Government Technology - December 2007 - (Page 66)

signal: noise BY PAU L W. TAYLOR CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER CENTER FOR DIGITAL GOVERNMENT index Jurisdictions/Agencies: j An Inscrutable Hunch ith Al Gore’s climate change trifecta — the Nobel Peace Prize, an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth and the Live Earth concerts — 2007 may be best remembered as a tipping point in environmental consciousness, complete with attendant attention to the greening of IT and government’s own carbon footprint. It is an obvious choice and perhaps too easy by half for this page’s sometimes inscrutable choices for a year in review. Longtime readers will know that this retrospective is now a five-year-old tradition inspired by the old Saturday Night Live sketch about Father Guido Sarducci’s 5 Minute University, which promised to teach only those few things that will still matter five years after the fact. Here’s the rest of the 2007 list: W change the service delivery cost structure while catalyzing collaboration by blending the formerly discrete dot-gov, dot-com and dot-org domains. Response and Recovery: A Little Help From My Friends Since all emergencies are local, local governments have properly continued preparing for the next big thing without relying on the federal government as part of the initial response (while craftily shoehorning the things they want into any available federal funding source). But it’s worth noting, as I did in August, that Web 2.0 is proving its value in putting people with people in significant ways — and that some public agencies are determining how to contribute meaningfully in these communities that aren’t of their own making. Falling Down: The Infrastructure Dilemma Seventy-one thousand bridges aren’t the only public infrastructures in trouble. Heavy loads force the electrical grid to brown and black, and our beloved Internet is four decades old. Public investments commensurate with national priorities are past due — but there’s no latter-day Ike in sight. California 58 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 60 Department of Homeland Security 32 Federal Emergency Management Agency 10 Info-Tech Research Group 56 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 14 Motion Picture Association of America 16 Office of the Secretary of State, California 58 One Laptop Per Child 14 Recording Industry Association of America 16 Republic of Estonia 14, 32 San Jose, California 56 Southern Alliance of States 16 Texas Department of Information Resources 66 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 56 Zero Waste Alliance 56 Vendors: Acer 62 Alcatel-Lucent 8 CARIS 16 China Mobile 14 China Unicom 14 Dell 60, 64 Diebold Election Systems 58 EBay 16 ESRI 16 Glacier Computer 64 Google 16 Hart InterCivic 58 Intel 16, 60 Jeep 60 Linux 60 Macintosh 16 Motorolla 8 Mozilla Foundation 16 Nokia Siemens Networks 8 Northrop Grumman 60 Peoplesoft 16 Polycom 64 Sequoia Voting Systems 58 Sony 60 Sprint Nextel 8 Videx 64 Windows 16 MyPublicSpaceBook: A Two-Way Street in Service Delivery In five years, nobody will be talking or writing about Web 2.0. Not only will the version number have been eclipsed, but like everything “e”-related from an earlier time, the chatter stops when everybody is actually doing it. In the interim, John Miri of the It’s worth noting, as I did in August, that Web 2.0 is proving its value in putting people with people in significant ways. Texas Department of Information Resources reminds us that what makes “2” important isn’t the technology itself, but that it presumes two active parties to every transaction — promising to forever change the relationship between governments and citizens. SaaS and GaaS: Funny Names, Important Ideas These two sets of awkward initials for Software and Government as a Service also will go to the dustbin of history, however the underlying models of both promise to DEC_07 All this suggests that the hard slog of government modernization continues even as public revenue prospects are expected to tighten again as the decade ends. It portends another period characterized by disruption and the dark horse potential of transformation that such moments make possible. Perhaps Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov captured the zeitgeist of this time when asked whether he expected a breakthrough in the face of considerable obstacles. He quipped, “Breaks definitely. Through or down, I don’t know.” Advertisers Index CDW-G 34, 35 Gateway 2, 3 GTSI 45 HP 13, 48, 49, 68 Hyland 47 NIC 41 Red Hat 53 Sprint 15 SunGard 67 Symantec 55 TESSCO 7 Verizon Wireless 51 Xerox 43 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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