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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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