It will be built as a lease back under an arrangement struck by the legislature last year. Albert says that, with addition of more office space, they have not reached a new guaranteed maximum price with the firm that was selected for the building project. Those details will be worked out before construction begins.

Your Next IT Strategy: Stimulating, Smart, Sustainable and Sticky

2009-04-15T17:27:24Z

The CTO Summit wraps up today in San Diego. It continues to be home to great conversation among a group of state and local technology executives that rarely have the opportunity to meet face-to-face and discuss issues of common concern and interest.

To kick start the conversation, I borrowed a page from Harvard Business Review and offered (however immodestly) what should be the four corners of their next strategy. The presentation is available here and the accompanying videos are available from the Renovation Nation companion site.

Intel ISS: Stimulus, Security, Sustainability and Mobility

2009-03-18T15:28:53Z

The 2009 Intel Solutions Summit (ISS) wrapped up last night after three days of discussions between the company and about 400 of its channel partners about what it considers the three defining characteristics of its offerings -- security, sustainability and mobility.

I was asked to provide a overview of the federal stimulus package and the slides from that lunch presentation are here --
IntelStimulusLaunch.pdf

Kundra back at work: Federal CIO reinstated, White House confirms

2009-03-17T22:23:40Z

The New York Times added White House confirmation to earlier reports by TechPresident.com and The Personal Democracy Forum that Vivek Kundra was back at work today as Federal CIO.

The reinstatement comes a few days after F.B.I. agents had raided his former office at the District of Columbia's technology department. Mr. Kundra was not a target of the raid. A former employee of his, Yusuf Acar, has been charged with bribery. The F.B.I. said that Mr. Kundra was not implicated in the bribery case, but he took a leave from his new federal job anyway.

The three day leave will probably be remembered as among the shortest in federal government history, and reflects the Administration's attitude (if not always its actions) to err on the side of an abundance of caution.

Now, his challenge and opportunity is to make sufficient progress quickly to get out from the cloud not of his own making that he was the guy whose old offices were raided.

It will be harder from here but, at the very least, Kundra will be around to make the journey,

On Leave: Vivek Kundra has left the Building (Opinion)

2009-03-12T22:00:48Z

A dispatch from NBC White House Correspondent Chuck Todd on MSNBC's First Read blog confirmed an unwelcome but perhaps inevitable development at the end of a very long day:

A senior White House official tells NBC News that the president's choice to be the nation's chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, has taken a leave from his position until further details become known of the FBI's investigation into Kundra's Washington, D.C. IT offices.

While the FBI has said Kundra is not connected to their investigation of a contractor that was under Kundra's supervision, the appearance apparently is enough to force Kundra to take a leave from the White House.

This line is worth repeating: "FBI has said Kundra is not connected to [its year long] investigation." Indeed, First Read was the first to make clear that Kundra was not a target of the FBI investigation.

UPDATES (03-12-09): Newsweek online ran this extended piece from the AP on the raids, the arrests and the alleged scheme. Separately, Government Technology noted Kundra's recent rise and recognition within the public sector IT community.

WTOP Radio tied the pair of arrests in a DC government office building to an "Obama appointee" in its web headline but only clarified that "Kundra has not been linked to Thursday's raid" in the 18th and last paragraph of its story.

The Washington Post's first report of the raid on the DC CTO's office, including the arrest of a member of its staff and a contractor in a bribery sting, noting in the fourth paragraph that the office had been headed by Kundra until last week. Later in the day, the paper added a link to a full story that clarified that Kundra "is not suspected of any wrongdoing" -- another eight paragraphs later.

Politico's Ben Smith appended a one sentence update to a post called "FBI raids office of D.C. CTO, Obama appointee," noting "Kundra himself is not a target."

The Huffington Post was less attentive. Its story remained unchanged all day, leaving room for all manner of speculation:

FBI agents have arrested a District of Columbia government worker and another man while they search the offices of the city's chief technology officer. The head of that city office, Vivek Kundra, recently left to take a White House technology post.

The private, non-partisan Performance Institute echoed the theme in a tweet, tying the raid to the non-targeted individual in Twitter's characteristically cryptic 140 word dispatches, "FBI agents have made two arrests after raiding the D.C. office of the man tapped to be President Obama's chief information officer."

The breaking news came as the March 10 issue of Business Week hit the news stands. The BW profile of Kundra covers familiar territory about his penchant for open source development, data sharing across institutional lines, web 2.0 possibilities, and the cloud as the next platform for governing. The subhead is strangely prescient, "Vivek Kundra says he'll improve the federal government's technology, but he faces an immense challenge." And the challenge just got a little more tangled today.

The news -- as sketchy as it is -- and the accompanying headlines -- some of which are downright misleading -- created all manner of concern and confusion in the public sector IT community. The subject line in one early e-mail made the point in the cryptic and crude language of texting -- "DC raids -- WTF?"

For his part, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty defended of his former CTO and the work of his office in comments to the Washington Post on what the district will do now that the investigation has come to this point.

Kundra is still standing -- on leave from his new federal appointment, but still standing. The appointment may never have been made if the raid had come a week earlier, particularly given the rush to judgment reflected in the online comments attracted by the stories on the sites noted above.

And that is the part of this affair that is so frustrating: in a single news cycle, we have been witness to a rush to judgment that presumes guilt, by association or otherwise, based on word of an investigation the details of which remain sealed. Surely, at this point, the presumption must be with Kundra, not against him. And for those of us tempted to say more than we know, it is time to let the process be the process.

Florida's Fugate is FEMA Pick

2009-03-04T17:46:01Z

The AP confirms speculation that Craig Fugate, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, is the Obama Administration's nominee to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Fugate, 49, led Florida's disaster response to eight hurricanes that hit the state over two years.

Fugate told the Miami Herald that he was first contacted by staff at the Department of Homeland Security. He met Wednesday with Secretary Janet Napolitano in Washington.

Fugate faces daunting challenges as the director of FEMA, which, as Eric Holdeman of ICF International details in a recent op-ed piece in Emergency Management magazine, lost focus as its mandate expanded to be all things under all circumstances.

DIY: Obama Admin. works around YouTube Cookie Controversy

2009-03-03T01:28:42Z

If defending a landmark $3.6 trillion federal budget proposal and a $787 billion economic stimulus package was not enough, the Obama administration has been dogged by persistent complaints about persistent cookies used by YouTube in embedded videos on administration web sites.

Persistent Dogging over Persistent Cookies

The big dollar spending initiatives have dominated the news cycles but blogger, self styled cyber activist and academician Chris Soghoian remained on the embedded video watch as the Obama team has successively launched its transition site (change.gov) after the election, the new whitehouse.gov site after the inauguration and the stimulus tracking site (recovery.gov) after the passing of the economic recovery act.

The Original Complaints

As detailed in this blog's post last December, Soghoian's initial call for team Obama to "ditch YouTube" was based on three concerns:

The use of persistent cookies by YouTube that would violate a long standing prohibition of the use of long-term cookies on federal websites;
Favoratism through the exclusive use of what Soghoian repeatedly reminds us is the Google-owned YouTube; and,
Lack of transparency about privacy and user choice.

Soghoian's critique of the transition site softened only slightly with the launch of POTUS 44's White House. He noted with alarm that White House lawyers had written in an exemption for embedded YouTube videos from the White House privacy policy. And he gives a grudging nod to a subsequent technical fix that he admits will protect most (but perhaps not all) visitors.

Soghoian implies a correlation between his critiques and the technical fix, which he suggests may be modeled after the the Electronic Frontier Foundation's MyTube privacy tool.

Making YouTube Safe for Federal Websites

If all of these changes took place incrementally on whitehouse.gov, the more fully formed package of fixes debuted with recovery.gov.

1. Visitors guarded from YouTube Persistent Cookies until they Click

The image of a embedded YouTube (left) and the actual embedded video (below).

As Soghoian describes it "YouTube is now only able to use cookies to track users who click on the "play" button on an embedded YouTube video -- the majority of people who scroll through a page without clicking play will not be tracked."

2. Exclusive use of YouTube and the Appearance of Favoritism

Below the screen, users are given the option to download the video directly or access it from an alternate video sharing site (vimeo).

3. Transparency about Privacy and User Choice

The initial screen (image, not the actual embed) includes a link to the YouTube privacy policy, which users can compare to the administration's privacy policy (linked below the video) before they click on anything.

What Have We Learned?

The administration has taken the same kind of pragmatic approach to the persistent cookie problem as it has with larger policy issues. It brings with the risk of alienating the most zealous in its base but it also brings the promise of getting things done.

There are two other alternatives. Soghoian clearly wants a crack down on Google for the privacy-invading cookie-collecting practices of its YouTube service (even with the privacy work arounds in place). Drawing attention to concerns over the administration's use of these technologies is also the best shot at what Soghoian really wants -- a congressional investigation.

Within the civil service, federal web masters report that they have been in discussions with YouTube for about a year to establish a YouTube just for government to provide a comprehensive, once and for all policy-based solution to concerns over privacy and commercial encroachment. The problem is, there is no once and for all on the Internet. The other problem with a YouTube-of-Its-Own approach is that it would be isolated from the real YouTube, that space where 80.7 million people gather voluntarily to watch videos -- a place where the eye balls that public agencies want to reach gather naturally.

FastGov Microblog

2009-02-28T05:42:19Z

It may not be a particularly elegant solution but here is a 30-second cut and paste integration of a blog and a microblog. There will be a more elegant solution soon but this will work for now.

Lessons from Facebook Faceplant: When the 2 in Web 2.0 stands for Second Chance

2009-02-27T01:30:27Z

A hugely popular social network angered a sizable chunk of its users last week with a unilateral change in terms of service that, in essence, said "your content and your life becomes our IP and our revenue."

It regrouped and is back with a surprisingly Web 2.0 second chance -- one in which it remembers that conversation and community is based on communication that goes both ways. In so doing, it has come face-to-face with issues that have long bedeviled governments -- transparency and openness.

With a wink and a nod to a popular Portland, OR radio station that once had a contest during which callers were given a proper name and had to decide whether the person was Dead or Canadian, it is now time to play the inaugural round of Government or Facebook:

Statement One

1. "Forever won't work: Use of our content has to have clear limits."

We make it clear that we can only use your content in a manner consistent with your privacy and application settings.

[ ] Government [ X ] Facebook

Statement Two

2. "Opt-in only: You can't just change the terms whenever you want."

We sought to address this comment by adopting a virtual Town Hall process for providing users with notice of proposed changes and an opportunity to comment, as well as an opportunity to vote where certain thresholds are met.

[ ] Government [ X ] Facebook

Statement Three

3. "Write it in English: No legalese (or Latin!) please."

We sought to address this comment by making the proposed Statement simpler and shorter, and avoiding legal terms where possible. That said, some legal concepts demand the use of very specific legal wording, so it is not possible to avoid all legal language.

[ ] Government [ X ] Facebook

Of course, there are not-so-subtle clues that give away the answers. But notice how the issues are similar: Whose information is it? How long should it be retained? How and where should we talk about these issues? (In Town Halls says Facebook, how old school governmental is that?) And what language do we use to talk about this stuff? (Plain and simple, an area where exemplar governments including Washington state are getting much better.)

If government can school Facebook on the complexity of these issues (and it can), the social network is not constrained by deliberately slow bureaucratic processes in dusting themselves off after a big, public mistake and taking a second shot. Being fast is good. Being right is better. Listening and developing policy iteratively may prove to be -- in the long push -- the best.

Concluded that noted policy wonk Mark Zuckerberg after a particularly bad week for a company that quickly found its footing again in a way promises a better future, "History tells us that systems are most fairly governed when there is an open and transparent dialogue between the people who make decisions and those who are affected by them."

[More analysis of the Facebook approach to policy making is coming in the May 2009 issue of Government Technology.]

BearingPoint Declares Chapter 11

2009-02-18T17:07:29Z

With $1 billion on debt and a looming repayment deadline, BearingPoint filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for its US operations today. The company has asked the courts to allow operations to continue uninterrupted during the reorganization.

In a statement, the CEO Ed Hapbach said:

BearingPoint has reached agreement with our lead creditors to significantly reduce our debt. To implement the agreement, the company commenced a pre-arranged Chapter 11 process on February 18, 2009. This is a major step forward in securing a stronger financial foundation and better future for our company, our clients and our employees.

We will continue to operate our business as usual while we complete our restructuring.

Because we have already negotiated terms of our restructuring with our lead creditors, we expect to emerge from this process quickly.

Government is one of its three major practice areas, a practice which ranges from federal defense work to management and technology consulting to state and local governments.. Based in McLean, Virginia, USA, the firm, which emerged from KPMG, has approximately 17,100 employees.

Taxpayers of Genius: This Spoof's for You

2009-02-10T21:42:53Z

In a playful YouTube spoof of the "Real Men of Genius" ads made famous by Bud Light, Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot marshals "real taxpayers of genius" to e-file their state income tax returns this year.

Those familiar with the original series of beer ads will recognize the formula. "Today, we salute you, Mr. Frustrated Taxpayer," says the unseen voice over announcer. Then, as backup singers repeat his words in falsetto, the announcer suggests that life will be better with e-filing.

As with the originals, the spot ends triumphantly.

"Well done, e-filer, well done," the announcer deadpans as a taxpayer files online and pumps his fists in the air.

There is method to this madness.

According to a release from the Comptroller;s office, the state spends $1.98 processing a paper return, compared with 38 cents for a return filed online.

E-filing is free for people who meet certain requirements.

Washington DIS Elimination Bill: 3 Up, 3 Down in 7 Minutes

2009-02-06T14:24:41Z

After a long and often emotional hearing on a separate bill about same sex benefits, a characteristically brusque committee chair Darlene Fairley (D 32nd District) told the people who had stayed to testify on Senate Bill 5256 that she only wanted to hear from three of them due to the lateness of the hour.

At issue, the proposed elimination of the Washington State Department of Information Services (DIS). Fairley summarized the sponsor's motivation for closing DIS as "gathering up money for his social services" although committee staff said the benefits or costs of such a move were either "indeterminate" or "over $360,000" depending on how you read the as yet incomplete fiscal notes.

As for choosing only three people to testify off a long list of those who had signed in as "opposed" to the bill, Fairley acerbically concluded, "I know why you're opposed ... because you go away."

With that as his introduction, Interim DIS Director Jim Albert, appointed just over a month ago, reminded the flagging committee members of how his agency provided a wide range of technology goods and services to some 600 public entities in the state that would have to find replacement providers -- possibly at a higher cost. Albert said that one in five state residents receive services from or through DIS, whether that is a payroll or benefits check, electronic funds transfer or eligibility letters -- not to mention the 700,000 unique visitors who visited the state portal for information during the December storms.

With Albert's two minutes up, Department of Personnel CIO Steve Young itemized the DIS provided services on which his agency relied -- e-mail, security, secure file transfer and server hosting among them.

Washington Federation of Labor Lobbyist Alia Griffing was last up, saying simply that the Federation had 349 members at DIS and the reasons for the Federation's opposition were "self evident."

But by themselves, evidently not enough.

Hearing set for Bill to eliminate WA state technology agency

2009-02-05T17:09:30Z

The heart of Senate Bill 5256, introduced in the Washington State legislature, is the repeal of the enabling statute for the state Department of Information Services (RCW 43.105). With its repeal, the agency would go out of business on January 1, 2010.

Strangely, the digest written by legislative staff says the bill "eliminates the department of social and health services' information system services division and prohibits maintaining a similar division in the future." Indeed, it does that but the accompanying Senate Bill Report acknowledges the wider scope, summarizing the bill in a singe sentence, "The Department of Information Services is eliminated."

Except for a provision that would transfer any balances in the DIS revolving fund to the general fund, the bill is silent on government operations without DIS. Who if anyone would assume responsibility for the third largest data center in the northwest, the statewide network and a big basket of IT related goods and services? Put another way, would the 130 or more public agencies that are DIS customers be left to find new providers by themselves? Those agencies that provided fiscal notes on the bill concluded that the impact of the bill would be "Non-zero but indeterminate cost and/or savings."

When Senator Jim Hargrove (D - 24th Legislative District) dropped the bill on January 19, the conventional wisdom was that it was, to use a popular euphemism in Olympia, a "conversation starter."

There was also a sense that, if for no other reason than the massive volume of legislation with which the Senate was dealing, the bill was not likely to get a hearing. So much for conventional wisdom. SB5256 is scheduled for a hearing this afternoon at 3:30PM before the Senate Committee on Government Operations. The hearing is scheduled to be carried live on TVW, the state level C-SPAN service.

