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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 .

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.

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.

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.

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.