Government Technology - December 2008 - (Page 50)

signal: noise BY PAU L W. TAYLOR CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER CENTER FOR DIGITAL GOVERNMENT index Agencies/Jurisdictions: j Not That We’re Likely to Forget his year has given us trillions of reasons to remember it — because now it takes 13 zeros to count how much economic trouble we’re in. The national debt clock in Times Square ran out of digits in September 2008 when it reached $10 trillion. Operators initially removed the dollar sign to make room for a bigger number, and they’ll add a couple more digits so the tally can reach the hundreds of trillions of dollars. And so went 2008. As has become traditional on this page — with a wink and a nod to a classic Saturday Night Live sketch, Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University — here are the five things we’ll remember about 2008 in five years. 1. Getting over IT’s love affair with the general fund. In hard times, general fund budgets are easily oversubscribed by just state government’s big three functions — education, medication and incarceration. Studies updated in 2008 show only 28 states rely on the general fund as a main source for funding state IT programs. What were once characterized as under-the-radar, alternative funding schemes are now essential to the new public-sector IT funding mix. 2. Making green the new green. The confluence of sustainability sensibilities, energy savings and telework is netting real results: energy savings in Virginia of 32 percent, or an estimated $12 million a year, by refreshing 60,000 PCs with Energy Star-rated machines; projected savings of $1 million a year in Washington state by installing energy management software on its existing PC fleet; and a double-digit spike in server usage in New York through virtualization. Utah adopted a four-day workweek for public employees, which is made possible by a robust and proven suite of e-government T self-service offerings. The condensed work schedule saves trips and money while maintaining service delivery. 3. Putting the public back into public records. Last year, disgraced former congressman Mark Foley should’ve been an object lesson that e-mail and IMs are public records — read: disclosable. Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick learned the lesson in 2008, when 14,000 text messages made a liar of him. He resigned and agreed to a plea deal on obstruction of justice charges resulting from perjury accusations. As one legal observer succinctly put it, “‘Send now’ may go public later.” 4. Getting us out of the way. Human latency is the cold, clinical, science fictionsounding term that engineers use to describe what’s wrong with most business processes — the delays we cause through our apparent inattentiveness. More sophisticated machineto-machine Web services make human intervention unnecessary, and the presence feature of unified communications promises to track us down when we’re needed — on the device of our choice. 5. Confronting the point where mobility and utility computing meet. Speaking of devices, mobility means that smartphones are more than cameras, e-mail clients and music players. Mobility has its own top-level domain (.mobi) and is becoming mission critical, with mobile enterprise resource planning applications in the labs and coming soon to the streets. Imagine the possibilities. On the threshold of 2009, there’s at least the prospect that a viable and sustainable future is literally in the hands of the people government serves and figuratively in the cloud. Surely we can do something with that. Alabama 7 Arkansas Crime Information Center 44 Bellevue, Wash. 40 Boise, Idaho 40 California 10 Chicago 6 Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communications 7 Colorado 10 Indiana 10 Indiana Family and Social Services Administration 10 Michigan 10 Missouri 10, 46 Nashua, N.H 40 New York 10, 50 New York Civil Service Commission 7 Richmond, Va., Police Department 10 San Francisco 22 Santa Barbara County, Calif., Fire Department 40 Seattle 20 South Dakota 10 Tennessee 10 Texas 10 Utah 10, 50 Virginia 10, 50 Washington, D.C. 10 Vendors: Adapx 40 Cisco 22 ESRI 46 IBM 10 LeadsOnlabs 44 Microsoft 40 Advertisers Index AAE Systems, Inc. 32-33 ADT 21 Bearing Point 30-31 CA, Inc 45 Canon 52 CDWG 34-35 Diskeeper 51 IBM 2 NIC 38-39 Northrop Grumman 41 Sprint 28-29 Verizon Wireless 36-37 Chief Information Ofﬁcer Baltimore City government seeks a highly qualiÆ ed, self-motivated professional to Æ ll the position of Chief Information Ofﬁcer (CIO), a Cabinet-level appointed position reporting to the Mayor of Baltimore City. This position provides strategic and tactical planning, development, evaluation, and coordination of the information and technology systems for Baltimore City government to support the City's da y-to-day business operations as well as the City's emerging technology needs. The ideal candidate will have a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration or a related Æ eld, Master's de gree is desirable and a minimum of 5 years of senior management IT experience. TO APPLY submit resume to Ms. Moore at deptofpersonnel@baltimorecity.gov or 201 East Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202, TTY: 396-4930 TO VIEW A DETAILED JOB DESCRIPTION including full qualiÆ cations and residency requirements visit www.baltimorecity.gov/ government/personnel/descriptions/CIO-MOIT.pdf Baltimore City Government is an Equal Opportunity Employer DEC_08 http://www.baltimorecity.gov/government/personnel/descriptions/CIO-MOIT.pdf http://www.baltimorecity.gov/government/personnel/descriptions/CIO-MOIT.pdf http://www.baltimorecity.gov/government/personnel/descriptions/CIO-MOIT.pdf http://www.govtech.com

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

Government Technology - December 2008 Contents Point of View Four Questions for... On the Scene Big Picture Year in Review Who Controls Your Network? Paper Makes a Comeback Halting Meth Abuse Spectrum Up Close signal:noise Digital Communities Contents Becoming a Digital Community Rethinking 700 MHz Smart Grids: Powering the Future Gearing Up for Crime 2.0 Software Predicts Crime Local Portals on the Red Carpet More Than Just a Pretty Face

Government Technology - December 2008

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.