New HUD Number 2 Nominee TWEETS ... at least for now

2009-02-04T16:23:56Z

Pending Senate confirmation, King County Executive Ron Sims has accepted an appointment to serve as Deputy Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan in the Obama administration.

Sims has clearly been thinking about the Obama team's seven-page, 63-item questionnaire, the completion of which is required of every candidate for Cabinet and other high-ranking positions.

The questionnaire includes requests for personal and professional records, including a "list all aliases or 'handles' you have used to communicate on the Internet," and links to any blog posts and links to their Facebook pages.

In an interview with Seattle public radio station KUOW, Sims said,

"They know I Twitter and they know I Facebook. So it's gonna be really interesting to see what the rules are. They may say to me no Twitter and then I wouldn't. So trust me, they know I Twitter. They know I'm active. It'll be up to the White House and it'll be up to Secretary Donovan about their comfort zones with my Twittering and my Facebook."

Sims has tweeted sparingly on his appointment as he keeps his micro diary of the days of the life of a county executive. His Facebook profile notes, "Ron Sims, King County Executive has no recent activity." Not surprising given what's on his plate. Given the troubles some of his fellow nominees have had, you wouldn't blame the guy for going back to the questionnaire and that question about taxes....

DTV Transition: South Dakota's Rabbit Ear Response

2009-02-02T18:36:33Z

"Please don't adjust your set, you ain't seen nothing yet." The line is a send-up of those serious-sounding "One Moment Please" announcements that were once commonplace on local TV when things went wrong. The parody was on a scratchy comedy album from a misspent youth, but could prove prescient on the eve of the nation's transition to digital television -- or DTV -- this month.

The issue on the ground is how you get the signals out of the sky. At-risk viewers are those who rely on rabbit ears or rooftop antennas. Their sets will fall silent and snowy on Feb. 17 without a converter box.

Thankfully it's not IT's problem, unless you are South Dakota's Otto Doll. He is unique among state CIOs because running and programming the state's public broadcasting stations are in his wheelhouse. Public radio and TV happen to be the largest broadcasters in South Dakota.

"We have a natural tendency to expect the state to come to the aid of people in trouble," said Doll, who noted that South Dakota's experiences with fires, tornadoes, floods and hurricanes helped officials prepare a rabbit-ear rapid response. "We know things are going to fail, we just don't know where," he said. Losing TV reception is less severe than losing access to bank machines, he said, but residents still rely on broadcasters for emergency alerts and other information.

The problem is threefold. "Some people will not have heard they needed to do anything, some will have heard but decided to do nothing and others will have done something but will have done it wrong," Doll said. Consequently the state deployed a handful of its public TV engineers in a modified train-the-trainer model to make house calls to different communities. The engineers work with volunteers to provide troubleshooting knowledge, including how to reorient antennas.

South Dakota's planners studied an early DTV transition in Wilmington, N.C., last fall to get a sense of what to expect. The Wilmington experiment drew 1,823 phone calls about adjusting antennas, setting up and tuning converter boxes, and why the transition was happening in the first place. But the largest share of the calls (553) was from residents who complained they were unable to receive their favorite TV stations' signals.

Doll said his state "will muster another six engineers [and] whatever resources I have to make do" as the DTV deadline approaches. Given Wilmington's call breakdown, Doll saw an opportunity to enlist communications students from the University of South Dakota to staff a phone bank, with his engineers standing in the wings. South Dakota Public Broadcasting (SDPB) will cap an awareness campaign that has included 5,000 radio and TV announcements with a DTV telethon, which will have the look and feel of a pledge drive, but instead of asking for money, the SDPB will answer viewers' questions on the air and through the phone bank.

By definition, this will be the last time that video will not be IT's problem. Digital video is the new lingua franca, and broadcasting's transition removes analog as the last big barrier to convergence and carriage on any network, including yours.

Editor's Note: This column was published before a congressional decision on Feb. 4 to delay the DTV transition deadline. Broadcasters now have until June 12 to turn off their analog signals, although they can do so anytime after Feb. 17.

This post originated as a column, Rabbit Ear Response, in the February 2009 issue of Government Technology magazine.

Inauguration Streams trump TV in delivering Unique Audience

2009-01-27T15:19:37Z

An unrepentant and even gleeful television loyalist, Government Technology Associate Editor Chad Vander Veen added a inauguration post script in a recent GovLog post about how the conventional and new media compared in delivering the video the world wanted to watch last Tuesday.

There was a good reason for the herky jerky video from streaming sources. It turns out that Vander Veen was in the minority by choosing to watch the party on the national mall on television. (In the name of disclosure, I double dipped with the TV remote on one knee and my laptop on the other.)

Consider recently released numbers about the inauguration coverage from the Nielsen Media Research and its sister organization Nielsen Online. The former counted the total television and cable audience across 17 broadcast and cable networks at 37.8 million. For its part, Nielson Online reports that the Top 10 current events and news sites served up a unique audience of 48.7 million.

This may be an inflection point in the way that we use media. Broadcast and cable may have been able to deliver a more consistent signal but it is remarkable that a larger audience chose to make a little history of their own while watching a historic moment online. Make no mistake, the digital majority has spoken again. We would do well to listen and think carefully about what that means for meeting the expectations of generations that gravitate to the Internet but probably couldn't tell you that there were dedicated public access, educational and government (PEG) channels on cable.

Day One: Smart, Sustainable and Transparent

2009-01-21T01:09:55Z

Change.gov, the transition site of the former President-elect, actively solicited advice and input from all comers on matters of public concern. (That function will now be performed through the newly relaunched whitehouse.gov.) Our sister program, Digital Communities, responded early to the call with a transition brief that summarized the priorities of local governments.

Beyond the Digital Communities document, there are three nuggets that stand out in the breathtaking volume of unsolicited advice.

The first two represent a rare bit of agreement between a liberal Nobel Laureate economist and a conservative operative of the first order. Their subject: Economic Stimulus.

In the January 22 issue of Rolling Stone, Economist Paul Krugman wrote an open letter to the new president. It read, in part,

As much as possible, you should spend on things of lasting value, things that, like roads and bridges, will make us a richer nation. Upgrade the infrastructure behind the Internet; upgrade the electrical grid; improve information technology in the health care sector, a critical part of any health care."

Importantly, Krugman continues,

Provide aid to state and local governments, to prevent them from cutting investment spending at precisely the wrong moment. And remember, as you do this, that all this spending does double duty: It serves the future, but it also helps the present, by providing jobs and income to offset the slump."

Still on the subject of stimulus, former House speaker Newt Gingrich cautions,

They're talking about a government that's still a trillion, 500 billion dollars. We ought to then have a smart, trillion, 500 billion dollar government, not a dumb one. Lincoln built the trans-continental railroads, one of the key factors in the rising Republican majority of his generation. Theodore Roosevelt built the Panama Canal. Eisenhower proposed the interstate highway system as a national defense act.... There are smart things government should do....There's a huge jump from the transcontinental railroad president to a pothole presidency. What I've seen so far is a tendency to have relatively tiny projects that have no strategic impact on the country's long-term future."

Greg Elin of the Sunshine Foundation told public radio that digital technologies are transformative -- and that new administration can prove it by doing a couple of things on day one:

I think the first one is an executive order stating that social media and technology of Web 2.0 should be used by all the agencies. I think that that's absolutely the first one. We're certainly hopeful that he's going to follow through on his promises to create an Ethics.gov site and to make the information of lobbying activity as searchable as the contracts are.

I think the other thing is we'd like to see this information available in real time; rather than report it twice a year or quarterly or annually, that this information is available as it happens in real time.

If it is not too early to speak of the new president's legacy, if this is our moment, if this is our time, then let's let government in our time be remembered for being smart, sustainable and transparent.

The Streamed Inauguration as Experienced

2009-01-20T18:40:14Z

CBS News was the first to post a story that conceded the grand streaming experiment of the inauguration -- including its own streams -- was brought to its knees at just the moment for which Americans had been waiting:

Minutes after noon as Barack Obama took the oath of office, the much talked about online video coverage of the event almost ground to a halt.

Just as massive crowds filled the National Mall in Washington, millions of users flocked to online video feeds. Maybe we're not as far into the Internet Age as we thought because for the 20 or so minutes surrounding the big moment, it was hard, if not impossible, to watch the inaugural festivities....

Clicking around to some of the other major news outlets, they seemed to be having similar issues.

Indeed, during the speech, the CNN Live/ Facebook streaming social network hybrid had its moments.

One moment, it looked like this:

And the next moment, this ...

Given the new administration's heavy reliance on these technologies, networks -- social, cable, television and other -- will not have another four years to figure out the problem of latency during high traffic moments

Bracing for Inauguration Day Network Congestion

2009-01-19T17:40:27Z

The inauguration of the nation's 44th president promises to be the largest live social-networking event to date. It is expected to dwarf election night and the Super Bowl and push the edges in the ongoing experimentation with social networking.

Among the most prominent projects, CNN is integrating Facebook user status updates on CNN.com Live's streaming of the event and ABC is soliciting text messages and videos from neighborhood inauguration parties to include in its broadcast of the Tuesday night concert all in the hope of creating a national virtual inauguration ball. Social networks including Flickr and Meebo and social platform companies such as Slide and Socialcast are expecting spikes in traffic, up 60 percent from normal patterns by one estimate.

With less than 24 hours to go, the volume of micro blogging at Twitter was already beginning to overwhelm the system:

For their part, major wireless network providers have bulked up their capacity in the Washington, DC area.

In the other Washington -- Washington state -- public employees have been asked to help prevent congestion on state controlled networks on inauguration day. Instead of streaming inauguration coverage into their own cubicles, employees interested in watching the inauguration have been asked to gather in conference rooms and watch it together -- on TV.

There is no word about whether employees who watch the ceremony will be required to submit leave slips for the time.

Blog Extra: The Crisis Column (Extended Edition)

2009-01-07T20:16:21Z

Only a crisis, real or perceived, produces real change.

When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken
depend on the ideas that are lying around.
- Milton Friedman

The New Year begins with no shortage of crisis. Economic. Geopolitical. Confidence. Then there is the need for rebuilding the things on which communities rely to get stuff done - roads, bridges, airports, water, sewer, electricity and, lest we take it for granted, the Internet.

Friedman, the Chicago school free-market economist, would hardly think so but Keynesian-style public works had been an old idea lying around that is now gaining currency because building roads, bridges, grids and networks create jobs and help renew confidence - with more direct, measurable impacts than economic rescue plans and stimulus packages.

Public works is a not an instant remedy. It reflects a long term commitment from investors based on what might be best characterized as a patient urgency, recognizing that government is uniquely able to invest as both a means and an ends - the means of kick starting a stalled economy and the ends of making needed improvements.

Here are five smaller ideas that have been lying around that are worth considering as we think about the path forward:

1.   Be Like Ike
On inauguration day 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower made this note in his official, "My first day at the President's Desk. Plenty of worries and difficult problems." His was a post-war, post-depression presidency into which Eisenhower introduced what is widely credited as the greatest public works project in history - the interstate highway, defense and communications system. It became the backbone of a resurgent economy, supported national defense and did more to bring Americans together than any other law in the twentieth century. The 47,000 mile system cost about a half trillion inflation-adjusted dollars. That sounds about right, because trillion has become the denominator of choice in estimating the levels of investment needed for national renewal, competitiveness and sustainability.

2.   Smart is Second to Nothing
Dr. Robert Atkinson, President of the non-partisan Information Technology and Innovation Foundation argues that investments in what he calls "digital progress" is vital to: improved productivity, competitiveness, and quality of life; collaboration among public, private and not-for-profit organizations; and, solving intractable problems. He concedes that investments in making digital progress is hard to attract because it invisible and intangible or both, yet it is much stronger economic driver that the industrial age institutions that are going to Washington, DC in search of a bail out.

Likewise, IBM chief executive Samuel J. Palmisano recently told the Council on Foreign Relations that more intelligent, efficient and smarter systems for modernizing utility grids, traffic management, food distribution, water conservation and health care are central to economic recovery as is the need for huge levels of public and private investment. For Palmisano, smart is not just a metaphor. "I mean infusing intelligence into the way the world literally works -- the systems and processes that enable physical goods to be developed, manufactured, bought and sold... services to be delivered... everything from people and money to oil, water and electrons to move... and billions of people to work and live."

If, as the New York Times observes, this approach "potentially providing a foundation for innovation and growth across a range of industries," digital progress and smart systems should not take a backseat to any incumbent industry in the competition for new investments.

3.   Action is at the Edges
For Palmisano, being smart is synonymous with the rise of "the globally integrated enterprise" -- perhaps one with three initials in its name. The conjoining of the two may put us at risk of losing out on the great lesson of the Internet - that innovation, growth and community always happen at the edges of a federation rather than the center of an enterprise. The network has forever inverted center-periphery relationships in the hinterland's favor.

4.   Value is in what public works make possible
Engineers and policy makers both have a tendency to talk about investments in terms of the thing itself rather than the value the thing creates. In a political context, a bridge is much less an engineering marvel than a cost effective way to reduce congestion, improve safety and increase opportunities for residents and businesses alike. The same holds true for investments in digital renewal - engineering and wizardry in the ether means far less to elected officials and taxpayers than how it improves quality of life and opportunities for their kids and communities.

5.   Watch Our Language
This column will doubtlessly be meta tagged as being about infrastructure but I have been at pains not to use that word here. It is a useful shorthand among technologists but - according to no less authorities than Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director of the Annenberg School of Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania and MSNBC commentator Chris Mathews on an unlikely point of agreement - "infrastructure is an awful word." The task ahead is too important for our potential friends and allies to be turned away from something good by an apparently awful label. While we are it, we should probably lay off the practice of using software-style versioning numbers - as in Government 2.0 - to talk about things that are more important than the name lets on.

A fellow economist reminds us that there is something to learn here from Milton Friedman, who was particularly effective as a "popularize" with even his most polemical work "beautifully and cunningly written. There is no jargon; the points are made with cleverly chosen real-world examples."

Perhaps that is our charge for making the case for things that matter: be clever, beautiful and cunning.

For the last seven years, the editors of Government Technology and I have usually found a way to shoehorn my often over length columns into the available space on the back page of the magazine. The first few drafts of the January 2009 column, originally titled The Case for Patiently Urgent Public Works, were much longer than they should have been. I took the axe to it to get it down to the size but I still like the longer version better. Now, if a guy had a forum or a platform, maybe he could surface the longer version ... wait, they have blogs on the Internet now.

Transitioning Out: Jarrett stepping down as Delaware CIO

2009-01-06T18:54:05Z

After seven years, Tom Jarrett is leaving his post as state CIO in Delaware. In a note to NASCIO colleagues, he explained simply, the "new governor has decided that he wants to make a change." So go transitions.

In a follow up note, he told me that he was "not ready to retire and believe I still have something to offer." The track record from the plucky little state where 'its good to be first' speaks for itself.

Jarrett joins Dan Ross, formerly of Missouri, on the "between opportunities" list but probably not for long.

Pledge Drive: Wikipedia borrows a page from Public Broadcasting

2009-01-05T17:54:19Z

Little noticed amid all the talk of a $600 billion stimulus for 'shovel ready' public infrastructure projects, the Wikimedia Foundation raised $6.2 million the old fashioned way -- it begged for it.

In the Internet version of a public broadcasting pledge drive, the foundation appealed to need and vision all in the name of two mind numbingly dull subjects -- operations and infrastructure. Here is the foundation in its own words -- the money would be used to "to maintain and grow the Foundation's technical infrastructure, which includes managing global traffic for Wikipedia, the 4th most popular web property on the Internet."

"This campaign has proven that Wikipedia matters to its users, and that our users strongly support our mission: to bring free knowledge to the planet, free of charge and free of advertising," wrote founder Jimmy Wales in a thank you note to users.

The campaign also proves public broadcasters have been on to something for decades -- or, alternatively, has acculturated us to responding to things like pledge drives. Some 125,000 donors from around the world helped the foundation exceed the foundation's $6 million goal.

There is also a reminder about the power of a strong pitch man as the wikipledging surged in the final days, "A personal appeal from Jimmy Wales, published on the Wikimedia Foundation's website on December 23, 2008, resulted in a surge of more than 50,000 contributions in eight days, totaling $2 million and closing the gap towards the revenue goal."

