Government Technology - December 2007 - (Page 26)

20 YEARS IN REVIEW 999 State and local consolidation efforts signal the end of the big iron days DEC_07 j j 26 ‘HOW DO WE BEGIN TO USE THE INTERNET?’ NC@Your Service leads a new wave of government portals. By 2000, government Web sites were moving beyond mere collections of static information. That year, North Carolina’s innovative NC@Your Service led the emergence of a new breed of Internet sites known as portals. These sites — now commonplace in states and localities — revolutionized electronic government by presenting comprehensive information in a single location and allowing users to tailor that data to their needs. NC@Your Service was among the most ambitious of these new sites. State officials worked with Accenture — then known as Anderson Consulting — and Yahoo to apply the Internet firm’s My Yahoo personalization interface to government information. As a result, citizens could customize the state portal to show only information they wanted to see. “It was the first deal, interestingly, that Yahoo had ever done with a public entity,” said former North Carolina CIO Rick Webb, now an Accenture executive. NC@Your Service, which finished first in the Center for Digital Government’s annual Best of the Web awards for 2000, was driven by Gov. Jim Hunt’s desire to “dotcom” North Carolina, according to Webb. “He was very much caught up in how we really begin to use the Internet — not only for information, but to sell industry and jobs,” said Webb. “It was all about how you make North Carolina more attractive.” STEVE TOWNS, EDITOR ONE GROWING CONCERN for state and local government was that as new technology kept hitting the shelves, people began to wonder what to do with their aging “big iron” systems — those antique legacy systems that still ran many of government’s mission-critical applications. The problem then, as it often is today, is that switching out hardware was costlier than many budgets would allow. This left many CIOs with little choice but to maintain existing systems. Of course, necessity being the mother of invention, new database management tools, middleware and integration software began to fill the gap — enterprise resource planning (ERP) software in particular. The late ’90s became a battle for dominance of the ERP market, with giants PeopleSoft and SAP facing off. Many smaller (though not small) ERP vendors entered the fray as well, including Oracle, SSA and Lawson. Today, of course, ERP and customer relationship management (CRM) remain huge business, as there are countless agencies that still rely on siloed, obsolete infrastructure. 802.11b Wi-Fi standard boosts bandwidth to 11 Mbps AMD releases Athlon processor Pyra Labs launches Blogger.com, which helps popularize the blogging technique 2000 Intel launches Pentium III processor PayPal electronic payment service appears ASPs gain popularity Heavy metal band Metallica sues Napster file sharing service 2001 Monster.com debuts Seven states offer Webbased tax filing Y2K. Was it global disaster averted or a harum-scarum flap over nothing? We’ll probably never know for sure. But by 2000, the widespread fear of planetary computer meltdowns vanished, leaving us to wonder if IT wasted its time or really did save the world. Check back in 7,993 years. Love Bug computer virus cripples numerous organizations Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Google, believing search engines should produce results more relevant than simple keyword matching. Multiple patents, acquisitions and billions of dollars later, Google is one of the most recognized companies on Earth. In fact, the word Google has come to mean “search the Internet.” http://Monster.com http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - December 2007

Government Technology - December 2007 Contents Point of View Big Picture Profile The Last Mile GT Spectrum Well...How Did We Get Here? Dark Spaces A Paler Shade of Green? Decertification Dilemma Game On Two Cents Products Signal:Noise

Government Technology - December 2007

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