Government Technology - January 2009 - (Page 33)

Do As I Say, Not As I Do Ironically Barack Obama may not be able to take advantage of the technology infrastructure that he proposes for America. There are special security concerns about the president’s business communications and personal messages that are sent electronically. Obama loves his BlackBerry, but security experts say he’ll have to give it up because it could be compromised by malicious hackers. Reportedly Obama wants a laptop in the Oval Ofﬁce, but it remains to be seen if he’ll be allowed to connect to the Internet from there. President George W. Bush stopped e-mailing and using a computer when he took ofﬁce in 2001. In a 2008 interview with Politico and Yahoo, Bush admitted he was looking forward to sending e-mails to his buddies when he leaves ofﬁce, much like he did when he was the governor of Texas. selves? I don’t know if there will be federal money provided for that purpose.” Instead of working on broadband rollouts, Dankowski predicts Obama will first try to use technology to help right the nation’s fiscal ship. “I think there will be a great many new relationships and new processes formed around fixing the economy, more collaboration than ever between the financial industry and the government financial regulators,” he said. “There were potentially a lot of indicators that we were headed for this [financial disaster], but the information was stovepiped in a lot of places. The aggregate could have given us some warning, but we didn’t have that. I think there will be a lot of IT efforts around carefully aggregating information to give the leadership of this country a dashboard as to what all this aggregate data means. That sounds like a transformation opportunity in the IT space.” Working now as a principal with IT consulting firm Customer Value Partners, Dankowksi spent almost 25 years working in the White House, including a stint as President Bill Clinton’s special assistant, overseeing IT projects and Y2K preparation. Dankowski said he thinks Obama might run into a situation where he’s overpromised and may be forced to under-deliver. One of the first roadblocks Obama may discover is a surprising lack of basic technology and connectivity. “Looking at how tech-savvy the campaign was, there’s going to be a natural expectation … that infrastructures need to be in place, that IT should work, and I think [the Obama administration] may be in for some unexpected findings when they see there’s not quite enough infrastructure, at least not quite as much as is needed,” Dankowski said. Obama has championed reforming the Universal Service Fund to expand broadband to rural areas. This move underpins almost every other technology initiative he’s proposed, from more transparent government to reinvigorating student interest in math and science. But Dankowski said he isn’t sure that will be immediately feasible given the economic situation. “It’s a matter of funding,” he said. “Do [municipalities] have the resources them- Recalibrating Priorities John Skowron, a federal and state consultant at Deloitte, said he sees Obama’s broadband initiative as part of a larger infrastructure improvement project, a la President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Only this time, the government will hire as many people to lay fiber as pour concrete. “I think [building out rural broadband] is going to be very important to this administration,” Skowron said. “There’s a general consensus that there will be more infrastructure PHOTO COURTESY OF OBAMA FOR AMERICA spending. In the technology age, it may look different than the FDR infrastructure spending of solely bridges and highways. You could start to see spending within infrastructure from an IT perspective — next-generation networks, expanding broadband, looking at cyber-security,” Skowron explained. “I think technology is going to play a vital role in federal government, and that will certainly trickle down and permeate in the state and local space.” Financial woes aside, even ardent Bush supporters would probably agree his administration hasn’t been terribly forthcoming. Obama seized on that during his campaign and promised, as part of his infrastructure plans, a new era of government openness that, much like expanding broadband, will help the rest of his technology plans move from campaign crowd-pleasers to reality. “One of the things Obama had said was he wanted to create a chief performance officer and a performance team,” said Anthony McKinney, public security director at SAP. “With the way we see decreasing resources, because he is IT savvy, he can help by leveraging all the technology initiatives and making sure that when they get implemented in the states, the states get rewarded from that performance-management perspective.” MyBarack, MyState, MyLocal One core strength of Obama’s presidential campaign was its expansion and innovative use of Web 2.0 tools for fundraising, energiz-

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - January 2009

Government Technology - January 2009 Contents Point of View On the Scene Big Picture Four Questions for... Stemming the Retirement Tide Getting the Picture Fact of Matter Money Trail Rays the Roof Trick or Tweet? The Modern Way to Vote Products signal:noise

Government Technology - January 2009

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.