So there are alternatives to applying for a federal bailout. They both involve swallowing hard and asking for help but a key difference between a bailout and a pledge drive is who you ask and how. Madame Governor, Mr. Mayor, it is time for your close up.

Renovation Nation

2009-01-02T02:01:23Z

"Everything we need to know about making government service delivery better, particularly during tough economic times, we can learn from home improvement television."

- Renovation Nation, 2009

That's the premise behind a major new white paper from the Center for Digital Government that couples everything good about home improvement with a contemporary view of government modernization. It is all about building a smart and sustainable platform for governing in the age of stimulus.

There was more material than would fit inside the covers of the Renovation Nation, so it overflowed onto this companion site.

On this page:

Priority Plans by States in the Top Five Categories of Government Modernization
State-specific applications launched on existing platforms
Videos featuring many of thought leaders quoted in the paper
The full white paper, Renovation Nation, available for download here or here.
The companion presentation, Renovation Nation Roadshow, available for download
An additional companion presentation, All-a-Twitter about Web 2.0 in government, available for download

Be sure to bookmark this site -- www.govtech.com/renovationnation -- to share with your colleagues and check back for updates.

Renovation Nation was made possible through the underwriting support of:

Informatica
Intuit
Red Hat/ DLT Solutions
salesforce.com
Sungard Public Sector

and these members of the Digital States Performance Institute:

Accenture
EMC
NIC

WEB EXTRA: Priority Plans by States in Top Five Categories

The Center for Digital Government surveyed U.S. states on the functions of government that would grow in importance even as the public treasury becomes constrained.

The consensus between state executives and technology leaders held for the top 5, but there was less agreement in priorities moving forward on the remainder of the list. That said, it is useful to see what is driving select states to make smarter and sustainable approaches their highest priorities. It is also worth noting that in each of the examples that follow, the possibility of transformation is rooted in an organization and a process that values knowledge.

1.    Public Safety, Emergency Management, Corrections and Courts

Public safety is a perennially high priority and the economic downturn has not displaced it from a matter of first importance. Arizona, Utah, Michigan, Washington, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, California and Virginia have all outlined aggressive plans for modernization in the next biennium.

Arizona's AZ3D will bring together geospatial data from local, state and federal sources through service-oriented architecture to provide an advanced utility for better data exchange, situational awareness, visualization and enhanced decision-making in handling emergencies and managing the state's border and homeland security needs.

Utah is radically redefining what was once called radio interoperability. Over the next two years, the state will begin transitioning radio communications to IP, a platform that will further integrate voice and data. Increased bandwidth to patrol cars will allow for the streaming of video from the scene to a central video capture environment that is the basis of a comprehensive library of law enforcement video.   What is true on the ground is also true in the air, where the state maintains a small fleet of remote-controlled, camera-equipped mini helicopters that help manage and report on traffic accidents and other incidents.

2.    Finance and Administration

There is nothing like a public sector revenue recession to focus attention on finance and administration systems. States as diverse as Kentucky, New Jersey, Virginia, Utah, Michigan, Tennessee, Maryland, Arizona and Georgia are making investments in smarter money managing.

Kentucky is completely re-engineering and replacing a pair of core systems -- personnel and tax -- with a view to improving human resources and tax services, adding significant new online self services and increasing the transparency of government spending activities.

One commonwealth over, Virginia is modernizing a trio of central administrative systems - financial, budget and personnel -- through its Enterprise Application Public-Private Partnership Office that was established by the General Assembly. The new performance budget system will use analytical information on outcomes as the foundation for resource allocation. For the first time, it will connect actual and targeted results to spending while establishing an environment to discuss, evaluate and re-evaluate earlier decisions. The replacement of the 1980s vintage personnel management system needs to be sufficiently malleable to accommodate the widely different staffing structures among agencies, prompting the state to look to ERP and Software as a Service (SaaS) technologies to optimize flexibility while managing risk in incremental chunks.

Georgia is taking a phased approach to replacing the 23 existing systems that, together, collect $23 billion per year with a single system that integrates sales and use tax, withholding and corporate tax. It will allow Department of Revenue (DOR) employees to view all the taxpayer's accounts simultaneously while reducing manual intervention, increasing accuracy and improving accounting controls.

3.    Enterprise IT Infrastructure and Applications

Extending the reach and benefits of networked digital technologies is a common theme among states as they prepare to meet the needs and expectations of a smarter century. It goes beyond conventional approaches of consolidation to providing a common platform for doing the public's business. No two states on a long list of those with ambitious plans in this area --Michigan, South Dakota, Maine, Virginia, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Indiana, Kansas, California, Texas, Colorado and New York - approach it the same way, owing to notable differences in their respective histories, geographies, hierarchies and policy priorities.

"Michigan/1" is the aptly named campaign to simplify that state's technology architecture by introducing a centrally-supported, enterprise-wide common productivity platform, providing the basis for a cohesive approach to telework, security, continuity and collaboration. Seven of 19 agencies were migrated in the program's first 18 months. And it scales. When it's done, Michigan/1 will be among the largest infrastructure migrations in either the public or private sectors.

The state of Maine is taking an active role in extending terrestrial broadband into underserved communities through the ConnectME Authority. Through a grant program, the state has been able to tap community initiative and enjoy a multiplier effect in introducing broadband access to 14,400 household and businesses in 50 communities that had no previous infrastructure and were unlikely to receive high-speed service from conventional providers. The authority is projecting that, in the next 12-24 months, the state will add another 12,500 additional households to the broadband universe through a combination of WiMAX and Wi-Fi mesh networks, with two of the larger projects using a multi-modal solution, combining DSL and wireless equipment.

4.    Health, Human Services and Employment

Health and human service agencies face the challenge of reconciling infinite demand with finite resources. Utah, Pennsylvania, Michigan, South Dakota, Georgia, Missouri, New Jersey, Washington, Arizona, Kentucky, California, Virginia, Mississippi are among the states that are modernizing their systems to stay ahead of the demand.

Cover All Pennsylvanians (CAP) is the self-descriptive name of a program which makes affordable basic health insurance available to eligible small businesses that do not presently offer health insurance to their employees, and to the uninsured, offered through the private insurance market. A companion plan will promote non-emergency settings for non-emergency care and increase the number of care centers in underserved areas. To make it work, the Pennsylvania Health Information Exchange (PHIX) will provide secure access to patient information to authorized users at the point of care. This high-level goal encompasses many initiatives which have been announced or are in planning and will provide the required framework to make health information available. Due for initial release in late 2009, PHIX will serve as a platform for data sharing among Medicaid and public health information systems, with the ability to take advantage of electronic medical records and electronic prescribing.

Kentucky is pursuing a priority-driven razing and renovation across a number of social service agencies and the systems that support them. Health and Family Services is developing an e-Health Interchange System to be a standardized platform for admissions, billing, pharmacy management and patient medical records for the state's mental health and mental retardation facilities.   The commonwealth is also re-engineering the eligibility systems that administer food stamps, medical assistance and other programs for families in transition to break free of the constraints caused by the age and complexity of legacy systems. The story is the same for the systems that help support and enforce the administration of programs for child support, assistance for needy families and foster care. Add to the mix new systems for real-time access to (and processing of) vital statistics on one hand and online electric death registration on the other - all with a view of increasing accuracy and reducing the need for manual intervention.

5.    Economic, Business, Community and Workforce Development

Economic development is multi-faceted and a multi-agency undertaking. Regardless of the size or geography of the state -- California, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Maryland, Maine, South Dakota, North Dakota, Kansas, Kentucky, Arkansas, New York - they share many of the same goals and characteristics, but allow for regional diversity.

The country's largest state is taking a platform approach to modernizing the administration of its unemployment insurance program. The UI Modernization (UIMOD) project at the California Employment Development Department (EDD) will implement Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and a service-oriented architecture to allow customers faster access to EDD services. The UIMOD project replaces the existing telephonic platform in favor of new automation technologies to be more responsive to customers requesting information about their claims. The project will also introduce a multi-channel self-service application for claim submission.

WEB EXTRA:
Nationwide Comparables: What Have You Done for Me Lately?

State-specific applications launched on existing platforms

Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts
An accountability and transparency-related site that tells taxpayers "Where the Money Goes."

Utah Educator Licensing Suite
The Education Service Suite exemplifies innovation and it's a fast and efficient alternative to the lengthy paper process.

Virginia's Regulation Information System and Virginia Regulatory Town Hall 2.0
This Web-based enterprise approach allows agencies to seamlessly submit regulatory actions for review and approval, for public comment and to the Registrar for real-time publication.

Missouri Business Portal
This site brings together information from a variety of sources related to doing business in Missouri. In addition to the service to the taxpayers, the increased usage of online business registration could save 30 to 40 hours per registration.

Tennessee 511
The information results in reduced traffic congestion, thereby improving air quality and a reduction in traffic crashes.

Michigan Mobile 24-hour Fishing License
The state saved $239,200 in development hours and did not require any special hardware or software purchases. Every angler saves an average of 30 miles of round-trip drive time, fuel expenses and emissions.

Hawaii Online Hunting License Application
The state had more licenses sold online than through paper forms -- 52% vs. 48% -- in fiscal year 2008.

California Bond Accountability
California succeeded in providing a satisfactory level of transparency that benefits two major stakeholder groups. First, it established a window for residents to see how their government is spending money. Second, it gives public policy experts, including the legislature, access to instantaneous information on approved bond expenditures.

Oregon Building Permits
Since its launch in May 2005, the site has been used by contractors to purchase over 30,000 building permits. The number of participating jurisdictions has grown from six to 20, with an additional 15 jurisdictions in the process of joining.

Wyoming E-Filing of Annual Reports
Since mid-March 2007, over 19,500 annual reports have been filed online for over $1.1 million in fees.

Vermont CourtPay
In its first year and a half of use, the CourtPay service processed over 30,000 transactions and collected approximately $4.7 million in overdue fines for the state

Washington DOT Good to Go
This project was to provide electronic tolling on the new Narrows Bridge. By opening day, more than 60,000 customers had established Good To Go! accounts and more than 130,000 transponders had been distributed - nearly three times the goal. On opening morning, smooth-flowing traffic heralded the commute as 73 percent of the peak commute drivers used the electronic toll lanes. Traffic zipped along at freeway speeds for the first time in years. Today, eight months after the bridge opened, more than 220,000 transponders are distributed and 85 percent of morning commuters use the electronic toll lanes.

Massachusetts Virtual Gateway/Consumer Facing Food Stamp Application
Consumers can apply for food stamp benefits through the online application as well as hard-copy applications. Currently, DTA receives approximately 25% of the total amount of applications online (about 1,800 applications per month).

New Jersey Registration Renewal Application
The application has successfully processed around 571,000 renewals, representing over $30 million in revenue. Included in the transactions were almost 2,300 specialty plate add-ons and over 24,000 addresses changed. The daily average is just short of 3,000 requests, with the highest day's volume exceeding 5,200 completed transactions.

VIDEO WEB EXTRAS:
Heads in the Cloud

GETTING SOMETHING DONE
Federal CIO Vivek Kundra on the inevitability of cloud computing

RAINING ON THE INSIDE
State of California EDD CIO Dale Jablonsky on the merits of internal clouds

FATHER OF THE INTERNET, IP AND ME
Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf on computational power of the cloud

OVERCOMING HIS OWN RESISTANCE TO THE GATHERING CLOUD
Cerf on the advantages of cloud connectivity

ADEQUATE CONNECTIVITY, CAPACITY AND A LITTLE LUCK
Cerf on why it is better to be lucky and good

HEY YOU, GET OFF OF MY CLOUD
Cerf on why disconnection is as bad as you think it is

Renovation Nation is being paired with another new and big presentation about how we use media with particular reference to social networks. A PDF copy of All-a-Twitter about Web 2.0 is available here.

A PDF copy of an early Renovation Nation presentation is available here. Check back for updates to the presentation and additional web extras.

As always, your comments and suggestions are more than welcome.

Doing IT in Public: Good Help is Hard to Find

2008-12-30T18:22:49Z

You have meetings about phone calls and phone calls about meetings, suffer through countless white board exercises and design reviews, and hear from designers and consultants and attorneys -- all to end up as the bottom of the hour kicker on National Public Radio:

Wisconsin's Government Accountability Board is having to account for why its new Web site shows the state capitol in Madison in front of the Minneapolis skyline. An ethics officer explains that the Minneapolis skyline is a placeholder until an image of Madison that isn't copyrighted is found. The board didn't explain why the outside company that it paid a million dollars to design the Web site couldn't just take a picture.

There is a new temporary site that is free of any offending graphics but it doesn't look like a million bucks.

LAFD 2.0: One Man's Quest (with a Little Help from His Friends)

2008-12-23T14:12:47Z

The Los Angeles Fire Department is engaging its community using social networks, Twitter, blogs and other Web 2.0 tactics. NPR's Day to Day did a nice 5 minute piece that illustrates how these innovations are often: (a) driven by a larger than life personality; (b) bootstrapped on a shoe string budget as a skunkworks in a dark room in the basement; and (c) characterized by a willingness of an old guard organization to engage the public on its terms.

Search is on for new Washington State CIO: Deputy named as Interim

2008-12-22T18:26:40Z

Washington Governor Chris Gregoire is elevating Jim Albert to Interim Director of the Department of Information Services (DIS) as of January 1, 2009. Albert has been the deputy director of the agency for the last four years under Gary Robinson who is leaving at the end of the year.

According to the announcement released by DIS this morning, Albert will serve as Interim state CIO "while a search is conducted for a permanent replacement."

Albert is a long-time hand in the state's public sector IT community. His resume includes time as IT Director at the the Office of the Attorney General when Gregoire served in that post.

The Unintended Humbug from USPS Online Tracking

2008-12-22T17:31:05Z

Not that we needed another economic indicator of a recession but the United States Postal Service has one. USPS is expecting a slight drop in the volume of mail sent this holiday season, which runs from Thanksgiving Day through the end of the year. In broad strokes, officials expect the post office to handle 19 billion pieces of mail, down about a billion from this time last year.

One of those pieces was a an parcel headed to my home. It was sent registered mail with a tracking number, which gave me an excuse to use the USPS website to do something real. The taxpayer-owned corporation presents itself well on the web. The track and confirm feature is prominently placed on the page. It all works swimmingly until you enter the receipt number and press the "go" button. Technically, the look up is very fast but the search result is written in code:

"Origin post is Preparing Shipment: We have received notice that the originating post is preparing to dispatch this mail piece." And such was my introduction to the private language of the post office -- I tried to tease some meaning from these words but eventually conceded I didn't have a clue.

A search engine can be helpful in such moments so I entered the string of words into the search box. The search returned some 27,100 results, all of which reflected the same kind of head tilting confusion I had. The most helpful (if obvious) piece of advice was to take the print out to the nearest post office and see whether the staff there could figure it out. I will probably do that when the weather clears and the snow gets plowed. It is worth noting the irony of moving from online back to in line all for the want of a little plain language.

Second Life? Missouri State CIO Dan Ross steps down

2008-12-17T19:36:16Z

When Dan Ross leaves his post as Missouri state CIO at the end of next week, he will take the usual box of stuff with him: a few files, a few clippings, an award or two and a copy of his contacts file -- plus his user ID and password for Second Life.

Most of what will be in that box will be mementos of the state's progress on consolidation and collaboration during his tenure. Then there will be that cat. An avatar actually. It is kitten dressed in a tuxedo with a bright red bow tie. It isn't Dan's avatar but the image was the payoff for the Show Me state's experiment in Second Life.

Working with the state's libraries and universities, Ross' office created an "island of interest" in Second Life where they recreated the land locked state for a new generation of potential public servants.

Ross knew that Missouri was a great place to live, work and raise a family. The problem was a perceived deficit in the state's coolness quotient. Said Ross at the time, "To attract young talent, you have to go where the troops are. We've been establishing our presence out there, working up information about IT jobs in Missouri, and really working on making our image out there bright and crisp."

Among the visitors to Missouri's Second Life island was that kitten. The 26-year-old computer science grad behind the avatar had not considered Missouri or public service as possible career stop until he rediscovered the state in the virtual world. He is, in fact, the state's most recent technology hire and a minor media celebrity.

Corruption and Cons in All Shapes and Sizes

2008-12-17T15:57:20Z

Gov. Rod Blagojevich is the state executive who just won't quit. The transcripts from the wiretaps that lead to his arrest last week are pure [bleeping] comedy gold. They are also scandalous and a tragic smear on public service. Pity the honest politician or public official in the land of Lincoln because Governor B-Rod is sucking up all the oxygen. The tapes and transcripts provide a cautionary tale about politicizing things that should not be politicized. It should remind us that what is true of an empty senate seat should also be true of information technology.

