The administration's e-government program is a series of initiatives aimed at applying business-world solutions to leverage the $60 billion that 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 technology community 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 government performance. "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."
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 White House Office of Management and Budget.
"IT (information technology) 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."
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.
At the same time federal agencies were wasting money on redundant IT investments, they were spending million of dollars to put gigabytes of information on the Web without knowing what sister agencies were up to.
Not only did the old system waste money, it 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 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 national parks, historical landmarks and other points of interest.
- E-Payroll: Consolidates government payroll processing from 22 service providers to two, at 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.
Forman has vowed that the e-government reforms will move forward using agency budgets and money saved by the initiatives. Meanwhile, 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.
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 recent study by 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.
Quelle: Newhouse News Service (NNS)
