The market research firm said "state and local e-government growth will be moderate over the next two years as governments exhaust opportunities to further broaden website operations and engage consulting and research efforts to develop comprehensive plans for the next phase of e-government." By 2006, growth will pick up more, the report found. "As governments complete plans and begin widespread integration and process improvement across agencies, services will increasingly be tied to new more fully interactive portals that will be automated for citizens," James Krouse, Input's manager of state and local market analysis, said in a statement.
The second phase of e-government market development "will be led with exploratory research initiatives that outline agency-by-agency process reviews, and develop comprehensive plans for integration and system consolidation. As governments complete plans and begin widespread integration and process improvement across agencies, services will increasingly be tied to new more fully interactive portals that will be automated for citizens," Krouse said.
Washington Technology noted that Input's finding that "[s]tate and local e-government spending peaked in fiscal 2002 at $700 million and then declined about 60 percent over the next year. Spending dropped another 50 percent by 2004, Input's analysis said. The decline was driven by state and local budget shortfalls and disillusionment in the effectiveness of e-gov services, according to the report."
InformationWeek had a slightly different take on the Input numbers: "State and local government spending on E-government topped out at $650 million in 2002, but plummeted nearly 81% to $125 million this year as governments struggled to pay for all types of services as tax receipts and other revenue plunged. But with the economic recovery, spending on E-government projects will slowly bounce back over the next two years, to $150 million in 2005 and $175 million in 2006. Then, spending will quickly accelerate to $300 million in 2007 and $575 million in 2008."
Washington Technology said despite the expected spending uptick, there are potential pitfalls for e-government funding: "Obstacles facing state and local governments in the next phase of e-government development still include budget constraints, the report said. Other obstacles include difficulty producing measurable returns on investment and disagreements where agencies must integrate operations."
An Eye On State and Local E-Gov Work
Detroit Free Press columnist Mike Wendland this week reported on one Michigan county's broad e-government efforts: "[T]ech experts say Oakland County is breaking away from the pack to become one of the nation's most progressive purveyors of digital democracy. In the county, residents can go online to buy park permits, file complaints, pay traffic tickets, order birth certificates and pay current property tax bills – and that's just for starters. Soon, for instance, county courts will be able to hold arraignments entirely online, with prisoners, investigators and lawyers hooked up on high-speed video connections."
According to Wendland, Oakland County has invested more than $100 million so far in the effort. "Officials say it's beginning to pay off big-time, making government workers more efficient and letting citizens go online instead of standing in line. 'Oakland is one of a half-dozen or so places in the country that is considered a leader in e-government,' said Terri Takai, director of the state Department of Information Technology. 'They're really pioneers in this.'"
Fairfax County, Va., located just outside Washington, may not be as savvy as Oakland County with its e-government approach, but county leaders are catching on, particularly with dumping paper for electronic communications, The Washington Post reported last week. "The county may be the region's epicenter of high technology, but its government lags in one pervasive way that it does business: It's awash in paper. The burdens of an excess of paper became clear to Supervisor Linda Q. Smyth (D-Providence) as soon as she took office in January. She says she was inundated with faxes, electronic messages and mail (the post office-routed kind). Land-use lawyers, fellow supervisors, civic groups, the county clerk, even telemarketers were writing. But the same correspondence was arriving on her desk three times, once through each medium. The Board of Supervisors meeting agenda, for example, can run hundreds of pages.
Fairfax County's answer is the Paper Reduction Task Force – a "group of experts from departments as varied as public affairs, archives and information technology that has been meeting to map out change. The goal? To fully usher in the electronic age in Fairfax. ... Other changes are in the works: more printing and copying on both sides of the page instead of one, more correspondence and other county business through e-mail, and more production of big documents on CD-ROM, such as the publication of the Park Authority's recent annual report."
Still Accountable at the Federal Level
Federal e-government spending may be on the back-burner, but agencies are still being held accountable for meeting aggressive e-gov goals.
A report released in March detailed the federal government's progress on e-government initiatives from fiscal year 2003. And the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees e-government reform, recently noted that several federal agencies were making e-government progress.
But clearly, there is major room for improvement. In the latest government scorecard rating, released in June, the performance of agencies in different management areas, the Transportation Department, Environmental Protection Agency and the Small Business Administration all received "green" scores, the highest rating on the OMB's scale for grading e-government work. So too did the Office of Personnel Management and the National Science Foundation, which maintained green ratings they achieved in the previous scorecard.