That lesson was hard learned by the German industrial giant Siemens, which this week agreed to pay the equivalent of $1.4 billion to US and German authorities to settle a sprawling corruption scandal. The news service AFP reported, "The 161-year-old conglomerate with activities from nuclear power stations to trains [and large information systems] has acknowledged that up to [$1.8 billion US] may have been used illegally to win foreign contracts." The settlement allows Siemans to keep doing business with governments all around the world, but not by B-Rod-style rules. Besides, the company appears to have played in a league well above B-Rod's pay scale.

If all of that wasn't enough to induce year-end head scratching, Digital Communities blogger Ulf Wolf provides a fascinating chronology of a transcontinental Internet scam that bobs and weaves (as most frauds do) to seperate the gullable from their money.

The Dilemma of Sustainable Provisioning

2008-12-17T15:12:00Z

Like many organizations, we have been thinking hard about the new year. The two interrelated themes that emerged as defining 2009 are sustainability and provisioning. They work as a two-word coupling too, as in "sustainable provisioning." The vaguely bureaucratic sounding term captures what IT organizations do -- provide, either directly or indirectly -- and how they need to do it in these most unusual times -- in ways that are both ecologically and economically sustainable.

As if to remind us of potential new year's resolutions, Pat Tiernan, the new executive director of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative included this in his otherwise cheery holiday greeting:

Information and communications technology (ICT) accounts for more than two percent of global CO₂ emissions and is expected to at least double in the next few years;
PCs and monitors account for almost 40 percent of the ICT emissions;
The average desktop PC wastes nearly half the power it pulls from the wall as heat; and,
90% of desktops do not utilize power management settings.

Lumps of coal? Perhaps. Too hard to deal with amid a bone crushing revenue recession? Maybe. Sustainable? No. The stuff on which history will judge the heroes and zeroes of this moment? You bet your life.

A Private Label YouTube for Government?

2008-12-16T18:47:18Z

Remember the stodgy old presidential radio address? They were all the rage when President President Franklin D. Roosevelt began his Fireside Chats in spring 1933. A half century later, it was hard to find a radio station that carried them live but they did make a free and easy source of audio for weekend news editors, and so they limped on.

The Office of the President Elect put a novel twist on the 75 year old tradition by posting the addresses on video sharing sites, including YouTube, AOL, Yahoo, MSN. In five short weeks, these weekly addresses have become popularly known as Obama's YouTube Addresses.

Viewership varies widely week-to-week but the numbers are not trivial:

November 15, 2008 -- First weekly address -- 993,086 views
November 22, 2008 -- Second weekly address -- 525,420 views
November 29, 2008 -- Third weekly address -- 231,842 views
December 6, 2008 -- Fourth weekly address -- 454,600 views
December 13, 2008 -- Fifth weekly address -- 135,783 views

(Numbers were current as of December 16, 2008)

In a country of some 300 million people, the video addresses are well short of a mass medium but they do attract a much more motivated audience than their radio predecessors. The theme of most of the media coverage was that it was a harbinger that the new president would govern the way he campaigned ... all Web 2.0'ish and sticky.

The sticking point for blogger Chris Soghoin was two-fold:

(a) Video Hosting is a "no host give away": the transition team had a mountain of cash ($12 million) but was getting a free ride from YouTube's parent and the company's watermark in the corner of the videos has underdetermined commercial value to Google;
(b) Embedded Videos may violate privacy rules for federal websites: According to Soghoin, just by visiting the Office of the President Elect's change.gov site, "visitors will be transmitting cookies to Google's servers."

Sohoin's solution is captured in the post's headline -- "Obama should ditch YouTube," presumably in favor of government-owned servers, here-to-for overlooked video sharing start-ups such as Veoh, Vuze, Revver, Blip.tv and his personal favorite, BitTorrent.

The no cost dimension of this video sharing deal reminds us again that public procurement rules are either silent on or, at least, unhelpful on the issue of governments buying things that are free. While an occasional annoyance in the past, the procurement problem around free will not serve us well as government confronts business models that would have been unimaginable at the beginning of the average contract administrator's career.

The privacy implications here are not trivial but there are ongoing conversations between Google and public agencies as more and more governments establish YouTube channels to aggregate and host their videos. Both sides in the dialogue have an interest in positioning YouTube as more than a novelty or plaything, but a platform for doing important things.

Clearly, YouTube and most of the rest of Web 2.0 environment remains wide open for experimentation, pilots and even some production-level work, even with a couple of caution flags fluttering in the distance.

For its part, the federal government has been in negotiations with YouTube for eleven months to get special terms for federal agency use of the service because, as one federal director of web communications noted, "The standard terms contain several points that federal agencies cannot agree to...."

Even as governments, acting together or alone, work toward creating a private label video sharing environment that meets policy requirements, there should be some consideration to the one thing that they cannot re-create: the audience. YouTube aggregates eyeballs. People who like videos go there, and to AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Veoh, Vuze, Revver, Blip.tv and BitTorrent. The great lesson is to go where the eyeballs are, engage people in a community of their choosing, and avoid a false start in a field of dreams of government's making.

NASCIO Board Bolstered by Utah and Michigan CIOs after VP Departure

2008-12-10T00:37:41Z

With the sudden departure of Washington CIO Gary Robinson, reported here last week, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) was left without its Vice President right now and the presumptive President in 2010.

The organization announced today that Utah CIO Stephen Fletcher will replace Robinson as NASCIO's Vice-President, and Michigan CIO Ken Theis will fill the resulting director vacancy on its executive committee.

The group's midyear conference is scheduled for late April in Baltimore, Maryland.

Becoming Digital: Investment Language Broadens to Include IT

2008-12-08T21:59:08Z

President-elect Obama's most recent weekly address, as synonymous with YouTube as his predecessors' was with radio, coupled with an extensive interview on NBC News' Meet the Press, include hopefully inclusive language about information technology as part of the new administration's infrastructure investment plans.

Dating back to the 1920s, roads, bridges, dams and schools have been the pillars of infrastructure or public works projects. Now, with an estimated $600-750 billion in new or refocused stimulas funding at stake, the working definition of public works is broadening to include things about which we care.

Notice the use of technology-inclusive language in describing the Obama plan for a massive investment in national infrastructure, which the new president would try to pass immediately once in office:

Improve the energy efficiency of government buildings;
Rewire schools "to help our children compete in a 21st-century economy";
Expand broadband capacity to all US communities, saying it "unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption"; and,
Instituting electronic medical records and reducing the cost of health care delivery by millions of dollars through advanced technologies, because "That won't just save jobs, it will save lives."

Obama also noted that the governors with whom he met last week had a long list of infrastructure projects that were "shovel ready," that is, ready to go and able to get people back to work quickly.

Noting again that the US is "the country that invented the Internet," the incoming administration seems intent on paying for some overdue routine maintenance. Yes, digital technologies will compete with roads and bridges for whatever pot of federal stimulus funding finally becomes available but at least they are in the mix.

Washington State CIO to retire at year's end

2008-12-02T21:37:38Z

In a message to staff, the Washington State Department of Information Services (DIS) announced that director Gary Robinson will retire on December 31, 2008.

Robinson was named to head DIS by Governor Chris Gregoire on February 16, 2005. As DIS director, Robinson was the de facto state CIO and had just become the vice president of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO). He was slated to become NASCIO president in 2010.

The announcement comes less than a month after Gregoire's re-election. Since then, the returning administration confronted estimates that the state deficit has ballooned to as much as $6 Billion, prompting the governor to warn about what to expect in the budget she plans to release this month, "I will come up with something that will look truly ugly, truly ugly."

The sharp decline in state fortunes came as DIS was working to revamp its proposal to build a new state data center, estimates for which had spiked $110 Million from $260 Million to $370 Million earlier this year thanks to rising construction costs and the unforeseen need to mitigate the effects of increased traffic on the neighborhood. The revised, smaller package came with an estimated cost of $262 million. When contacted for comment on the data center's status, DIS Communications Director Joanne Todd wrote that, as of November 21, "The project is still under consideration by [the governor's budget writers at] OFM."

Earlier this fall, the state pushed a long-troubled offender management system at the Department of Corrections over the finish line. The turnaround began three years ago after the state changed vendors and, at the insistence of the governor, made the DIS director responsible for its success.

Robinson began his career in Washington State government with committee staff positions in the House of Representatives and then the Senate, followed by an administrative role at the state Parks and Recreation Commission and a long tenure at the Office of Financial Management (OFM).

2008 Review: The Year in State and Local Government Technology

2008-12-02T03:33:44Z

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.

Port of Seattle offers Charging Stations for Electric Cars

2008-12-01T17:01:23Z

A new sign that greets drivers entering the eight story parking structure at Seattle Tacoma (SeaTac) International Airport but it is still enough to make an internal combustion engine stutter. Accompanied by a stylized graphic of a car, electric cable and lightning bolt, the sign announces that electric car charging stations are being installed on Level 5.

The move comes as MINI has just begun electric car trials in New York, New Jersey and California and two years before Chevy is slated to roll out the Volt, the plug-in hybrid on which GM appears to betting the company.

The executives of GM and the other Detroit-based auto makers are due back in Washington, DC on Tuesday for a second shot at extracting at least $25 billion in bridge loans from Congress by presenting more detailed plans for how they will use the money. It seems that, in the "other Washington," other public officials are presuming on the what those plans contain.

Mumbai Aftermath: A Failure of Government and Web 2.0?

2008-12-01T02:42:23Z

UPDATED: DECEMBER 1, 2008 AT 18:42

"Our Politicians Fiddle as Innocents Die," blared the Times of India newspaper on Sunday as the political recriminations began in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks in Mumbai. The headline coincided with the resignation of India's highest-ranking internal security official, who said he was taking "moral" responsibility for the tragedy.

While the country's black-cat commandos have been largely commended for their work in the street-to-street (and sometimes room-to-room) combat with the assailants, the Indian intelligence, counter terrorism and surveillance services faced almost immediate criticism for allowing the attacks to happen in the first place. There are even reports that the government had advance warning.

All of this sounds eerily reminiscent. The early reporting from India suggests that national governments have not learned the lessons from the failures of earlier targets of terrorism.

It is worth saying out loud that the strengths and weaknesses of the evolving media landscape were also on full public view during this latest tragedy, marking an evolution that can be traced back to natural disasters (hurricanes on the gulf coast of this country or the Asian tsnami) if not before.

Consider stories that were published and posted while Mumbai was still under siege. NPR introduced its listeners to Sreenath Sreenivasan, a journalist who also serves as dean of student affairs at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Within in an hour of learning of the Mumbai attacks, Sreenivasan "was hosting a Web radio call-in show with other Indian journalists relaying what they knew." It was the meeting of old and media, with the conventions of journalism tempering the noise that inevitably follows shocking developments.

Elsewhere, a Reuters dispatch reported, "Bloggers across Mumbai fed live updates ... [on the] ...attacks in the heart of India's financial capital, highlighting the social media's new expanding role in news coverage." It pointed to photos of the attacks on Flikr, frequent updates of an entry on Wikipedia, a steady stream of updates and comments on twitter and myriad bloggers doing what they could to help. Clearly, these Web 2.0 technologies are as effective as anything we have seen in terms of immediacy -- a particularly powerful attribute when they are in the hands of those on the ground with unique, authoratative information.

But, and there is are two big buts here: (a) precious few bloggers and even microbloggers are that close and that relevant, prefering instead the comfort of home half way around the world (present company included); and, (b) something disturbing happened to embedded links as they aged. Dina Mehta blogged furiously from Mumbai during the siege, originally describing herself as "upset and angry and bereft." But by Sunday night, visitors to her blog learned that she had grown weary of a secondary problem -- inappropriate and even abusive speech.

In a helpful clarification (including a corrected URL for her post) to the original version of this post, Mehta wrote me:

I have only been deleting some comments for this reason as stated in my blogpost: "I'm getting a huge load of comments around the politics of religion, of division and hate at my last few posts on the Mumbai terror attacks. While religion and politics may have a lot to do with the state of our world today, my blog's not the forum to air or feed these divisions. I almost feel it's a violation of my own person. So I am deleting them. Sorry. All other comments and conversations are welcome, as always! The #Mumbai Twitter feed is now flooded with them too. I'm stopping watching it. I'm certainly not playing. For all those who feel they have lots to say - I'd recommend they do something more constructive. Start by reading Ingrid Srinath's post titled This is not India's 9/11 ... and Priyanka Joshi's comments there."

[See comments for full text.]

Another blogger, Gaurav Mishra responded to Mehta's decision by setting out a multipoint plan for confronting extremest commentary. Citizen journalism has no conventions to guide it, and those that comment are prepared to say almost anything under the veil of anonymity.

[As if to remind us of those things at which Web 2.0 is particularly good, Mishra provides links to events or movements spontaneously conceived on or through the Web to benefits of victims of the 11/26 terrorist attacks -- some local, others global -- Nov 30 Tweetup at Leopold Cafe, Facebook Wear White Event, Facebook Support 11/26 Fighters Event.]

At the risk of making a snap judgment even as the events of last week are still unwinding, the response and the reportage were both only partial successes. Honoring those who served well is important but taking a hard look at what failed may be where the greatest value lies. It is the only way to perfect or reform institutions about which we care -- government, media and that still amorphous thing called Web 2.0.

A final note. There is another post about Mumbai that I struggled to write over the long Thanksgiving weekend. I couldn't get it right. Thankfully, CBC essayist Rex Murphy did:

We should not see what happened ... in India - what is happening - as something in a distant country, but as a chilling and depraved assault on on what all decent people share in common.

Terrorism is the murder of innocents as a tactic in the service of fanaticism. It is the anti-politics of our time. It is a threat to us all. The blast was in Mumbai, but its vibrations are meant for every civilized city of the planet.
... It is merely right therefore that we give our thoughts to their particular plight - and offer - to these, our fellow citizens - our alert and full sympathy.

Thanksgiving Taboos: Politics, Religion and Infrastructure

2008-11-26T06:20:39Z

The server logs at the Merriam-Webster online dictionary have spoken -- "bailout" is the word of the year as much for how often it was looked up than how many industries wanted one. The arbiters of the English language say the trillion dollar word eclipsed favorites from the campaign trail, "maverick" and "vet." (The list comes out just in time for the much anticipated holiday's slow news days.)

But this year's finalists hold the promise of being red meat -- "bailout" for conservatives, "maverick" for liberals -- at the extended-family Thanksgiving Day feast, which just isn't right because the day is supposed to be about turkey (the original white meat).

Of course, if you received an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner this year, you have probably figured out the wisdom behind the prohibition on talking politics and religion in such settings.

But there is an occupational hazard that could send your tryptophan-saturated hearers face down into the jellied salad. Infrastructure.

It is an easy shorthand in the private vocabulary of information technology but both high- and low- culture word watchers don't think much of it.

According to no less an authority than Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director of the Annenberg School of Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania in comments at the fall NASCIO conference, IT's coupling of infrastructure and architecture has little meaning outside of the technology community and is confusing to the very people with whom CIOs and their kin seek to communicate.

MSNBC commentator Chris Mathews agrees. "Infrastructure is an awful word," he gurgled during an early on-air dissertation on the merits of the depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) and how it may be time to try such a scheme again.

But his cable news colleague Rachel Maddow opened her show early on Monday by enthusing about the opening of the federal spigot under the new administration:

President-elect Obama's ... big plan? He's rolling out what amounts to a new "New Deal" to invest in infrastructure. Yes. I've wanted infrastructure to be a sexy political issue for so long now that when I say the word, I can almost hear wakachicka-wakachicka background music in my head - infrastructure, yessss.

That last little wakachicka-wakachicka bit has morphed into a downloadable ring tone under the heading of what Maddow calls infrastructure porn.

Even with infrastructure worth about 115,000,000 returns on Google, when and if real people think about it, they think about roads, bridges and schools. They don't readily think about the Internet and digital infrastructures. We run the risk of thinking we are part of this new national conversation when we are not. We don't share a common definition of the word, a word it should be noted that nobody really uses in casual conversation anyway.

The final caution can be ripped out of context from The Princess Bride, the 1987 Rob Reiner film that has become a perennial favorite rental on Thanksgiving long weekends. In a recurring exchange with Vizzini, Inigo Montoya calmly intones, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Inconceivable! No, infrastructure.

