(L-R) Haile, Goodall, Szablicki, Hart, Jacknis, Kline


The final session of this year's GTC East quite appropriately looked at the future."Future technologies: Responding to the Shifting Demands of Tomorrow's Citizenry" centered on the expectations of students and young users of government Web sites. Christine Haile the CIO at the State University of New York at Albany (SUNY) moderated the session which also included SUNY's David Goodall, and SUNY students Corey Hart and Henry Szablicki. Also on the panel were Westchester County, N.Y., IT Commissioner Dr. Norman Jacknis, and Gregory Kline, New York State DMV deputy commissioner for administration.

Jacknis, the father of three teenagers, said that the DMV is the most important agency in their lives, they've been looking forward to doing business with it for years. Not so with county government, he said. And he said that technology adults think is "spiffy" -- such as voice recognition, instant messaging -- is taken for granted by the kids, who sometimes see government Web sites as "brochureware."

Both SUNY students related being summoned for jury duty recently. Hart said it was not a good experience. He navigated the county Web site -- looking for answers to fairly ordinary questions such as when was he supposed to appear, how could he explain he was in school and ask to defer duty, and what should he do? What he found on the site was a telephone number and left a message. He suggested that a simple "frequently asked questions" page would have helped significantly.

Szablicki said his jury duty summons came from his home county, and he no longer lives there. He called the office and was told he needed to present proof of residency and a valid ID which required him to travel to the office in person to present the documents.

Goodall said he has a background at DMV, and was proud of some of the customer service initiatives there. "But all that pride was dashed when my daughter, who lives in New York City, got married here in Albany," he said. She took her husband's name, said Goodall, and to establish her new identity, needed a new driver's license. But to do that, she needed to present a paper marriage license. The marriage license is a computer-generated document, he said, that must be printed out, taken to the DMV, then data entered into another computer system. Most young people have the expectation that computers can talk to one another, he said.

Jacknis said that many state laws require signatures on paper, but that even if the laws were changed, the enterprise architecture does not yet exist in many cases, to allow sharing of information across systems. The CIO Council, of which he is a member, is working on enterprise architecture matters.

Haile said that SUNY built secure systems in a student-focused way, with consolidated identity management on a single net ID and password for all applications, that allow a student to register for courses, access course management systems, check invoices, access the library, parking, housing, etc.

Surprisingly, neither SUNY student had an inclination to do away with paper. Szablicki said some students "just aren't keeping up," and still want paper, and that should be continued for them. In his job on the student help desk, for example, he got a request from a student who wanted the help desk to give her a password and didn't want to do it herself.

"A lot of people just want to do things on paper," said Hart, admitting that he preferred paper himself for things like taxes, because it was easier to save a copy for audit or confirmation that the taxes had actually been