"One major disappointment is the Department for Homeland Security. It is failing in several areas of the management agenda, and appears to be moving backwards on e-government with its rating dropping from yellow to red. Embarrassingly the OMB itself also failed to improve its ratings, receiving four red scores and a yellow across the management agenda," according to a report from Kablenet.com, reprinted on ZDNET's UK site.
Washington Technology also reported last week on the scorecard's findings. See a Government IT Review I wrote in May on the previous scorecard results.
E-Government Victories
Agencies aren't shy about showing off their e-government progress. On Wednesday, OPM said its USAJOBS Web site had added new features. "With the latest enhancements, job seekers are now receiving expanded information in their job search notices including salary and closing date. This enhanced content gives job seekers more decision making data right in their e-mail," OPM said. For the month of May, OPM said it sent more than 3 million USAJOBS e-mail notices to people. That's a good sign it's a service that is getting used. Meanwhile, in May the SBA started a new Web site that businesses can use to obtain federal government information.
Fancy online tools and sites are not only helpful, but help federal agency sites get good reviews. "Americans are reasonably happy with e-government Web sites, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which gave them an overall score of 70.3 for the second quarter," CMP Media's Transform Magazine reported. E-gov sites bested the NYTimes.com's score of 70, yet not surprisingly fell below the top scores of e-retail sites (84) and travel sites (77). The rankings are based on online surveys voluntarily filled out by site visitors on criteria such as accuracy of information, freshness of content, usefulness of information, ability to accomplish desired tasks and ease of navigation."
Favorite Government Web Sites
Is there a government Web site that you find particularly helpful? Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein! telling me why and I will include selected reader comments in an upcoming column. Please include your full name and the city and state you are writing from.
E-Gov's Global Reach
The e-government push is not just an American phenomenon. Thom C. de Graaf, the Dutch Minister for Government Reform and Kingdom Relations and deputy prime minister, posted his e-government plans on a government Web site, according to the EurActiv.com European news portal. De Graaf concluded that "relatively few transactions are being conducted digitally as yet" and "now is the time for local authorities to make the leap from digital information services to digital transaction services. In order to be able to do this they have to establish a link between the electronic front office and back office."
The United Kingdom has been particularly bullish with its e-government efforts. But a recent survey indicates that taxpayers might not notice all the hard work. "Nearly three quarters of the public have not noticed the impact of the investment in the UK's e-Government initiative, while almost half of those who have noticed are unhappy with it, a new report concludes. The survey, undertaken by eService software provider Transversal, has revealed that the majority of UK citizens have a poor perception of e-Government," the Netimperative site reported.
The European Commission has a Web portal that links to information about a number of EU e-government initiatives.
Digital Rx
Back in the USA, there's a federal push for patient health care records to be digitized. Earlier this summer, President Bush announced that he wants paper records to go by the wayside in 10 years. Yesterday, more details of the president's plan were released. "The plan, while short on specifics, marks the biggest effort by the federal government so far to encourage the use of computer technology to modernize health care, just as other industries have turned to technology to cut costs and improve quality," USA Today reported. "More than 90% of the nation's health care transactions still occur via phone, fax or an exchange of paper. Technology could cut the nation's $1.6 trillion-a-year health care bill by at least 10%, says Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson. He added that it might not take 10 years to meet Bush's goal: 'In the next couple of years, we will see electronic health records.'"
Reuters cited an HHS statistic showing that only "13 percent of hospitals and 14 to 28 percent of physicians' practices say they have electronic health systems."
According to The New York Times, "[c]ost has been a big hurdle. Most hospitals do not make money, so they forgo technology investments that seem to have an uncertain return. And until recently, bedside technology has often been expensive and cumbersome. The spread of light, low-cost hand-held computers has changed that – making it much more practical for the government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to promote standards for ordering and processing electronic prescriptions."
Federal Computer Week reported this week that a federally funded program in California, Arkansas, Massachusetts and Utah is trying to help doctor's officers move patient records to the digital age.
RIP CAPPS II
The federal government's controversial CAPPS II airline passenger screening program was put on ice last week, with the Bush administration acknowledging the program would have to be retooled before it would be ready to fly. The news was heralded by privacy advocates, who blasted the program for prying too much into passenger data to attempt to spot potential terrorists. (Read my Filter column last week for a rundown of media reports on the program's demise in its current state.)