Little Hoover to Schwarzenegger and Legislature: Give CIO the Authority to Act

2008-11-21T20:04:24Z

A bipartisan and independent California state agency is recommending further consolidation of the state's information technology infrastructure, assets and staff under the state CIO. The Little Hoover Commission, in an ironically-named report called A New Legacy System: Using Technology to Drive Performance, recommends:

Empower the state chief information officer with tools and resources to oversee a generational transformation of information technology in state government. The state must consolidate resources under the Office of the State Chief Information Officer, including the Department of Technology Services, the Office of Systems Integration, geospatial information functions and the information security functions of the Office of Information Security and Privacy Protection.

Use public money for technology projects responsibly and with transparency.
To rebuild the confidence of the Legislature and the public, the process through which California's technology projects are governed must be open and transparent. The Information Technology Council should expand to include legislative members as well as members from existing technology councils, and it should be empowered to prioritize overall technology projects for the state and aggressively monitor their implementation. The state chief information officer should regularly report on the progress of the state's information technology projects through a more robust Web site.

Use technology to track, measure and improve performance.
The state should encourage and foster the burgeoning development of performance measurement projects throughout state departments and agencies by re-establishing the technology innovation fund and creating opportunities to regularly integrate performance data into the state's management and budgeting strategy. The governor should hold regular public meetings with agency heads to evaluate performance data.

Even while tacitly recognizing that these changes will be difficult and take time, the Commission points to a new model for IT governance as key to a more effective fiscal management in the long run.

In the name of full disclosure, I was one of many who provided testimony to the Commission and worked with its staff in the preparation of the report. To read the full text of the report, download it here -- LittleHoover.pdf .

Georgia signs $1.2 Billion IT Outsourcing Contracts with Last Vendors Standing

2008-11-21T16:41:42Z

I substituted for Georgia Technology Authority Director Patrick Moore at the state's Digital Government Summit yesterday because Moore had 1.2 billion reasons not to be there at the appointed hour.

He was alongside Governor Sonny Perdue to announce the signing of a pair of contracts intended to consolidate and outsource the state government's IT operations. The larger of the two, worth $873 million over eight years, was awarded to IBM to take over infrastructure -- from the raised floor data centers, mainframes, services and disaster recovery to PC and laptops. The other will pay AT&T $346 million over 5 years to manage network services for the state. Both contracts have two one-year renewal options.

The state estimates that it will save an estimated $180 million over the term of the contracts but it comes at a cost to state employees, 92 of whom will lose their jobs in May 2009 and 322 others will be offered jobs with IBM and AT&T.

IBM and AT&T were effectively sole bidders after two other companies withdrew their bids before the apparently successful vendors were announced.

The award comes on the heels of a decision late last month by the state of Texas to suspend an $863 million outsourcing project with IBM to transfer state records to a centralized computer system. In a letter to state IT officials, Governor Rick Perry said the company had failed to backup the data of more than 20 state agencies.

As for my presentation, you can download it here [11-08CDGStealThisIdea1.6.pdf].

Unified Communications: My Personal Problem with Presence

2008-11-20T16:34:25Z

"My plans require time and distance." That's the quote carved in stone below a statue of Pacific Northwest pioneer Marcus Whitman inside the entrance to the Washington State Legislature. Of course, the commodity Internet has been collapsing time and distance for more than a decade. Still the technology juggernaut's time efficiencies have been frustrated -- by the deliberate process and pacing of legislatures at the institutional level, for example, and by you and me.

There is a name for this neo-Luddism that lurks just below the surface of even the most enthusiastic technology booster: latency. We carbon-based life forms are the prime source of latency in semiautomated processes. Without us there would be no "semi" in semiautomated. (Read: We are the problem.)

This isn't a new problem. Latency has a language of its own in communications media -- mail (Return to sender), broadcast (One moment please), over-the-counter (Back in five minutes), phone (Leave a message), e-mail (This is an auto reply) and mobile, instant messages and short message service (Subscriber could not be found. Message may not be delivered.)

Unified communications (UC), the latest evolution in converged networking, promises to remove these excuses by making the underlying problem -- humans -- more available. Enter "presence" -- described by its supporters as "the dial tone of the future" because it keeps real-time tabs on the availability, ability and preferred mode of communicating. Presence is also the component of UC that's aimed at reducing or eliminating human latency; it's also the key differentiator between UC and previous iterations of any-to-any networks that combine multimedia communications, such as voice, data and video; call control; instant messaging; conferencing like audio, video, tele, Web; and mobility.

Are UCs a sleeper issue? Perhaps. In a recent survey of 82 self-selected public agencies conducted by the Center for Digital Government, 22 percent of respondents reported that presence was the highest funding priority in their communications strategy. That's well behind voice (60 percent) and video (38 percent), in line with data (26 percent) and e-mail (26 percent), and ahead of instant messaging (16 percent) and mobility (11 percent).

Presence is a compelling idea for institutional improvisation and productivity. But presence is also a very personal matter. It's about my presence and yours -- when and how to reach us, especially when we're away.

It reminds me of the first time I was issued a cell phone in 1988 -- convenient yes, but maybe too convenient. Cell phones began to blur the lines between work hours and personal hours, professional spheres and personal space. Two decades later, we have become accustomed to how cell phones have reordered our lives -- call it accidental technological determinism. Presence is smarter than cell phones by themselves -- our planning for presence and response to it needs to be more deliberate because we could use a little time and distance.

This post originated in the pages of GT but this forum creates the opportunity for conversation about it. What say you? Am I overstating the creepiness factor here or is it just good thinking?

Google Chief hopeful on mashup of infrastructure, openness and government

2008-11-18T23:45:40Z

Disavowing that he was speaking in his role as a member of President-Elect Barack Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board, and disavowing interest in serving as the new administration's chief technology officer, Google CEO Eric Schmidt did provide a hopeful view of the potential synergies among public policy, technology and economic renewal.

Schmidt is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the New America Foundation, the organization that hosted the speech and live webcast from Washington, DC on Tuesday.

Echoing incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel's rejoinder not to let any crisis pass without taking advantage of it, Schmidt told his audience in the Ronald Reagan Building, "The country has faced many, many more significant challenges. ... Let's take the crisis ... and let's deal with it as an opportunity to get the structure right."

"If you're going to spur economic growth you've got to focus on infrastructure research and development and energy. These are jobs programs," he said, pointing out that the historical record was on his side of the argument, "Infrastructure is the foundation upon which wealth is created"

Even as the heads of the American auto makers and their unions lobbied for loans in front of a lame duck Congress just down the street, Schmidt said that there was a better way to go than invest in past failures, "Let's not just have bailout programs. Why don't we use the stimulus money to get infrastructure built?"

The strongest parts of the speech were those that were within Google's wheelhouse - the democratization of information. "In our life time, almost all people will have access to almost all the world's information. That is a remarkable achievement."

What's more important, said Schmidt, was having systems as open as the information that they surface and exploit, ""Open systems have this clear promise of innovation and greater choice.... It is that openness, the ability that [allows] anyone can play ... that drives the modern economy.... You never know where innovation's going to come from, but with an open platform, you welcome it,"

Aware of his audience and the location of his speech, the Google chief closed by noting that, in his view, the public sector has been a laggard in adopting new platforms for governing -- including but not limited to blogs and social network, "Government has not embraced generally the tools we use every day.... It's time to do it and do it right."

The 'Other' People's Choice Awards: Apps for Democracy

2008-11-17T22:57:21Z

A pair of Bronze Medal Award Winners from Washington, DC's Apps for Democracy competition picked up additional honors on Friday night by picking up the People's Choice awards.

The District's new Car Pool Mashup attracted 22 percent of the 3,320 votes and DC Bikes took another 13 percent.

It could be that all of this only matters to a small band of Birkenstock-wearing, open source-coding, Obama-voting, Inconvenient Truth-watching, Latte-drinking residents in Washington, DC or it could foreshadow the democratization of government-held data and the applications that make them useful. Nothing against the former, but I'm betting on the latter.

The Question of Privilege: Public Disclosure

2008-11-17T22:20:32Z

In the shadow of the budget preparations by governors across the nation that mark the start the negotiations with their respective legislatures, there is considerable activity to position bills on a wide range of issues.

In Washington state, the 2009 legislature will be asked to act on the recommendations of the state Sunshine Committee to narrow the circumstances under which public agencies can cite attorney-client privilege to prevent disclosure of certain public records.

The original standard in the state's Open Records Act had been that there had to be an authentic threat of litigation against a public agency had to exist. Two state Supreme Court decisions in particular -- Hangartner v. City of Seattle (2004) and Soter v. Cowles Publishing (2007) -- had a broadening effect on the exemption by upholding claims of attorney-client privilege. The state's daily newspapers -- individually and through their lobbying association -- claim the result has been the loss of public accountability.

As worrying for the daily newspapers is what they perceive as a proliferation of exemptions, which started at only 10 in the original 1971 law and have grown to over 300 today, and were a catalyst to the creation of the Public Records Exemption Accountability Committee in mid-2007.

By a 7-3 vote last Wednesday, the so-called Sunshine Committee voted to recommend new legislation that force a tightening of the privilege definitions under the act, and push back against the Supreme Court. The no votes included a state senator and a pair of public sector attorneys who provide advice to public officials on legal matters. One of the no votes belonged to an attorney who was enormously helpful to me in the early days of the e-government movement.

The state's largest newspaper has called the trio out by name, and not in a complimentary way, as part of its campaign to have the legislature codify the committee's recommendation.

We are entering the fourth decade of America's citizen-led experiment with open records laws. They were created around broad principles but refined, as the 300 exemptions attest, incrementally with scalpel-like incisions. Considering the source of the minority opinion in the privilege recommendation, the legislature would be well advised to avoid replacing the scalpel with the blunt force of a hammer.

Briefly Noted: Mississippi's Karen Newman Retires

2008-11-14T11:49:10Z

After only 29.5 years in Mississippi state service, Karen Newman has retired from the Department of Information Technology Services. Apparently a change is still as good as a rest - she joined The Clay Firm last week.

Apps for Democracy Winners: A Good Day to be a DC Resident

2008-11-14T01:37:45Z

The answer is in: what do you get from 260 data feeds and $20,000 in prize money? The District of Columbia says you get 30 days of frenetic activity and 47 applications that mash up public data in ways that government itself may never had the time, inclination and impulse to develop themselves. Such are the results of an aptly named competition, Apps for Democracy, which all but wrapped up round one today.

The winners range from the useful to the quirky and all point to the potential of democratizing data. They all put the individual at the center of the transaction, which may be progress enough in rethinking the relationship between citizens and their government.

Here is a briefly annotated tour of the top two tiers of award winners:

Gold (Independent)
iLive.at - Doing errands in DC will never be the same.
Gold (Agency)
DC Historic Tours -- A walking tour planner, powered by a Google Maps-Flikr-Wikipedia mashup, minimizes steps and maximizes experience
Silver (Independent)
Park It DC -- fighting the constant circling, the unnecessary meter plugging and even expensive tickets that come with finding a parking spot in DC.
Where's My Money? DC -- The buck stops at a Facebook Forum on public expenditures, procurement and accountability.
DC Crime Finder -- Ripped from the databases, not the headlines -- a customizable look at crime in the neighborhood.
Silver (Agency)
Stumble Safely -- Making the streets of DC safe for pub crawls.
PointAbout Alerts -- an iPhone app makes crime reports, building permits and other civic data location-aware in that you see the stuff that is closest to you first
We the People Wiki -- An editable Vox populi for our Web 2.0 times, embedding the voice (or keystrokes) of the people through an editable, peer-led community reference website based on Washington, D.C. public data.

The full list of winners is available at the Apps for Democracy Medal Winner page, which comes complete with the opportunity to vote on the People's Choice award -- and the polls for which remain open until Friday, November 14 at 7PM EST.

The medal winners and the honorable mentions (which are all other entrants for their willingness to innovate, compete and collaborate) are all open source and all are offered to others for refinement and reuse. Perhaps more importantly, they keep hope alive for redeeming the reputation of a discredited phrase, your tax dollars at work.

Watch This Place: Apps for Democracy Winners announced Thursday

2008-11-13T14:50:22Z

The judges are sequestered in an undisclosed location with an array of laptops, iPhones and other devices to decide who has done the best job mashing up the District of Columbia's data.

The Apps for Democracy program is detailed in previous posts on internal catalysts and the use of cash incentives.

The results will be summarized here in an updated post as the results are known, with the details available at Apps for Democracy as soon as the $20,000 in award money is allocated.

change.gov: A Web 2.0 Political Transition

2008-11-13T12:30:00Z

The Office of the President-elect has launched change.gov to be the public face of a much watched and anticipated political transition. Like its content, the web address -- "change" being the watch word of the Obama campaign coupled with the exclusive dot-gov top level domain -- blurs the once bright line of distinction between campaigning and governing.

National Public Radio ran a good piece on how the web tools that served the campaign so well can be applied to advancing the new administration's objective. NPR correspondent Mara Liasson points out that one of the effects may well be to disintermediate the media by creating citizen activists who advocate directly with congress on the administration's behalf. It is worth noting here that the conventional media is not the only institutional interest at risk of disintermendiation -- you can and should add entrenched bureaucracies to the list. For them, this is a change that they can believe will happen to them, whether they like it or not.

It is followed by an clever little essay by comedian and NPR regular Paula Poundstone on what she is willing to do to breath life into the promise of change ... at least for now.

Internal Catalysts for Community Collaboration in Public Sector Renewal

2008-11-12T06:25:22Z

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.

Disney on Management and Other Books Never Written

2008-11-11T00:52:04Z

It may have been an unfair request but biographer Neal Gabler's task was to divine leadership lessons from the life and work of Walt Disney. The night before his talk, when I met him in Tucson on the eve of a leadership retreat -- called re:public VII; a gathering of those who choose to lead, convened by e.Republic's Center for Digital Government -- Gabler said he was debuting a short list on the subject.

The short list was extracted from a long book -- Gabler's 633-page biography Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. The next morning, in front of group of public officials and employees, he debuted what might be called 'Disney on Management' with the caveat that he did not want it to devolve into the stuff of greeting cards or motivational posters. The talk did not. With apologies to Gabler, the following summary may.

Here is the short list of what Disney did, for good or for ill, in creating an industry and sheparding the company that bears (and bought) his name:

Infallibility Helps. Disney failed early and often, but never considered himself a failure. He was driven to be the best at something -- he set out to define the then new craft of animation and it defined him.
Business Plan Optional. He insisted that high quality was enough of a business plan. Disney also had the curious practice of repeatedly hiring efficiency consultants to study the studio's practices only to toss their reports and recommendations when it became clear that acting on them would put unneeded (or at least unwanted) constraints on the studio -- and the man who reigned over it.
Not Just an Organization. Disney was all about creating community -- a community that was intensely loyal to him -- but it foreshaddowed by decades all that Web 2.0 social network talk.
Inspire, Inspire, Inspire. Disappointing Disney was a terrible thing to do, and the people around him knew it, and did everything in their power not to do it. Inspiring his artists was the key to transcend simple cartooning and make animated features in which audiences believe the characters are alive, and have a heart and soul.
Trust Yourself. Disney did not collaborate, he directed. It was his vision, and those around him were charged with making it real. It made him a micro manager of the first order, and not necessarily a good thing for the organization. When Disney stopped trusting himself, the studio started using focus groups, which were no substitute for his iconoclastic leadership.
Take the Long View. In 1935, Disney pioneered the production of color animated films because he believed that, decades later, there would be color television and black and white films would not hold their value.
Maintain Control. Disney did, it made him indispendable and the company knew it -- so much so that life insurance was taken out to pay back share holders in case of his death.
Reinvent Regularly. There were a number of Walt Disneys over the years, each adapting to or anticipating the next opportunity.

In the end, Disney was better than anyone else than imagining the future, and then building it. Gabler would quickly add that was true insofar as brother Roy O. Disney was around to check Walt's unbridled enthusiasm and find ways to pay for it all.

In the discussion that followed, Gabler reflected on this future of biography. Biographers rely on the written record, from the first postcard Disney received to his death certificate -- to all of which Gabler had unprecedented access. Documents were also central to his biography of Walter Winchell and a history of Hollywood studio chiefs. He worries that the craft and its products will suffer, or perhaps disappear, as the written record becomes less complete. The worry was shared by many in the room but others protested that the nature of the record will change but will still be available to future biographers. The optimists drew analogies between postcards and instant messages and pointed out that proper archives would embrace more than just physical artifacts.

