Sharon Dawes, director of the Center for Technology in Government, received the Rudolph W. Giuliani Leadership Award Monday at the GTC Executive Leadership Institute in Albany. At the presentation, Dawes told a story about her somewhat trying entry into public-sector IT and the lessons she learned from it. In 1973, Dawes, a recent college graduate working for the New York State Department of Social Services, joined a project transferring assistance programs for aged, blind and disabled people from the state to the Social Security Administration. Here is the story in her own words:

Sharon Dawes
The thinking behind the transfer was that the caseload shouldn't be in the welfare system, that what they needed was a respectable reliable source of steady if modest income, much like today's Social Security retirement program. My job was part of a task force responsible for transferring the records of 180,000 people from the welfare offices in counties in New York City to the Social Security computer in Baltimore. This was the very first computerized database for any welfare program in New York State.

We thought we were very cool. We worked with every county and every welfare center in New York City, to gather the records, transform them into the federal format, keep them up to date, and prepare for the changeover on January 1, 1974. And as the year wore on, we saw just how complicated the job really was. And we began to worry whether things were going well. But the Social Security Administration was the expert in information technology, with the biggest domestic information systems in the world. And they said 'don't worry.' So we didn't worry.

We went on gathering records, transferring records, and on the day of the changeover -- which was a bitterly cold January day -- we discovered first hand the limits of wonderful technology. There were thousands of errors. Some people received no check at all. Some people received too little, and three very happy elderly gentlemen received $6,000 each.

People lined up outside welfare offices, outside Social Security offices, all around the state. These were sick and old people, the average age was 82. They relied on caseworkers to solve their problems, but this program had no caseworkers. New York City government leased school busses to serve as waiting rooms to keep people warm outside Social Security offices in Manhattan and Queens. And one of those offices actually locked its doors against the crowd forming outside.

Some county social service agencies continued to serve people even though they no longer had any funds to do so. The state enacted an emergency assistance program, and slowly things began to stabilize.

The project was, in fact, a technological wonder. Social Security had built a single nationwide information system, from the computerized and mostly paper records from 50 states, and thousands of localities. They got the checks out on time, and the vast majority of them were correct. But the errors and omissions and confusions led to a huge loss of credibility for SSA at great financial, organizational and human cost.

This project was my first taste of public service, and my first taste of IT. It taught me very early that these two things exist in a very powerful but uneasy relationship. And the lessons of that project came forward with me into every job I've had since. Three lessons:

• No initiative that makes use of IT can succeed on the basis of the technology.
• The way government uses information can profoundly affect people's lives for both good and bad.
• A public service program is an extraordinarily complicated mixture of principles, practices, policies, organization and information, and