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.
The Washington Post looks back at one year of the E-Government Act. The federal eGov initiative has been reasonably successful, expecially considering that it has received roughly 1/10 of the funding proposed in the 2002 Act.
There is another (and actually much better) year in review available at FCW.
The Association for Federal Information Resources Management (AFFIRM) has recently released the report from their annual survey of the senior federal Information Technology (IT) managers to determine the most critical challenges facing federal Chief Information Officers (CIO).
The survey found the top challenges, which have not changed since last year, include:
The most vital tecnologies / uses were:
Most interesting to me was that less than federal IT mangers felt only 21% of intitiatives would successfully initiated in 2004. (Another 76% responded intiatiives would be "somewhat" successful). This doesn't seem to bode well for the President that their isn't a great deal of confidence in his eGov Agenda. Still, these confidence numbers have increased significantly each year, so there is a liklihood those with negative projections will be change their opinions once the plans are in place and working.
As gift giving season is upon us, it seems the perfect time for the Fed to releaseRecalls.gov, a portal for information on recalled consumer items, motor vehicles, recreational boats, food, medicines, cosmetics and pesticides.
As I was reading about this, I had one of those Tim Berners-Lee moments, imagining setting up a user agent to check my credit card purchasing history against the Recalls website, and then sending any matching items directly as a text message to my cell phone. But thats the future.
For now the site, which is a coalition between the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Coast Guard, Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, Food Safety Inspection Service and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, has a partnership with over 20 retailers, trade groups, and consumer advocate groups to help promote awareness of the resource.
Some "entertaining" facts facts about Thanksgiving, from the fun folks at the U.S. Census Bureau.
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.
A couple articles (both via beSpacific) on the move to e-filing of documents by the U.S. government. The first article deals with e-filing of documents within in the judicial system. No specifics, but does track progression of these initiatives from its current nascent state (merely scanning paper documents by the courts), to the full realization of document submittal in XML.
I tried to play around with several of the courts they mention, but they all required an official login.
The second link has to do with the e-filing at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. They've begun filing electronic versions of documents on June 30 using a system they call Image File Wrapper (IFW), which seems to boil down to merely scanning existing applications. The eventual goal is to create an "end-to-end" patent application process by October, 2004. The initial iniative will require 100 terabytes of data storage.
If you haven't heard, the US Federal Trade Commission has recently set up a national Do Not Call registry. Registering with the DNC list will stop as much as 80% of telemarketing calls to your home. Telemarketers get the list from the FTC, and if they are found to be calling numbers on the list, they are subject to fines. Great idea, and something that has existed in various forms (especially at the state level) for several years.
This registry, which took me less than a minute to file (and only another couple seconds to respond to the email they send me), is part of the low level functionality that is essential to the success of eGovernment as a whole. This is the kind of thing that can spark public interest in the use of the internet to simplify their interactions with government. Sort of like a gateway drug for eGov. I don't know the exact numbers, but I've heard the site was swamped during its first several days, so it looks like the marketing was successful. Hopefully that translates into continued and varied usage by those hitting the DNC site during the first several days.
If you are a government CIO and you don't happen to check your inbox very often, here is the memo from eGov Czar Mark Foreman specifying procedures to collect part of the $5 million federal budget allocated to eGov this fiscal year.
Assessment of Electronic Government Information Products
This report was put together in early 1999, so is a little dated, but it is still an interesting look at the initital efforts towards providing digital access to documents in the Federal Depository Library Program. At the time, the study found that: there was no unified standards across government agencies, little thought had been given to permanent access to the digital materials, there are authenticity issues (census data provided by GPO Access rather than the Census Dept. website), no central web authority - even within individual agencies.
It seems like most of those concerns have since been solved (or at least addressed to some degree), but I wasn't able to find a follow-up report.