In discussions after the session, some attendees swooned over the reminder to wish on a star while others concluded that the words and Disney and leadership should never be used in the same sentence. "What was the lesson I took away from it?" asked one attendee who was quick to answer his own question, "He was a lot of things but not a manager ... and he may have just been crazy."

Not a Prayer: An Inspired Project Plan

2008-11-10T00:53:24Z

The trip to the seventh annual re:public retreat for those who choose to lead provided a chance to get caught up with friends in Arizona over the weekend.

At breakfast on Sunday, we met with a friend who is a veteran of health care IT systems implementation and training. She had moved here three years ago after a long career at public hospitals in the northwest. The then new job was with a hospital system run by a religious order.

There is much in common between the two environments. The same software, the same organizational resistance, the same tight budgets, the same aggressive time lines and the same team dynamics. But there was at least one notable difference.

This morning's breakfast came as the launch of the next iteration of the clinical information system loomed only seven days away. The team was pressing hard against deadlines, working long hours to ready the system for the go live next Saturday at midnight.

In double checking the final countdown's task list, a colleague reminded our friend that there was one final requirement for the go live -- finding a priest to bless the new system as it went into production.

After a flurry of e-mail, she found a priest who was happy to help but there was one last contingency -- a page at 11:00PM to make sure he was awake at an hour much later than his normal bedtime.

Political Transitions: Should CIO Stay or Should CIO Go?

2008-11-06T16:09:01Z

Should I stay or should I go now?
Should I stay or should I go now?
If I go there will be trouble
An if I stay it will be double
So come on and let me know

- The Clash (1982/ 1991)

There is a conventional wisdom among public employees: vote your job. That usually means voting for the incumbent whose administration signs your paycheck rather than the challenger who ran on a platform of eliminating government waste, which could include your job.

It is a different story around the cabinet table, where the members are supposed to be the first choice of the appointing authority. When the appointing authority changes, and when there is a change in party, resignation seems obvious.

There is sometimes a case to be made for retention over a political transition. The speculation about the possibility that Defense Secretary Bob Gates would be held over by the incoming Obama administration is a case in point.

Sometimes continuity matters, sometimes there is a non partisan path forward, sometimes the plan is working, and sometimes the incumbent is uniquely credible in the community of interest such that spanning changes in appointing authority and even party make sense.

With eight of the eleven gubertorial elections on Tuesday night returning incumbents for another term, the issue of transitions may not seem relevant. But returning governors often see the new term as exactly that - new.

Re-election forces soul searching and a hard look of what worked and what didn't. What remains undone and will the current strategies and players get them to done? In such circumstances, legacy becomes more important than continuity.

It takes little intuition to figure out whether you are part of the next administration when the call comes thanking you for your service, couched in some awkward talk about going in a new direction.

But what if doing the right thing for the good of the order comes down to your own initiative? It may be helpful to see yourself as others do.

When the track record of projects has been obfuscated to mask overruns in cost, time and scope, or bug lists are kept from partner agencies to save face, it is time to write that letter.
When you have earned a reputation as a hatchet person, because the person who dismantles a program is rarely the right person to build a new one, it is time to write that letter.
When you do not have a good and clearly stated answer to the simple question, what's next?, it is time to write that letter.
If you have never been caught making a decision, it is time to write that letter.
If you have a customer base of only one -- the appointing authority -- it is time to write that letter. (Conversely, if you covertly complain about the appointing authority to curry favor with customer agencies, it is time to write that letter.)
If you spent the good old days marginalizing people whose help you could now use to work through the hard times, it is time to write that letter.

An old friend taught me a long time ago that success in this business is based on competence and trust. If that is not the way you are seen up, down and across the organization, it is time to write that letter.

Do it. Now.

(Re)Elected Governors: The Other People in the News

2008-11-05T18:06:35Z

If journalism is still the first draft of history, it is understandable that President-elect Barack Obama dominates the post-election coverage. The Spectator's blog on all things American has compiled a long list of potential cabinet picks for the Obama Administration -- it is as speculative as any other such list but it provides a clue as to how intently overseas observers are watching every move of the incoming administration.

But there were other personalities in play, including eleven governors. Here is the briefest of summaries:

Delaware, where it is good to be first (constitutionally): Upstart Jack Markell (D) will replace a fellow Democrat Ruth Ann Minner who was prevented from running for re-election by term limits. Markell's predecessor was quietly effective in making technologies work for the disproportionately older population of her small state. It is a good foundation and thoughtful strategy on which to build.

Indiana: Mitch Daniels (R) won re-election in a landslide, an exception to his party's performance elsewhere in the country. During his first term, Daniels increased infrastructure spending from $244 million in FY05 to more than $867 million in 2007.

Missouri: State Attorney General Jay Nixon (D) will succeed Gov. Matt Blunt, the 38 year old Republican incumbent who decided not to run for a second term earlier this year. Nixon's campaign centered on what the New York Times called "a scathing critique of Republican control," making continuity through the transition unlikely.

Montana: The iconoclastic Brian Schweitzer (D), who gained national attention for his opposition to REAL ID as a reckless unfunded federal mandate, and who has worked to increase energy production (oil, wind and electricity) at home, won re-election by a wide margin.

New Hampshire: John Lynch (D) easily won re-election by landslide proportions, despite claims by his opponent that the state was losing its New England charm under Lynch's leadership.

North Carolina: Beverly Perdue (D) will build on a sixteen year run during which Democrats have held the governors office. North Carolina's leadership in the process of becoming digital has ebbed and flowed over the years, perhaps the reflection of strong personalities that pioneered the move into the Internet era and enterprise architecture. Those initiatives helped earn NC a Top 10 finish in 2004, a full 12 positions higher than where the state has been in both the 2006 and 2008 Digital States rankings -- 22.

North Dakota, which made a six position upward move to 17th place in the 2008 Digital States survey: John Hoeven (R) told reporters that re-election would bring with it a continued emphasis on economic development, particularly through the state's "Centers of Excellence program, an initiative that ties the state's universities to the private sector in order to create higher-paying jobs and new business opportunities for North Dakotans."

Utah, which earned the top ranking in the 2008 Digital States survey: In another counter trend Republican landslide, Jon Huntsman (R) won re-election by a large margin. Known for his pragmatic approach, Huntsman pioneered an energy-saving four day work week for state employees and where, by design, online self service ensures no loss in public service.

West Virginia: Joe Manchin (D) easily won re-election to a second term, running a track record of infrastructure investments, cutting the size of state government employment two years in a row, and saving as much as $350 million in government reform and streamlining initiatives.

Washington, which placed fifth in the 2008 Digital States rankings: Christine Gregoire (D) has apparently defeated former state senator Dino Rossi (R) in a rematch of a contentious and almost-too-close-to-call election in 2004. The incumbent governor made an acceptance speech based on declarations by the AP and other media organizations but without benefit of a concession speech by her challenger. The Rossi campaign says it will make a statement on the race on Wednesday afternoon. The margins in key counties are wider for Gregoire this time around, making the multiple recounts and court challenge that delayed a final judgement in 2004 unlikely.

What remains unchanged is what Digital Communities blogger Bill Schrier forecasts as "an agonizing election week [ahead] as King County (Seattle) slowly and painfully counts its ballots." Schrier says a little technology could go a long way toward shortening the count, and making it more accurate. And while he says there is plenty of blame to be assigned to King County itself, the Luddite-like disposition of a little known federal agency is not helping.

With a rough and tumble campaign behind her, Gregoire promised progress on creating a sustainable economy in the self described evergreen state, "It will be green, clean and the envy of the world."

UPDATE AT 11:43 AM: Saying "we just couldn't make up the gap," Republican challenger Dino Rossi conceded the governor's race to the incumbent.

Vermont: Jim Douglas (R) won re-election to his fourth term as governor. Douglas ran, in part, on the state's "e-State Initiative [which] is already helping to achieve my goal of creating a universal network of high speed wireless phone and internet services that reaches every corner of our state by the end of 2010."

A Reverse Dewey Effect: Cell phones to blame for wider than expected margin?

2008-11-04T16:02:09Z

"The polls are tightening," was the almost universal caveat repeated by cable news talking heads in the final countdown to the only poll that matters -- today's general election. It is an open question whether "tightening" could be used as a synonym or euphemism for skewing.

Others have written widely about the so-called Bradley Effect, which as described by TIME magazine, is a "theory holds that voters have a tendency to withhold their leanings from pollsters when they plan to vote for a white candidate instead of a black one." In March, a Pew Research study purported to identify the presence of both a Bradley Effect and a Reverse Bradley effect, the latter of which would advantage an African-American candidate.

An editorial in this morning's Los Angeles Times is skeptical about the Bradley Effect's existence, and even it does, whether it will have a role in Obama's fortunes. In dismissing it as a myth, the LA Times observes that demography and technology may be part of the effect's undoing:

[T]his election may feature a jump in the number of younger voters who cast ballots. They appear to tilt heavily toward Obama and are more likely to rely on cellphones, which pollsters have yet to figure out how to contact. Thus any racists who conceal themselves from pollsters may be counterbalanced by voters who are simply unavailable to them.

The dead space between public opinion pollsters and cell phone users -- particularly the one in three American households that have cell phones to the exclusion of land lines (according to a recent CDC-commissioned survey) -- could be the source of surprises of its own.

Consider the possibility of a reverse Dewey effect. Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York is best remembered from a headline that became a punchline -- DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.

There are a number of explanations for the mistaken headline. A printer's strike at The Chicago Tribune forced the paper to go to press an hour earlier than usual, before the actual ballot count was available.

The Tribune had been dismissive of Dewey but new fangled public opinion polling had helped convince its editors that Dewey had a significant advantage heading into election day. The telephone was at the heart of the new fangeld polling methods. But pollsters were only able to reach people who could actually afford telephones, who were overwhelmingly Republicans, and who overwhelmingly favored Dewey.

Fast forward to today and the ubiquity of cell phones whose users are out of reach of pollsters. Given what we know -- or what we think we know -- about the socio economic profile of cell phone users and young voters, we could see a Reverse Dewey Effect in tonight's results.

The suddenly conservative pundits who say the polls are tightening could be right. But if they are wrong, and the margins are wider than expected, the credit (or the blame) could belong a Reverse Dewey Effect and those pesky cell phones. To echo the LA TImes on that 'other' effect, it is not "so much that respondents lie to pollsters as that pollsters can't know what they don't know to look for."

Campaign 08: The Technology of Getting Out of the Vote (GOTV)

2008-11-03T16:00:28Z

With only one day remaining in the presidential election campaign, as many as a third of eligible voters have already cast their votes through absentee, mail-in and early voting. There are reports that Senators McCain and Obama will both break with tradition by campaigning on election day. At issue, voter turnout.

Political organizing is powered by hybrid systems that combine aspects of data integration, customer relationship management and business intelligence for political purposes: canvassing and voter contact on the front lines, and casework, donor, field, membership and volunteer management in the background.

The names of the systems have changed over years and their design, architecture and functions have been imporved but the underlying purpose remains the same. The RNC's Voter Vault, a web-based tool is now in its third release; and the Voter Activation Network (VAN) replaced Demzilla and is the platform behind the DNC's VoteBuilder, the Obama campaign's volunteer management system, and the organizing tools used by organized labor (AFL-CIO and the SEIU) among others.

It brought to mind a chestnut from the archives about the business intelligence systems used by the two major parties to get out the vote (GOTV):

"Too close to call." It was David Brinkley's election night epitaph to the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon match up; as it was for Peter Jennings forty years later during the long Florida night that left the Bush-Gore contest in dispute.

With results that were within the margin of error of manual, mechanical and digital vote counts, the television networks reworked their outdated predictive models and Congress - through the Help America Vote Act - set a timetable for the introduction of electronic voting machines, which will be in limited release this year in anticipation of a full roll out in 2006. Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines are the new hanging chads of American politics, sparking a debate over disenfranchisement amid concerns about validating that every vote is counted as it was cast.

If the e-voting debate is over which votes are counted, the full up implementation of CRM in presidential politics raises equally important questions about which votes are cast. Complex and highly partisan Customer Relationship Management is being deployed by both major parties to help tip election results in their favor, district by district, mobilizing their respective bases and wooing fickle swing voters.

The Democratic National Committee has built Demzilla with demographic, geographic and psychographic data on 158 million Americans; the Republican National Committee has locked up the same kinds of data on 165 million Americans its Voter Vault. Given the sensitivity of the information that they contain, it belies otherwise sophisticated political apparatuses that both systems have been christened with names that are, at once, sophomoric and Orwellian. What's more, after limited use in local and state races, Demzilla and Voter Vault go head to head it their first presidential throw down next month.

The number of names is less important than the contextual data that wraps around each name. "We have a numeric coding system," explained Washington state Republican chairman Chris Vance in a recent interview about the vault, "One is a hard Republican. Two is a soft Republican. Three is an independent. Four is a soft Democrat. Five is a hard Democrat. Six is someone who we reached, but refused to answer our questions. A zero is someone we have never been able to reach, we know nothing about."

The first five categories bring a certain scientific precision to the art of mobilizing the base - but the political prize is in converting zeros to partisans by election night. And that puts political CRM in the cross hairs of the same groups that have targeted e-voting as a threat to democracy.

At issue are the inferences that can be drawn from the manipulation of previously discrete data elements including all the usual stuff about who we are and how to reach us plus inferences gleaned from our reading habits and organizational affiliations. Layer on the answers to the questions about whether we vote and make political contributions (derived from secondary use of public records) and our views on war, gun ownership and abortion (which we may volunteer to the earnest, PDA-touting campaign volunteer at our door) and we end up with targeted messages that serve up 'my president, my way,' apparently unaware that they look different to people that have been placed in one of the other buckets.

One academic observer has gone so far as to condemn the parties' segmentation strategies because he claims they are not just correlated to, but the cause of, a precipitous fall in voter participation. Curiously, the complaint does not appear to extend to the legion of advocacy groups that use the same methods, punctuated by media campaigns and even lines of clothing, to convert non-voters to political participants.

This could all be a hideously bad idea. Or it could be a defining characteristic of a new civic engagement that solves some old problems while creating new ones. A century ago, Edward Berneys, alternatively known as the father of American public relations or propaganda, envisioned manipulating public opinion as an "unseen mechanism of society [that] constitutes an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. A generation ago, we came to accept a seemingly progressive idea that the "personal is political." Now, we have systems that automate both.

And if this year's election is again too close to call, the winners will know they are onto something. And so will the losers.

The original column appeared as "Political CRM: Swing voters and the systems that love them" in Government Technology magazine in October 2004.

The 14 Defining Characteristics of a Federal CIO

2008-10-30T21:32:48Z

The next president's choice of, and mandate for, a federal CIO has been speculative fodder for publications as diverse as BusinessWeek and The Atlantic on one side and c|net, CIO, Information/Network/Computer -Weeks and our sister magazines (Government Technology and Public CIO) on the other. Much of the coverage is aspirational -- projecting what the IT industry and other interested third parties (including the editors of the magazines) would like to see.

These speculative pieces look forward to election day or, more properly, inauguration day, and what could be. With much less fanfare, and just 15 days before the election, the outgoing administration issued a memo that defines what is now.

The memo, heavily laden with the kind of language that assigns responsibility retroactively while simultaneously dulling the senses, lays out fourteen characterstics of a federal CIO. (It is worth noting that the memo codifies a federated model where there are many federal CIOs, each working independently on behaf of their respective agencies.) Here is the job as understood in the dying days of an outgoing administration, in its own words:

I. Organizational Structure and Reporting Relationships of IT Executives and Senior Managers
A. The Department or Agency has a designated executive-level Chief Information Officer (CIO) reporting to the head of the organization, with formal and full responsibility for all requirements set forth in promulgating statutes, regulations and guidance of Public Law 104-106, "Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996," Public Law 107-347, "E-Government Act of 2002," Title 44 U.S. Code Section 3506 "Federal Agency Responsibilities," Federal Acquisition Regulation Part 39, "Acquisition of Information Technology," and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-130, "Transmittal Memorandum #4, Management of Federal Information Resources."
B. The Agency CIO has ultimate responsibility for the governance, management and delivery of IT mission and business programs within the Department, and has an effective operative means of meeting this responsibility.
C. The CIO may review the qualifications of and provides input into the selection process for IT and IT-related executive and senior management positions within the Agency and organizational components thereof.
D. IT executives and senior managers in all organizational components of the Agency have clear responsibilities and accountability for adhering to Agency IT policy and direction established by the CIO.
E. The CIO may establish and provide evaluations and appraisals in collaboration with the appropriate supervisors of record for at least one critical performance element within the performance plans of IT and IT-related executives and senior managers within the Agency and organizational components thereof.
II. Authorities to Set IT Policy and Implementing Procedures
Except where otherwise authorized by law, regulation, or other policy, the CIO has the authority to set Agency-wide IT policy, including all areas of IT governance such as enterprise architecture and standards, IT capital planning and investment management, IT asset management, IT budgeting and acquisition, IT performance management, risk management, IT workforce management, IT security and operations, and information security.

