Recently in Politics Category

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.

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.

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.

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 .

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.

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."

"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."