The Associated Press reported this week that "[t]echnology problems and privacy concerns doomed the passenger prescreening program, while the enormous cost – an estimated $5 billion – has held up progress installing large bomb-screening machines in airports. Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House aviation subcommittee, worries that the political pressure needed for such initiatives is waning. 'The further away you get from 9/11, the louder the voices become for a normal approach to security,' said Mica." Officials at the Transportation Security Administration said in January that the prescreening project – called Computer-Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System, or CAPPS II – could be up and running this summer. But the agency never was able to allay concerns about privacy, and last week acting TSA Administrator David Stone said CAPPS II would be 'reshaped and repackaged.'"
Wired News posted a feature article looking at former Army spy Bill Scannell's efforts to discredit CAPPS through a Web site he set up called BoycottDelta.org – a site he set up after news leaked that Delta was among several airlines that turned over passenger data to the government so it could test CAPPS II technology. "He created the firestorm," Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Wired. "Beginning with Boycott Delta, he sort of showed that there was a huge reservoir of bad feelings about these passenger-screening programs."
With the cancellation of CAPPS II, the big loser may be Lockheed Martin Corp., which has landed a $12 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security to help with the screening program. According to a report from Federal Computer Week, "Suzanne Luber, a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department 'declined to speculate whether the $12 million CAPPS II contract to Lockheed Martin Corp. would be revised. There is no projected timeline for the completion of the revamped program, Luber said."
The Nine Lives of E-Voting
E-voting reformers are starting to see some payoff from their efforts to get high-tech voting machines to produce paper receipts for every vote. Advanced Voting Solutions Inc. of Frisco, Tex., "has agreed to load election security technology from VoteHere Inc. on some of its machines to test the encrypted vote verification system in the fall election. The Bellevue, Wash., company has developed software that produces an encrypted receipt that could let voters verify that their ballots were accurately counted," Government Computer News reported this week.
CNET's News.com explained more: "The companies will team to integrate the technology into AVS's WINvote touch-screen voting terminal and will test the device during the November election. Rather than allow for a centralized re-count, the system gives voters the ability to check their vote online by matching a coded number on a receipt with the same number in a database."
Back in Washington this week, a House panel "struggled with the questions of how to set standards for acceptable error rates in voting technology and how to achieve those standards. Government officials, computer scientists and technology vendors agreed that it is too late for legislation or technology to have much of an impact on the 2004 election," Washington Technology reported.
In other e-voting news, Ohio is the latest state to hand down strict e-voting guidelines. "Three counties that were considering electronic voting machines made by Ohio-based Diebold Inc. cannot switch by November because tests have shown security problems, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell said Friday," the AP reported.
IRS Security Slip
More taxpayers than ever flocked to the Internal Revenue Service's Web site this past tax season to file their taxes electronically. But now the agency is getting blasted over security gaffes. "Private contractors revamping IRS computers committed security violations that significantly increased the possibility that private taxpayer information might be disclosed, Treasury Department inspectors say. An investigation by the department's inspector general for tax administration found that employees working for contractors, or an experienced hacker, could use the contractors' computers to gain access to taxpayer data," The Associated Press reported.
Federal Computer Week had more details: "The report, with the contractors' names and other sensitive data removed, revealed that root access privileges had been granted unnecessarily to about 50 contractor personnel. Root access permits users to make changes to computer systems without detection. Other contractor employees had violated IRS security procedures by installing e-mail and instant-messaging software on IRS computers. In some cases, the report says, contractors blatantly circumvented IRS policies and procedures, even when IRS security personnel pointed out the inappropriate practices. The IRS has more than 900 contracts with private contractors and consultants who perform many tax administration activities."
In other IRS news, the agency is touting its new taxpayer database program capable of processing 1040EZ forms for the first time, Government Computer News reported. "For the first time in 40 years, the IRS is processing returns and issuing refunds on a new computer system," said IRS Commissioner Mark Everson, according to GCN. "While long overdue, this is an important first step in modernizing our return processing technologies."
A Welcome Win for EDS
EDS's performance on the massive Navy-Marine Corps Intranet project has been in the spotlight over the past year, as the program incurs cost-overruns and complaints from some quarters about the system's performance (See my June 24 Government IT Review for more background.) But the company has received a welcome contracting win: EDS stands to reap some $93 million over the next decade by offering employee travel services to the Agriculture Department, Washington Technology reported. "The Agriculture contract is the first under the E-Travel vehicle for EDS. According to EDS officials, the department is the largest agency to make an E-Travel award to date. EDS's e-travel system, called FedTraveler.com, handles planning and authorizing of travel, reservation and fulfillment services, approval of travel expenses, and reporting and auditing of travel expenses," the article said.
EDS is scheduled to report its second-quarter earnings next Wednesday.
Autor: Cynthia L. Webb
Quelle: Washington Post, 22.07.2004
