Lessons from the Front Lines of E-Government

Wednesday's session at GTC "Feats and Fiascos from the Front Lines of E-Government" featured speakers who now work for CGI, but who have had plenty of experience on those front lines. The session not only provided a broad historical overview of the subject, but put context into today's efforts and advanced some possibilities for the future.

Steve Kolodney

First up with Steve Kolodney, former CIO of Washington state. "We have wired the world," said Kolodney, "Three billion people are now connected. Today, India, China and Russia are competing with us person-by-person, organization-by-organization, and our technology edge is gone." He said outsourcing, offshoring and homeshoring are several of the terms now used to describe new ways of using technology to compete.

"Reservation agents in Jet Blue airlines," said Kolodney, "are sitting in their homes, wearing pink slippers and bathrobes. They are wired with sophisticated technology, so calls are distributed to the next available agent."

Today, you don't have to get to the airport two hours early to get a good seat on Southwest Airlines, he said. "You just get up at 12:01 a.m., print out your boarding pass, and show up 15 minutes before the flight. You now become the travel and ticket agent for Southwest airlines."

But self-service self-reliant customers for the private sector can be bad news for government. "Companies have reduced headcount, cut overhead, merged, and offloaded benefits."

Kolodney said that per-person health costs in 1960 were about $143. In 2005, they were $5,700. In 1960, only 25 percent of health care was publicly funded, but today, it's closer to 46 percent.

A show of hands revealed that about 2/3 of the audience were public-sector IT folks, and he addressed the next part of his talk to them, saying that in the mid to late 90s "automation" was the watchword. "You take manual processes and apply computer technology to make them more efficient." Then in 1997 and '98 the word was "remediation," of systems for the new century. "We spent three years and millions of dollars remediating. I was in the data center in Olympia at 12:01 and nothing terrible happened."

Next, said Kolodney, we moved past that to a new world of the Internet. The word then was "demonstration," he said. "You show how a new technology could change the way a business operated." Following that was "consolidation." But now, he explained, a new era is here, the most exciting time in government, of "innovation." But the skills most valued in consolidation are not so valued when innovation is the key. Now government must build around the customer, "innovation builds from them to us," he said. Even the motto of the federal government Web site is "my government, my terms."

Kolodney demonstrated some best practices using Access Washington, the state's Web site. The site is simple, uncluttered and help is readily available, from questions as to why the citizen came onto the site, to foreign language help, to using the metaphor of file folders which people understand. And there's even a person who will guide you through the site if you need lots of help.

Need a job? Want to start a small business? The site has clearly labeled sections to help people find exactly what they need. "Ask George," a search engine, uses questions that are asked over and over again. Government staff were surveyed to see what those questions and answers were, then they were added to the site.

"That's the new world," said Kolodney, suggesting that California needs to move in that direction. "There is more to be done."

Gregory Jackson