Politics: December 2008 Archives

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.