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Main introduction page THE GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE PROJECT
Introduction: 50-State Average Grade: B-
The most dramatic impact was that a number of chief information officers got loads of money for new equipment. Technology budgets swelled in order to replace finance and human resource IT systems that had been deemed likely to self-destruct at the turn of 2000, perhaps forcing employees to miss paychecks. “The best thing that ever happened to me was Y2K...” says Don Heiman, Kansas’ CIO. “I had this big infusion of dollars. I was finally empowered with a lot of dough.” Over the past few years, Kansas has spent in the neighborhood of $400 million to flush away old technology.
But in Kansas, as in many other states, the big bucks spent on new systems will not be the most important impact of Y2K. More significant in the long run will be the fact that it pushed states, harder than any consultant’s report ever could, to think of technology management as an entity-wide issue.
This is critical. Statewide compatibility and integration of both software and hardware are keys to IT success. And that requires good strategic planning, as well as an emphasis on standardization of procurements. Two years ago, Kansas had no formal written standards governing the kind of technology its agencies could purchase. Now it has an enterprise-wide IT architecture for all three branches of government (still a relative rarity in a world in which courts and legislative offices sometimes resist the idea that they live in the same state as the executive branch).
Efforts to standardize have been accelerating in most places for a few years now. But more recently, emphasis has expanded to include central controls over project management. Far more states now require agencies to develop cost-benefit justifications for new projects than were doing so just a year ago.
The next step, of course, is for more of them to check back with the agencies after the projects are completed to make sure the promised benefits were actually delivered. Pennsylvania is a leader here. In that state, according to one official, agencies are required “to demonstrate the expected savings, reduction in personnel, improved performance, etc. promised in their initial project proposal.” What if they don’t deliver? “You don’t receive money in subsequent years’ requests,” he explains. That’s the kind of hangman’s noose that really gets an agency’s attention.
Then there’s the accelerating trend toward central tracking of the actual implementation of new technology. Ohio, for example, never did anything like this. Then, when Y2K appeared on the horizon, the state developed something called the Y2K Competency Center, to make certain that all its agencies were moving ahead on plans to avert breakdowns. Post-Y2K, the state didn’t shut the doors on the new center. The name just changed to the “Enterprise Project Management Office.”
“Obviously, we found major benefits in having an entity oversee projects, which we hadn’t done,” says Ohio CIO Gregory Jackson. “We wanted to continue that concept; we wanted to establish statewide project-management standards. The selling point to agencies is that we provide tools and training for them. The other side of the coin is we’re going to be watching over your back.”
Many other states are heading in the same direction. “We ended up tracking every single project going on in state government for Y2K,” says Dick Hinckley, Maine’s director of information service. “For everything — no matter what size.” With that in place, Maine is now hard at work centralizing its project management for future efforts.
This is great news. Virtually every CIO can tell stories of IT projects that went overtime or over budget for lack of effective central oversight. Few examples make the point more clearly than an effort in Massachusetts to create an integrated case-management system for the state’s district attorneys. Turned out that trying to get 12 separately elected DAs all to subscribe to the same plan was like trying to get 12 clocks to strike midnight at precisely the same moment. The project ultimately foundered and was brought to a halt. About $1.5 million was wasted. Right now, the state has 10 DAs on one system and two on another.
The move to entity-wide IT management across the country couldn’t have come at a more propitious moment. The Internet, by its nature, breaks down artificial walls, and states are taking advantage of that capacity to bring agencies together into one compatible whole.
In the past, visitors to many state Web sites were like turn-of-the-century New Yorkers who went to one store for fish, another for meat and another for bread. Worse yet, given the often bizarre way that government services are divided across agency lines, it could be a daunting task to figure out which agency was responsible for which activity — in effect, you might have to go looking in the back shelves of the fish market to find a jar of pickles.
That’s being replaced, from coast to coast, with so-called portals. This is the supermarket model, in which vast quantities of information and services are all available in one well-lit place, with well-marked electronic aisles.
Pam Ahrens, director of Idaho’s Department of Administration, puts it succinctly: “The portal concept assists citizens in translating the maze of government, and makes it easier for citizens and others to link specifically to services or information they are seeking.”
Among the many states that have developed some form of portal are Idaho, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Virginia, and Utah. New York is entering the field this month. And a gallery of others is heading in that direction.
An argument can even be advanced that the thought process required to develop these portals — and to arrange state services in an intuitively sensible fashion — will have a positive ripple effect. It may just drive states toward the kind of managing for results that focuses on actual service to citizens, regardless of agency fiefdoms.
Clearly, as more states make electronic commerce one of their prime goals, ease of Internet use becomes essential. Two years ago, there were only a handful of genuine online transactions provided by the states. You could renew a hunting license that way in a few places, but not too much else.
Now it’s just a handful of states that don’t have some Internet transactions available online. In Alaska, for example, citizens can go to the state’s homepages and renew driver’s licenses, apply for jobs, purchase fishing and hunting permits, estimate child support payments, make reservations on state ferries, file campaign spending and contribution reports, even apply for annual dividends from the Alaska permanent fund. “It is viewed as critical to the efficient operation of our state government,” says Fran Ulmer, Alaska’s lieutenant governor.
In Missouri, says former CIO Mike Benzen, “we actually defined every transaction in state government that’s a Web candidate; what will it cost, what will it save the taxpayer, the state. And then we prioritized them.”
States are moving their business online so fast that even listing the trend-setters is hazardous. Yesterday’s laggard is tomorrow’s leader. Among all the categories the GPP covers, rapid change is greatest in information technology. That’s both the thrill and challenge of managing in an area where the Red Queen’s admonition in Alice in Wonderland — to move faster just in order to stay in place — is a truism. Careful readers of that book might also recall the rest of that passage, and how it may apply to many CIOs. As Lewis Carroll wrote, the Queen’s argument was that “if something wasn’t done about it in less than no time, she’d have everybody executed all round. (It was this last remark that had made the whole party look so grave and anxious.)”
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For millions of Americans, the memory of the Y2K bug has joined a mental list of swine flu-like disasters that never came to pass. But for many information technology managers in the states, Y2K was a godsend — sort of as if boll weevil eggs were suddenly discovered to be a cancer cure.