Government Technology - March 2008 - (Page DC30)

Viewpoint BY TODD SANDER | DIRECTOR, DIGITAL COMMUNITIES INITIATIVE DEPUTY DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR DIGITAL GOVERNMENT The 2008 Agenda Organizing like-minded people who care. o you know what you’re doing? Of course you do … right? That certainly must be the presumption anyway after the scrutiny and sometimes convoluted hiring procedures most public ofﬁcials endure. It’s a question that I, too, have received from a few of you since I became director of our Digital Communities program. I know where it’s coming from. It comes from the pressure many of you feel to deliver obvious and tangible results that justify the signiﬁcant investments your jurisdictions are making in IT applications and infrastructure. So why are we putting a special focus on digital communities? After all, doesn’t a digital community simply seek to provide wireless Internet for everyone? Who has time to think about something so seemingly esoteric when the pressure is on to support the dayto-day business of government? Public safety communication systems must be improved and made more interoperable. Financial systems must be updated to provide better, more useful data. Through changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the courts brought new focus and urgency to the challenges of data management and digital public records retention and production. Everyone wants his or her organization to be more “green,” but the ﬁ nancial situation in many jurisdictions means the green needed to make the investment is harder to come by. Well, 2008 is off and running, and now is exactly the time to think about D what it means to be a digital community. In fact, if you aren’t thinking about it, you’re falling behind. CIOs from some of the country’s largest jurisdictions convened with us during a December snowstorm in Chicago to discuss that very topic. It’s no surprise that the substance of their interaction is reﬂected in the polling and survey data collected by many publications and associations (ours and others) that seek to identify the CIO agenda for 2008. And while wireless infrastructure is an important digital community component for many, there’s certainly much more to it than that. Based on what most of you are saying, the 2008 CIO agenda seeks to enable 30 DIGITAL COMMUNITIES MARCH 08

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - March 2008

Government Technology - March 2008 Contents Point of View Big Picture The Last Mile On the Scene Four Questions for... Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers Let's [Not] Get Physical No Data Left Behind Conservation King Community Drug Test Reinventing the System Better Late Than Never Closing the Deal Spectrum Products Personal Computing signal:noise Digital Communities The Expanding Focus of Digital Communities The Digital Imperative Hot Fusion Redefining Municipal Wireless Made in the USA Bridge Detectives The 2008 Agenda

Government Technology - March 2008

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