III. Authorities to Select, Plan, Control and Evaluate Investments in and Acquisition of Information Systems and Information Technology
Except where otherwise authorized by law, regulation, or other policy, the Agency head is responsible for the following activities. The Agency CIO shall be the lead agency official in taking the necessary actions to ensure such activities are completed. Thus, the Agency head:
A. Is responsible for ensuring all Agency business and mission policies, processes, and IT and IT-related programs comply with the Federal Enterprise Architecture;
B. Ensures the organization's enterprise architecture data is visible and accessible to other federal agencies and mission partners to the extent necessary for other organizations to leverage those resources, and works collaboratively with other agencies and organizations on enterprise architecture issues and opportunities;
C. Ensures IT and IT-related systems, assets and services acquired and existing within the organization do not unnecessarily duplicate those available from other federal agencies, and are planned for and managed throughout their lifecycle;
D. Shall include the Agency CIO in budget formulation, preparation, prioritization and presentation activities, including determining and evaluating IT resource requirements in support of mission execution and program administration and support;
E. Shall include the Agency CIO in Agency and component budget execution and resource allocation and planning activities for IT and systems development, operations, and services as appropriate to ensure resources are expended in accordance with established IT policy;
F. Shall include the Agency CIO in the selection, planning, review, and oversight of major IT and IT-related investments and acquisitions, development projects, and contracts or agreements for goods or services, and in evaluating and providing approval to proceed at the earliest state possible prior to initiating procurements or advancing to subsequent phases of system development and/or acquisition;
G. Reviews the status and progress of projects and activities in the Agency IT investment portfolio to determinate whether to continue, suspend, re-baseline or cancel projects or components thereof, including any associated current or planned acquisitions; and
H. Has established means for ensuring investment management, risk management, information security, and systems development lifecycle management policy compliance, including periodic review of artifacts and development products for IT investments and activities developed within or for component organizations.

A fair reading of this 14-point job description suggests that the memo is a one-size fits all straight jacket. It would have to be undone by any incoming administration that had a different view of how to manage or lead government modernization efforts. It would telegraph a message to anyone considering a role as one of many federal CIOs about the skills and world view that are valued -- and those that are not. And, sadly, it places a straight jacket on incumbent federal CIOs who are instructed to "review the attached IT governance framework [the 14 points above] and summarize your agency's current alignment with each element of the framework via signed memorandum by December 1, 2008."

Sign here. Take one for the team. And good luck with the transition.

An X Prize for government - on a budget

2008-10-29T03:19:15Z

In late 2004, SpaceShipOne took the original $10 million X Prize. Right now, 60 teams from nine countries are chasing the Automotive X-Prize to build a vehicle that gets 100 miles to the gallon. This one is motivated by green -- as in sustainability and as in another $10 million.

In January 2005, in the wake of the big SpaceShipOne win, I mused about the prospects of an the X or Next Prize for government on the back page of Government Technology magazine. At the time, it seemed that there were two central questions:

First, could there be an X Prize for government transformation? Funding the monetary prize would be no trivial challenge, but the hard part actually may be giving it away. Myriad ethics rules intended to stop public officials from doing the wrong thing also erect barriers to doing the right thing.

The second question is the more interesting one: What "Holy Grail" might an X Prize for government transformation tackle? What would your staff say it should be? What would the citizens you serve say? It's a conversation worth having (even in the absence of a cash prize) because it helps focus on things you and your colleagues would do if you weren't so busy lurching from crisis to crisis.

The conversation begins by finishing a sentence that traces its origins, appropriately enough, to the days when the space program was the gold standard of innovation and problem solving: "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we ...?"

Four years later, Vivek Kundra, the Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia Government -- as in Washington, DC -- has begun to answer those questions with an open invitation to "mashup DC's data."

It as an X prize on a budget -- with $20,000 up for grabs for public agencies and independent developers to share. According to the official rules:

[The competition] will feature 60 cash prizes from $2000 to $100 dollars for a total of $20,000 in prizes. Developers and designers will compete by creating web applications, widgets, Google Maps mash-ups, iPhone apps, Facebook apps, and other digital utilities that visualize DC's Data Catalog, which provides real-time data from multiple agencies to citizens -- a catalyst ensuring agencies operate as more responsive, better performing organizations.

The program is called Apps for Democracy: An Innovation Challenge and comes complete with a video introduction. The name is rooted in a personal and philosphical conviction about the relationship between government and the people it serves, as Kundra explains in this blog entry:

In ancient Athens--the model for the democracy envisioned by the framers of our Constitution-citizens met, face to face, in the agora--the public square-to conduct business, debate civic issues, and drive the decisions of government. Gone are the days of daily meetings at the agora. Today, citizens know government as red tape, long lines, and cold, distant bureaucracies. The reins of government have slipped from "we the people" to inaccessible government officials.

Fresh from giving a GOSCON keynote where such ideas are the mother's milk of 'movement software,' Kundra continues:

The District of Columbia, however, is at the forefront of a new era of governance, one in which technological advances now allow people from around the world unfettered access to their government. Through these advances, constituents can hold their government accountable from the privacy of their own homes. The District of Columbia is bringing people closer to government through collaborative technologies like wikis, data feeds, videos and dashboards. We're throwing open DC's warehouse of public data so that everyone--constituents, policymakers, and businesses--can meet in a new digital public square.

The early results are intriguing - 8 people have submitted initial apps, the first one went live within 2 days of the contest opening, and more than 90 people have signed up for the party when this experiment at the intersection of democracy and technology is over.

There are private sponsors of the effort, which may make incumbent technology companies nervous, or angry, or both. And that list of incumbents may include Google, which is probably not the way it thinks of itself. But time catches up with former young Turks everytime.

It promises make good watching. And it could be a proving ground for what Web 2.0 might actually look like in real life. Game on!

NSBA: Recognizing the Changes in the Hard Plastic Seats

2008-10-28T23:45:33Z

SEATTLE - Here is the material from the round table discussion on winning national recognition as a digital school board, presented to and discussed with delegates to the annual meeting of the National School Board Association (NSBA).

Click on the video to stream it from YouTube; to download a opy of the presentation, click on its awkward but information-laden file name --
10-08NSBARoundTable.pdf

Top States earn only a "D" in Ethics, Transparency and Integrity

2008-10-28T12:08:01Z

There is not a public official alive that likes to be at the bottom of a 50-state ranking, especially on close-to-home issues such as education, poverty and economic development. Even seemingly arcane rankings of readiness for the Year 2000 date field roll-over or maturity in delivering government services online can raise the ire of people associated with states in the back half of the pack.

What is worse is when there is really no honor in being in the top half of states on measures of open records laws; whistle blower laws; campaign finance laws; open meetings laws; and conflict of interest laws. That is the story that quickly emerges in reviewing state standings on the newly released second edition BGA-Alper Integrity Index that gauges the relative strength of state laws on transparency, accountability and limits in government. The index was created by a non-partisan waste-busting watchdog group -- the Better Government Association -- that has been holding public agencies to account since 1923.

The serial, templatized press releases for the top ranked states indicate that they are to be congratulated for their ranking, even though the best of them only merits a letter grade of "D" on the BGA assessment. It is not a terrific report card, with many states performing well on one or more measures and sucking channel water on the others. Here are the rankings in order (with imbedded links to the cookie cutter press releases on each state):

New Jersey
Rhode Island
Hawaii
Washington
Louisiana
Nebraska
Texas
Arkansas
Maryland
Colorado
Arizona
Illinois
West Virginia
Connecticut
Minnesota
Florida
Wisconsin
Kansas
California
Massachusetts
Oklahoma
Missouri
North Carolina
Michigan
Pennsylvania
Iowa
Georgia
Kentucky
Indiana
South Carolina
Ohio
Oregon
Maine
North Dakota
Nevada
New York
Utah
Virginia
Mississippi
Alaska
New Hampshire
New Mexico
Delaware
Idaho
Wyoming
Montana
Tennessee
Alabama
Vermont
South Dakota

According to the BGA rankings, South Dakota owes its last place finish to earning only a third of the available points -- ranking 49th in open records laws, 46th in both whistle blower and open meetings laws, 34th in campaign finance laws and 27th in conflict of interest laws. BGA Executive Director Jay Stewart concludes, "If you look at the percentage score, South Dakota received 32%, the equivalent of a F letter grade, hardly a cause for celebration."

In defense of South Dakota particularly, and all states to a certain degree, the BGA index lacks context or more than a single dimension. Sure it looks at five areas of law but it gives no consideration to how states of performing under those laws. Clearly, BGA sees South Dakota's open records laws as the second weakest in the land but the state's Open SD portal is apparently much better than the underlying law, providing a single spot on the Internet where South Dakotans can see how their governments are spending money.

If there is to be a third edition of the BGA-Alper Integrity Index, it would be fascinating to see an assessment of how well - or how poorly - states are executing against the underlying laws.

State Revenue Recession Deepens: 5.5% Decline

2008-10-27T11:48:55Z

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.

Open Source Détente: When "Movement Software" and Commercial Code meet

2008-10-21T12:24:07Z

"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.

YouGov2 at GOSCON

2008-10-20T22:57:23Z

PORTLAND -- Aneesh Chopra, Vivek Kundra, Andy Stein and me. One of those people doesn't really belong at a national open source conference. But the good people at GOSCON did not know that when they invited me. I am making the Tuesday morning keynote (available as a PDF here --
10-08YouGov2GOSCONHandout.pdf ).

I really like the title -- YouGov2: WHy MTV isn't, why radio is a Pandora's box and why government service delivery will never be the same -- and I hope the people in the room like it.

Their comments -- and yours -- are always welcome.

Top 10 Digital State Road Trip

2008-10-20T07:01:00Z

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.)

Only 899,999 other posts to read today

2008-10-02T20:16:00Z

The 2008 Tehcnorati State of the Blogosphere report tells us that bloggers worldwide create 900,000 blog posts a day. That makes me very grateful and more than a little surprised you have taken the time to include this in your daily reading. Its not like you don't have any choices.

TWEET: Ohio Loses Privacy Chief to Walmart

2008-10-02T18:54:05Z

The State of Ohio Chief Privacy Officer Sol Bermann has left for a new job at Walmart.

(This post originated as a microblog tweet at www.twitter.com/pwtaylor.)

Kevin Mitnick: The Magic Hacker Reformed

2008-10-01T15:28:09Z

Dinner with Kevin Mitnick is at once fascinating and frightening. In the time that it took the chef to prepare dinner, Mitnick did a little vishing on a major bank's IVR system (with each number pressed on his cell phone appearing in real time on his laptop sceen) after looking up -- through legal online subscription data resellers -- a dinner companion's social security number, drivers license number and mother's maiden name.

Mitnick, an early and infamous hacker who was convcted of computer crimes in 1999, has taken a turn as an information security consultant to government and industry. We were both in Columbus, Ohio for a Government Technology event. Interestingly, he is beginning to work magic (or, more properly, illusions) into his speeches and presentations, which takes him back to a childhood curiosity about slight of hand that became a pranksterish era of phreaking (phone freaking), all of which was a precursor to a short but headline-grabbing career as a computer hacker.

He has now gone legit, with a consulting firm and a 2002 book, The Art of Deception, which focuses on the promise, pitfalls and perils of social engineering.

Mitnick, whose metal business card can be broken out into a lock-picking kit, tells a great story but the underlying message is rather basic: Do not use information that is readily available -- SSNs, divers license numbers and mothers' maiden names -- for authentication because it just invites mischief, or worse. (He differentiates between old school hackers who were motivated by intellectual curiosity and a new underground economy of commercial, malicious hackers who are in it for the money -- yours.)

Granted, information security is the purview of Dan Lohrmann's Securing GovSpace blog but allow me an observation or two: As sophisticated as the attacks and defences have become on this front (and they have), it is telling that the successful exploits remain rather simple, taking advantage of human foibles and poor technical design.

Greening of the Public CIO

2008-09-23T23:15:51Z

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.

Green is the New Green

2008-09-22T07:01:00Z

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) meets in Milwaukee this week with a big agenda. Interestingly, NASCIO is dedicating two sessions to sustainability.

Oregon state CIO Dugan Petty, who has chaired a NASCIO working group on the greening of IT, will convene a workshop on equipment lifecycle in greener government. I have been asked to moderate a plenary session with a high power panel:

Ken Theis, Chief Information Officer, State of Michigan
Peggy Ward, Chief Information Security Officer of the Commonwealth & VITA Internal Audit Officer, Commonwealth of Virginia
Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar, Google

The big themes from the discussion -- including energy savings, telework and LEED-certified data centers and the alignment between green IT practices and the larger policies and politics of sustainbaility -- are drawn from two documents:

NASCIO's Green IT in Enterprise Practices, the work product from Dugan's working group; and,
The Center for Digital Government's Simply Green, my take on a few steps that state and local government can take on the road to sustainability.

Today's discussion also comes just days after Google and the venerable old school GE announced they "would work together on technology and policy initiatives to promote the development of additional capacity in the electricity grid and of "smart grid" technologies to enable plug-in hybrids and to manage energy more efficiently" [See the full story in the New York Times.]

It will be good to tease out the arc from the origins of climatesaverscomputing.org to the smarter electrical grid -- in both of which Google was a significant player -- with Weihl, Theis and Ward.

Government as BFF: Web 2.0 Implementation Rates

2008-09-17T23:00:05Z

In the years after Alexander Graham Bell successfully transmitted the sentence "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you" using a liquid transmitter and an electromagnetic receiver on March 10, 1876, enterprising reporters and editors most likely ran breathless stories about how government was using the new fangled telephones -- sparking debates about whether this was a cause for great celebration or concern. The slower the news day, the higher the likelihood.

Fast forward 132 years and the story has not changed that much. Government is still discovering the Internet and it is still drawing praise and criticism in its attempts. Portals are (largely) yesterday's news but ink is still being spilled to chronicle public sector experimentation with social networking sites, blogs and wikis. Around here, such things are our main beat and we are forever forwarding links to interesting finds and examples of how the popular press covers them like this one in the Washington Post on text messaging in local government (forwarded by our Editor-in-Chief).

It is an unenviable task to follow or advance a big city daily newspaper's coverage of anything but here we can add something the original story lacked -- context. Our ongoing review of the results of the Digital States suggests that there is a critical mass around the use of Web 2.0 technologies.

In summary form, even as work continues to finish what states started in their transition to online service delivery, there has been widescale experimentation and significant adoption of collaborative Web 2.0 technologies among public agencies. Listservs, the long established Web 1.0 tool used by more than two-thirds of states (60%) of states, have been joined by wikis in a quarter (26%) for sharing information of common interest and concern. RSS Feeds - alternatively known as Really Simple Syndication, RDF Site Summary, or Rich Site Summary - are common (90%) for broadcasting information to interested users, and almost three-quarters of states (72%) are using podcasts somewhere within the executive branch. Just less than half of states are using Text Messaging (49%), mashups (46%) and blogs (44%).

The numbers suggest that some public agencies in some jurisdictions are finding ways to act more like the citizens they serve, using technologies that their publics use in their everyday lives.

Thrown Under the Train: The Texting Engineer at Fault?

2008-09-17T21:38:56Z

"I can't believe someone could be texting while driving a train." That was the conclusion of Denise Tyrell, a spokesperson for Metrolink, on reports that train engineer Robert Sanchez might have been texting with teenage train enthusiasts immediately before the crash.

So far, the National Transportation Safety Board has not recovered his phone and has requested copies of the phone records of both the engineers and his fans. But a CBS affiliate talked with the teenagers and looked at the messages sent and received just minutes before the crash.

Metrolink, the public agency that operates commuter train service on five regional lines (Ventura County, Antelope Valley, San Bernardino, Riverside, and Orange County) in Southern California, has suspended all use of text messaging after the deadly crash of Train 111 last Friday.

