But just over a year later, the administration has surprised many tech watchers with a series of successful steps toward realizing its vision of an e-government that will save taxpayer money while providing the online public with easy access to government information and savings. The administration's e-government program is a series of initiatives aimed at applying business- world solutions to leverage the $60 billion the federal government spends each year on information technology. Ultimately, e-government will allow online Americans to pay taxes, apply for federal benefits, participate in the regulatory process, take advantage of resources for small businesses, and access information on every government department, agency and program.
Though much remains to be done, the IT world has been impressed thus far.
"The big change that you see is that these initiatives are focusing on simplifying the face of government," said Dave McClure, vice president for e-government at the Council for Excellence in Government, a nonpartisan group that works to improve the performance of government.
"They are consolidating systems and processes, eliminating redundancy and overlap. You can see real progress in the Web sites. There is still a lot of re-engineering that needs to be done across the government, but they are making progress," he said.
That new public face is obvious starting at FirstGov.gov, the ever- evolving main portal to the federal government's 22,000-plus Web sites.
Behind the scenes, changes also are being made in the way the government invests in technology. No longer are spending decisions made agency by agency without broader oversight.
"The solutions are pretty simple: to end duplicate spending, stop redundant purchases and do shared solutions to consolidate operations," said Jonathan Breul, a fellow with the IBM Endowment for the Business of Government and a 20-year veteran of the Office of Management and Budget.
"IT budget requests were approved for years without looking beyond each agency's immediate plans. It's only within the last three years that OMB has required a serious business case to justify that expenditure," Breul said.
Mark Forman, the administration's e-gov czar at the OMB, told Congress recently that when OMB began looking at IT spending governmentwide, it found "redundant IT investments made for the same purpose and supporting the same lines of business across multiple agencies."
"The federal government was purchasing excess infrastructure capacity, such as telecommunications, office automation and mainframe computers," he said. With a goal of saving $1 billion per year, the OMB now requires that every federal IT funding request be delivered with a business case analysis to justify the expenditure.
The goal is for agencies to build new enterprise architectures -- frameworks that integrate IT with agencies' overall missions. Proposals that simply lay new technologies on top of existing outdated processes -- "paving cowpaths" as it is called -- will be rejected.
At the same time federal agencies were wasting money on redundant IT investments, they were also spending million of dollars to put gigabites of information on the Web without knowing what their sister agencies were up to.
Not only did the old system waste money, it also failed to serve the public. Take, for example, the case of a 35-year-old father of two, who earns a limited income working on a farm. Two years ago, he could have searched dozens of Web sites looking for help from the federal government.
Today, by going to GovBenefit.gov, that same farmhand could answer a series of questions and be guided to 60 government programs that could help, including farm operating loans from the Department of Agriculture, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program from the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Self Help Homeownership Opportunity Program from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Since the initiative got under way in 1991, similar strides have been made in upgrading other online resources. Among them:
- Regulations.gov: Allows citizens and small businesses to provide input on federal government rulemaking.
- DisasterHelp.gov: Provides disaster management information, planning and response tools to federal, state and local disaster emergency managers. In seven months, 7,000 accounts have been established and information has been offered in 29 actual emergencies.
- GoLearn.gov: A year old, this site has had more than 36 million hits for its e-training courses, e- books and career development resources. More than 50,000 federal employees have received training at the site.
- Recreation.gov: Visitors can click a state on the U.S. map to find out about recreational resources such as national parks, historical landmarks and other points of interest.
- E-Payroll: Consolidates government payroll processing from 22 service providers to two providers at a savings of $1.2 billion over 10 years.
Congress, demanding that funding for e-government initiatives come from existing agency budgets, appropriated $5 million this year and is likely to offer a similar amount next year.
"I don't understand why Congress did that," said Eleanor Larsen, a research fellow at the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
"The point of this is to help the government work more efficiently with citizens and businesses and, hopefully, to recognize significant savings. You have to spend a buck to save a buck," she said.
Despite the lack of funds, Forman has vowed that the e-government reforms will move forward using agency budgets and cost savings realized by the initiatives.
"Congress ... made clear that we should fund the e-gov initiatives through consolidating redundancies rather than asking for more funding," Forman said during an online discussion sponsored recently by the Washington Post.
This might not be all bad. The META Group, an IT research and strategic consulting firm, said in a report earlier this year that the lack of funding could force federal agencies to forge new cost-sharing alliances.
"Cross-agency funding scenarios can provide fiscal and resource efficiency," the report said.
The attention to government IT investments comes as Americans are turning more often to the Internet in seeking information and interaction with the federal government as well as with state and local governments.
A new study from the Council for Excellence in Government found that more than 60 percent of American Internet users are interested in using e-government resources to perform tasks ranging from renewing driver's licenses to paying taxes.
That same study found that 74 percent of Americans who had accessed government Web sites expect the benefits of e-government to grow in the coming years.
"I've been impressed that they actually took on this wide scope of initiatives," said Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy and Technology. Though Schwartz' group remains concerned about the privacy aspects of all this, it is nonetheless supportive of most aspects of the federal IT overhaul.
"It's something that needed to be done. It's about time, really," he said.
Quelle: The Star Ledger
