The 2005 U.S. federal budget includes just $5 million for the eGov fund. The amount requested for the year was $45 million. Last year the fund received just $3 million, which means over the last two years just $8 of the $100 million George Bush had requested for the fund when it was initiated
has been granted. The money is part of a central fund that federal agencies can use toward their eGov intiatives.
As a spokesman for Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) says: "On e-government issues in general, there's just no coordinated political constituency pushing appropriators to allocate money. They see no political benefit in targeting funds toward E-Gov projects, which would require taking away money from other pet projects. In addition, appropriators see the E-Gov fund as duplicative spending."
This is a very short-sighted view, considering that in the long run the fruits of the funded initiatives could end up saving money. Overall, the Government IT budget increased just 1% from last year (to $59.7 billion).
The U.S. was founded on, amongst other things, the principle of a decentralized government. Early in the nation's history, this decentralization led to rampant corruption and cronism. Over the years government has become increasingly centralized and, at least in terms of technology, centralization should be the way to go. For example, enterprise architecture is a significantly more appropriate policy than each agency developing their own technology solutions.
Unfortunately, a recent report has found the Government Services Administration (GSA) is in need of a "thorough housecleaning."
The GSA is a centralized agency that handles much of the federal government's technology procurement and implementation. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley said that the GSA has "committed almost every conceivable contracting irregularity," and that the violations "seem to reflect an endemic and epidemic pattern of gross mismanagement, failed oversight, a flawed rewards system, and potential malfeasance."
Pending any additional investigation, I think it is a very safe bet that there will soon be major changes at GSA, effecting federal eGov/IT policy immensly.
Beginning this month, the Small Business Administration's database of small businesses wishing to do contract with government agencies is being integrated into the Department of Defenses Central Contractor Registration (CCR) database.
I don't have much to say about this, but I noticed I'd yet to utilize the Gov to Business category. The one thing I will add is that when it comes to information retrieval, centralized databases are almost always a superior option than several smaller decentralized resourses. The president's goal is for a single, integrated aquisition tool, known as the Integrated Acquisition Environment (IAE). This tool would be made available as a government-wide resouces, and with the merger of SBA's and the DoD's databases into the CCR, they are now much closer to that goal.
E-Travel is basically a portal/software exchange that provides a centralized location for all organizational travel to be planned, booked, and managed. The GSA is requiring that all Federal agencies move to E-Travel. The agencies have until March to submit their migration plan, and until 2006 to complete the transition. The GSA is requiring agencies to choose between three approved software packages.
This is a great idea, and will can save much time and money. The only more significant travel savings would be from a distributed workspace system, but this is a start.
Still, having worked on a corporate E-Travel migration (that would be probably be similar in size to even some of the larger of Executive agencies), I have to say that this transition should take months, not two years.
Cash-strapped state and local governments are discovering what millions of eBay aficionados already know: You can sell almost anything on the Internet.
. (link via beSpacific). Many of the agencies say they are netting three times as much as they previously had from their local auctions.
I see nothing wrong with this, other than that authenticity might be a problem. E-Bay's reputation management system goes along way to solve that. Still, shouldn't a forward thinking legislator read an article like this and see the possibility of something like an "auction.gov", where federal, state, and local governments across the country can place items for sale in a single location?
As the bill currently stands, Congress will approve only $3 million to go to the E-Government Fund, which is a pool of money that all Federal agencies draw from for their department's eGov initiatives. That figure is down from $5 million last year, and $52 million less than was slated for the fund when it was created by the E-Government Act of 2002.
A number of Federal intiatives are budgeted with their own line items, and several of these will receive significant funding, including $35 million for NARA's Electronic Records Project, and $56.3 million for the GSA’s Office of Governmentwide Policy.
After a series of articles over the past couple weeks warning that eGov initiatives aren't quite the cost savers they've been sold to be, here is some news about ways eGov has saved time/money in the US. They cite consolidation of agency business activities as the prime reason for the savings, which includes $1.2 billion in payroll savings over the next ten years.
Following up on a theme from an earlier story, this article cautions agencies from selling eGov iniatiatives as cost savers. One reason is that it is often tough to determine where savings are being generated, technological advances or policy changes. Another reason is that since these iniatitives have not achieved full adoption, most agencies are still providing paper as well as digital version of most services. And, most importantly, the value of eGov doesn't can't necessarily be judged by something as quantifiable as dollars and cents - the true value of eGov is in it's ability to better serve consituents, the success of which is much more difficult to gauge effectively, and much more difficult to put a monetary value on.
A couple days ago I wrote about how eGov initatives have yet to save the time and money they've promised. Well, I just ran across this article that says the problem aren't the initiatives themselves, but rather that not enough people know about them to make them viable alternatives to traditional interaction methods. This is another one of those polls/reports that for sets out to prove an obvious idea - that the more people who know about something, the more people will use it. I usually think these polls are silly, until it was pointed out to me that until someone takes the time to do this kind of report, the only thing you have to make your case to managers is your opinion. With budgets getting slashed so harshly, a report like this can assure your project can get the marketing budget it'll need to make the project worthwhile.
Here is a direct link to the official GSA report.
In the UK eGovernment costs outstrip savings. Most of the deficeit is made up of the start-up costs of these initiatives, but savings wont catch up to costs until at least 2012, it is estimated. One of the big selling points for eGovernment is the potential cost benefits of reduced staffing, beuracracy, etc and if these benefits aren't visible for another decade, and I'm worried that legislators might cool on their support because eGovernment, and the Internet in particular, isn't just a fad, but a tool that will be a crucial element in the operation of every organization in the future. I'm sure it was quite expensive to have telephones and electricity installed in government facilities a hundred years ago, but it was unqestionably worth it and necessary. I hope people realize that when it come eGov.
An interesting article on the state of eGovernment in South Korea. Their $251 million project, which began last November, has since lost 2/3 of its traffic since debuting. The program relies heavily on public kiosks and severeal of those kiosks have already been shut down because of disuse.
I don't read Korean well enough (at all, really), to judge the Korean eGov site, but I hope that usability is the problem, rather than that this speaks about the potential of the use of kiosks to bridge the digital divide.
Whatever the cause of the failures, the current problems don't bode well for what was supposed to have been the world's first eGovernment.
Despite the former Soviet Union's adoption of a policy of openess (glasnost), the reality of that policy hasn't taken nearly the form most people would expected, or hoped for. This is especially true on the Internet, which is supposed to have a democratizing effect in regards to freedom of information.
Estimates place Internet access in Russia at only about 5% (compared to 70% here in the States). Well, Russia has now moved to the second phase in their eGov strategy and one of their big initiatives is to provide increased access. Electronic government in Russia has a long way to go, but there is also a much greater potential. The state of technology in that country hit a peek in the early 60s, and never increased much beyond that. The promise of eGovernment will the ability to quickly jump from the low technology levels to something more equivalent with the rest of the west (or even the far east).
Here is an interesting quote from the article about the current state of technology usage by government agencies to prove my point: "The city of Moscow loses $25 million per year in pensions that are paid out to the deceased because it takes up to six months for death certificates to arrive at the necessary organizations." Cross-agency electronic access to these documents would be an enormous boon to the Russian government.