Electronic government is a problem that stretches all the way from cramped wiring closets to enterprise infrastructure, from sharing information between agencies and across agency boundaries to conducting secure online transactions.
There's nothing new about governments dealing with problems, but this particular problem is different. Resurfacing a four-lane thoroughfare or fixing a water main is not the simplest problem to solve, but at least the solution is clear.
With electronic government, solutions aren't so clear.
What's the best way to authenticate a user who wants to pay a tax or buy a fishing license with a credit card on your Web site? There are plenty of ways, but no single compelling solution.
How should cash-strapped county governments manage IT? Again, there are plenty of ways, but no compelling solution.
The Streamlined Sales Tax Project has made significant progress toward solving the problem of taxing online sales at the state level, but local governments in "home rule" states aren't pleased with certain provisions of the SSTP, and those provisions could ultimately derail the passage of legislation enabling the SSTP in those states.
In electronic government, what appears to be a solution often becomes just another problem. The interconnectedness of electronic government means that what gets tweaked here requires another tweak over there and maybe even getting a couple of new laws passed to make both the tweaks legal.
Still, state and local governments have managed to accomplish quite a bit despite the maze they often find themselves in when trying to convert the back-end processes of their brick-and-mortar bureaucracies into an electronic workflow.
It's an exercise in mastering minutia - that seemingly trivial little thread that doesn't get tied can cause the whole fabric to unravel.
The dirty little secret of electronic government is how many trees are killed to make the paper that documents the many threads of disparate business processes that are crafted into the code behind the software that makes electronic government work.
Electronic government is all about problems, large and small. Ignoring them is impossible, as governments know too well. The public won't accept their government sticking its collective head in the sand, waiting for the problems to go away.
Those in civil service often find themselves in crisis when it comes to preparing for the transition to electronic government, but crisis isn't to be feared.
In Chinese symbolism, the symbol for crisis is danger plus opportunity.
Though that seems ominous, equal parts of danger and opportunity is a good thing. At the very least, it means equal chances at success and failure.
At best, crisis gives governments, and people, the chance to create something completely new.