The crash is the worst US rail tragedy in a decade and a half, killing 25 and injuring another 125. In a move originally intended to rebuild public trust, Tyrell got out in front of investigators: "A Metrolink spokeswoman said a day after the accident that the engineer was at fault because he failed to stop at a red light, but NTSB and railroad union officials said it was premature to draw such a conclusion." [See full story here]

As the LA Times reported, Tyrell was later forced to resign over her comments, which were alternatively hailed for their candor by advocates of government transparency and deemed innappropriate for their timing and apparent intent to preempt official investigations.

The NTSB investigation is ongoing, as is seperate probe by the California Public Utilities Commission (which regulates train safety in the state) but, already, the engineer has been thrown under the train, followed by the spokesperson who threw him and a little technology called text messaging. You can already feel the chill.

A Melancholy Anniversary

2008-09-11T07:01:00Z

September 11, 2001. The date by itself invokes a touch point in recent history, marking a modern American tragedy.

In the intervening seven years, many have done much to recover, rebuild and make things better. Others have debated the constitutional and public policy impacts of government decisions in what was euphemistically called the "new normal" of the post-9/11 environment.

On a previous anniversary in 2004, I offered a "mulligan for the homeland" in the pages of Government Technology about what we had gained and what we had lost in the name of homeland security. Eighteen months later, in defense of the open government movement, I was still thinking about the new normal: "After 9/11, we were told that as an open society our strength was our weakness. Five years on, it's time to re-exert the modest proposition that our strength is still our strength." This observation too originated in GT but was subsequently chosen for inclusion in a First Amendment desk calendar by the Freedom Forum.

I thought that I had said my piece about this sad American anniversary when I happened across a newly written description of a network initiative in New York state, which "is working toward a goal of developing and implementing an ... emergency radio network to provide a common communications platform for state and local public safety ... agencies. The inability of first responders to readily communicate with one another ... can result in loss of lives and property."

I had to check the date, especially given the grammatical tense - "is working" and "can result"?! The language use may have suited September 10, 2001, but we are a long way past then.

The results of two audits put the situation in starker terms:

The first audit found numerous operational deficiencies and other problems that led to extensive delays and continued testing failures. The second audit found that [one county alone] could spend nearly $30 million less by scaling back its participation in SWN and building its own radio network.
"New York is not much closer to a statewide network today than it was when this whole process started," [State Comptroller Thomas] DiNapoli said. "After three rounds of failed testing, it is apparent that this system is not ready to move forward. [The contractor] has not met its contractual obligations, and New York can't afford to spend $2 billion on a system that doesn't work right. It's time to fish or cut bait.

Seven years later, first responders -- universally regarded as heroes from that dark day -- are still waiting to have their say in life and death situations. More's the pity. More's the shame.

McCain on IT: Need to catch up with History

2008-09-05T05:21:20Z

In accepting his party's nomination for president, Senator John McCain basked in the reflected glory of a long and distinguished career in public service and the runaway buzz around his pick for vice president.

His acceptance speech included a single reference to technology - significantly, it was in the context of a confession of things that the federal government had failed to do well, or at all. He delivered the line at 10:56PM Eastern:

We need to change the way government does almost everything: from the way we protect our security to the way we compete in the world economy; from the way we respond to disasters to the way we fuel our transportation network; from the way we train our workers to the way we educate our children. All these functions of government were designed before the rise of the global economy, the information technology revolution and the end of the Cold War. We have to catch up to history, and we have to change the way we do business in Washington.

A fair reading suggests that catching up with history requires public policy focus and public investment in infrastructure. Reconcile that with promises to reduce taxes and cut government spending. It is not just a math problem.

Public Finance Disaster Film debuts Thursday in PPV Event

2008-08-18T23:24:56Z

If you missed the live version of former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker "Fiscal Wake Up Tour," a new documentary that was the darling of the Sundance Festival captures the central message Walker would talk about to anyone who would listen: the US government is broke and broken.

The numbers tell at least some of the story: The federal government has dug itself a $53 trillion financial hole and keeps digging $2 trillion to $3 trillion deeper every year. If those numbers have too many zeroes to feel relevant, it works out to $175,000 of debt for every American.

But the story is more than the numbers. And that is where documentary director Patrick Creadon comes in. Creadon, who you may remember from his charming 2006 film about puzzles and those who make and play them (Word Play), begins to unpack the puzzle of how we got here and what to do about it now.

In early reviews, it has been praised for doing for public finance what an Inconvenient Truth did for the environment. But the live Fiscal Wake Up Tour from which the film draws was much less polemical than the Al Gore keynote presentations about climate change. And it is worth noting that Creadon's work to date is more about compelling storytelling than the ideological screeds for which Michael Moore or D.A. Pennebaker are known.

That said, there is ideology and world view at work here, but in a more non-partisan way than you might expect. Groups as different as the Concord Coalition, Brookings Institution, Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute were all on the tour and agreed that America's fiscal policies and practices were and are unsustainable. Expect a largely unchallenged contention that entitlement programs are the problem. Their death, not just reform, is central to ever climbing out of the super-sized fiscal hole.

And lest I bury my lede, I.O.U.S.A debuts on the big screen in a live event (tape delayed on the west coast) that includes an after-movie discussion with Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan, Paul O'Neill, Robert Rubin and Paul Volcker. It is scheduled for this Thursday in theatres across the country -- which can be found through the film's official website.

IT Industry Priorities in Public Sector

2008-08-14T22:43:13Z

A gathering of executives from leading system integrators and related technology companies gathered on August 11 for a day long examination of state and local government in Colorado Springs, CO. It was the second annual Industry Summit, convened by the Center for Digital Government.

The hundred or so industry delegates allowed an anonymous peak under the covers of their respective companies' prime targets in SLG. It is not at all surprising the public safety and human services topped the list but, interestingly, there was consensus on only two items -- on enterprise IT infrastructure near the top of the list and parks and recreation at the very bottom.

Slicing the market by the technologies in which government is likely to invest, infrastructure again topped the list -- second only to virtualization (which may be an aspirational ranking, given the composition of the audience). Interestingly, the industry reps see a continuing government focus on information security, consolidation and connectivity. They see only middling opportunities for legacy modernization, shared services and software-as-a-service. Representing sales organizations as they do, the results also indicate three items that just don't seem ready to move -- sadly, they are business process models and identity/ access management.

A Cartoonish Perspective on Campaign '08

2008-07-17T18:51:55Z

The people of Jib Jab are back with their satirical send up of the race for the White House with the animated Time for Some Campaignin' (to the tune of Bob Dylan's Times They Are A-Changin'). It is clever and well executed but, to borrow a phrase from the pundit's handbook, may lose in the expectations game because you and I cannot help comparing it to the original My Land parody from the 2004 Presidential Campaign.

Get the "Time for Some Campaignin'" JibJab Sendable® here.

Apparently, I inadvertently added to the funhouse-mirror view of this year's presidential race in a column that posted on June 25, 2008 in Government Technology's Public CIO. It included the results of a survey of IT professionals that seemed a little odd. They were mistakenly attributed to the Computer Technology Industry Association. The error was mine.

In fact, the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) had commissioned separate opinion research this spring on the presidential preferences of IT professionals. The findings, coming before the end of primary season, showed Senators Obama and McCain "in a dead heat, with 29% each."

CompTIA's Michael Wendy tells me the organization has commissioned a follow-on poll to gauge the IT community's view of the presidential horse race one more time before the general election. Its results will be available in September on the industry group's website at www.comptia.org.

Unvarnished, Up Front and Personal

2008-06-04T22:42:34Z

Legislators are unique among elected officials because they can be who they are and speak for themselves in their own voice, without the encumbrances of operational responsibilities that come with the territory for the executive branch and most independently elected officials. That makes them natural candidates to blog, and a growing number are. Such was the nature of my conversation with staff writer Pauline Vu for a Stateline.org update on the state of the new legislator's art. Part stump speech, part coffee shop chatter and more than a little stream of consciousness narrative, legislative blogs reflect the personality and world view of these (mostly) free agents - for good or for ill.

Excuse a self-referential reference, but I thought this was pretty good. Vu wrote:

Despite the risks, Taylor of the Center for Digital Government said the best legislative blogs are those written by lawmakers who don't turn to their advisors for approval on every posting. But therein also lies the danger. "It is a legislator who may speak the truth in unvarnished terms...and I suppose depending on your view of how public processes are supposed to work, that brings both promises and pitfalls," he said.

That brought a response from Barrett Marson who runs a blog for "the majority members of the Arizona House of Representatives. Its mostly unvarnished." And it mostly is ... as you can see here.

Thin Edge of the Internet Sales Tax Wedge

2008-06-02T17:32:00Z

Overstock.com is suing and Amazon's Jeff Bezos calls the move unconstitutional. On Sunday, June 1, the state of New York ended the experiment that has kept the Internet a sales tax free zone for those online retailers that do not have a physical presence in the state.

As of yesterday, New Yorkers began paying a charge for state and local sales taxes for their online purchases, which amounts to about 8 percent in most parts of the state. It is a high stakes gambit for political subdivisions in the midst of a public sector revenue recession. The change is expected to be worth $50 million to state coffers and another $50 million for counties and some cities that levy local sales taxes. According to published reports, the total take could be as much as $146 million next year.

The change refreshes an old debate about a level competitive environment among online retailers and their brick and mortar counterparts on one hand, and the potential to thwart Internet innovation and development on the other. Clearly, policy makers in one state have decided the Internet is all grown up. Revenue hungry legislators and governors in the other 49 states will be hard pressed to resist the temptation for new money even if, as is the case in New York, officials argue the online sales tax collection scheme is only a more effective means of enforcing use tax payments for out of state purchases. A permanent change at the virtual check out is contingent on yet another trip to the physical courts.

Would a President Obama let his Netroots show?

2008-05-30T01:39:11Z

A Marc Amblinder essay (HisSpace) in The Atlantic examines the promise and pitfalls of trying to parlay online campaigning into online governing. Amblinger's thesis: Barack Obama is likely to do it because he can but leaves open the question of whether he should.

Obama clearly intends to use the Web, if he is elected president, to transform governance just as he has transformed campaigning. Notably, he has spoken of conducting "online fireside chats" as president. And when one imagines how Obama's political army, presumably intact, might be mobilized to lobby for major legislation with just a few keystrokes, it becomes possible, for a moment at least, to imagine that he might change the political culture of Washington simply by overwhelming it.

This promise of transformation hinges on meaningful transparency.

What Obama seems to promise is, at its outer limits, a participatory democracy in which the opportunities for participation have been radically expanded. He proposes creating a public, Google-like database of every federal dollar spent. He aims to post every piece of non-emergency legislation online for five days before he signs it so that Americans can comment. A White House blog--also with comments--would be a near certainty. Overseeing this new apparatus would be a chief technology officer.

As an aside, that would radically redefine the role of CTO (not that the world of three-letter acronyms needed anymore confusion). The challenge here is a not just to appear to be a participatory democracy but to actually be one.

If Obama wins, and if he can harness the Web as a unifying force once the voting is done, he could be a powerful president indeed--the kind that might even deliver on some of the audacious promises that Obama the candidate has made. But the Web, like the politics it seeks to transform, is unruly and fickle. The online networks that have turbocharged Obama's candidacy could end up hemming him in, and even stalling his agenda, as president.

Obama and the Internet have both been described by their proponents as transformational with the ability to make good on the forty year promise of open government. It is at moments like these that half measures will disappoint at a devastating scale because words such as transformation and transparency should never be seen in the same sentence as the vaguely French sounding modifier faux.

Appreciating Irony

2008-05-29T18:53:12Z

Take a good look at a slacker video produced and posted by the California tax man. Indeed, the California Franchise Tax Board is among a growing number of public agenies that have been experimenting in public with engaging the public on the its terms. Exhibit A: YouTube videos. They are not your father's public service announcements because they are not intended to run on your father's medium of choice - television. Instead, they have a young, hip and urban sensibility more typical of viral videos that are now common on the Internet. And yes, the critics have had their say on why agencies should stay away from YouTube. This from the Christian Science Monitor:

"The state's YouTube videos vary in usefulness," says Jack Pitney a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College. "The public service announcements are slick but unhelpful. Who goes on YouTube to seek propaganda from a state agency? Just because you can go on YouTube, doesn't mean that you should."

Propaganda? A harsh assessment for what remains well within the tradition of PSAs - public health, public safety and, in the present case, filing taxes. It is surely hyperbolic to lump propaganda and PSAs together in same virtual bucket. The audience can figure it out even if certain college professors cannot. And that may be what ultimately matters. This YouTube experimentation by public agencies should not be judged by its production values (although a sophisticated audience is discerning on this front) or even the use of a video platform that comes without cost to the taxpayer rather than building their own (although that should be applauded).

This slacker video matters because it reflects an appreciation of irony, the defining characteristic of the demographic cohort that is coming of age at a time when YouTube is outdrawing the old tube. Public institutions continue to fight the fight for relevancy in these times -- and some are helping themselves by taking a calculated risk to act more like the people they serve.

Dot-Gov Performance: Grading on a Curve

2008-05-28T21:07:41Z

Public Information Officers have a tough job. Consider how hard one or more federal PIOs had to work to squueze lemonade from a bucket full of lemons. The White House uses the stop light metaphor common to scorecard programs everywhere - green is go or good, yellow is slow or mediocre, and red is stop or just plain bad, bad, bad. Here's the brave face put on the most recent report:

In the President's Management Agenda Scorecard for the second quarter of FY 2008, nearly 50% of agency "status" scores were green, and more than 75% of "progress" scores were green. The Department of Labor, the Social Security Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, continue to be the only three agencies to receive green scores for both "status" and "progress" in all five of the governmentwide initiatives: human capital, competitive sourcing, financial performance, e-gov and performance improvement.

Put slightly less charitably, (a) more than half of all federal agencies have a worrisome status of yellow or red; and , (b) only 3 of 26 -- 12% -- of federal agencies had their act together and were still moving forward on this handful of priorities. Singling out a vertical or two, 20 agencies were making green-level progress on e-government but 17 are digging out of a hole (14 yellow, 3 red) on the status measure. Ironically, the reddest of the red status belonged to the Department of Commerce -- an interesting spot to end up for a department the name of which shares a root word with "e-commerce." Apparently, not much to show for the last 13 years of playing in the Internet sandbox. On the competitive procurement watch, more than two-thirds (69%) of agencies were mired in red and yellow lights. Some 58% were making progress on this front, which may be akin to being lost but making good time.

Data Center Blues in the "Other" Washington

2008-05-28T17:11:40Z

It is just not easy building new data centers in Washington state, whether you are the world's dominant and hometown software company or the state government itself. Ground breaking on a new state data center was scheduled for this spring in Olympia, WA -- the first domino in a capitol campus renovation that includes an accompanying office complex to headquater the Department of Information Services (DIS), the Washington State Patrol and other state agencies, which would make room for a new Heritage Center near the Legislative building and Temple of Justice.

The Olympian (May 23, 2008) reports in a front page story above the fold that the first first domino won't budge just yet. The price tag on data center complex spiked $110 million from $260 Million to $370 Million, thanks to the rising costs of construction material plus the unforeseen need to mitigate the effects of increased traffic on the neighborhood. (The original $186 Million estimate for the Heritage Center has also bulged to $221 Million.)

What's more, State Treasurer Michael Murphy is concerned about the use of lease-purchase financing for the DIS complex, telling the Olympian, "This project will be the most expansive project on the capitol campus ... yet it is being financed in a way that makes it excempt form public works laws." The project marks DIS' debut as a general contractor, a role it sought in order to create a showcase for technologically advanced and sustainable workspaces.

In an unrelated development, DIS can commiserate with Microsoft and Yahoo, both of which have also suspended plans to build huge data centers in the state. The companies' multi-facility campuses signaled their commitment to enterprise-level utility computing. The viability of the SaaS-ready data centers required economical access to electricity, broadband access and a tax break. The town of Quincy, WA is prepared to make long term commitments to supplying cheap power thanks to the nearby Columbia River.

But the blog Data Center Knowledge reported that, earlier this year, "the state ruled that data centers were no longer covered by a state sales tax break for manufacturing enterprises.... Gov. Chris Gregoire requested an exemption in Senate Bill 6666, which would restore the exemption for data centers." The legislative session ended without action on the bill. Without the exemption, a 7.9 percent tax would be due on data center construction and equipment. Some things simply do not pencil out.