State and local leaders from across the country gathered at the third annual Governing Conference on Managing Technology in Philadelphia in June to mull over the challenges of technology leadership and to explore effective strategies to meet them.
The conference brought together executives, legislators, technology officers and program directors from almost every state, as well as many cities and counties. Ten corporate sponsors helped underwrite the conference: AMS, DynCorp, Enterasys Networks, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lexmark, Microsoft, Unisys, Veritas and Xerox Citizen Service Center.
Collaboration, fostered by the way the state has organized to address the issues of managing technology, enabled the state of Washington to become a recognized technology leader. Representatives from the three branches of Washington State government talked about how the state works together to build digital government. A single cabinet-level Department of Information Services reports directly to the governor.
An Information Services Board made up of 15 people from the three branches, including executive officials, legislators, court representatives and officials from the higher-education community, oversees the process of adapting technology to the needs of state government. The legislators are important, Steve Kolodney, former Washington State CIO, noted. "It's an opportunity to educate legislators, and it makes for IT experts in the legislature."
The first of two major successes for the board, said Mary McQueen, administrator for the courts, was helping the legislature see technology projects in a more strategic way. "The discussion shifted from whether we should do it to spreading funding over time," she said. The second was the ability to look at project failures and learn from them how to ensure that later projects succeeded. The primary lessons learned were the need for independent quality assurance and good project management.
The board became a powerful agency, said Joe Dear, a member of the board during his service as chief of staff to Washington Governor Gary Locke: "Agencies knew they couldn't go around the board, that they couldn't hide problems." But the board views itself as a partner, not a hostile body. "When projects go bad, the board learned not to engage in a search for the guilty. We developed working relationships." The board also provided institutional memory and expertise, important elements for success, said Emilio Cantu, former Washington state Senator and board member.
Just as important as collaboration is leadership, the support of political champions who understand the value IT services bring to citizens. In Washington, Governor Locke "is willing to put his office at stake in the success of this venture," Kolodney said.
So are several other governors who shared their vision of leadership with conference participants. Governor Jim Geringer of Wyoming believes the role for leadership is two-fold. Elected officials have to provide people what they say they want, but also to sense the future and "take people from where they are to where they want to be." To that end, a Web portal must be an entry point to all of government, not just a passive display. The goals of such an "e-portal" should be to transform government, enable access, enhance delivery and make services available at a customer's convenience. It should also lower cost per service and enable greater productivity for the same or less effort.
But it's a challenge to get government to do difficult things, said Governor Paul Patton of Kentucky, who has devoted enormous resources during his two terms to transforming Kentucky's government by employing technology. "You'd be amazed how a bureaucracy can lose sight of what it is doing," he told conference participants. "It's addicted to the process of doing because that's the way it's always been done, rather than, `This is what we want to accomplish.'"
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge had a similar experience when he took office. "We did not have a government thinking about technology," he said. Computers couldn't communicate with other computers and there were 17 separate data centers. Under Ridge's leadership, technology did become a priority, and Pennsylvania has become a high-tech leader, attracting technology and biotech companies and creating technology jobs.
The state consolidated all its data centers into one, saving more than $100 million and freeing up people who "can use that brain power for other things," Ridge said, such as round-the-clock staffing for e- government services. "Now we have a state government fluent in the language of technology." The state created a Web site and "turbocharged" it, created an electronic career link to help people find jobs and start businesses, found a way to promote tourism with video cameras in state parks, launched three digital school districts and created a widely admired criminal justice network.
At the local level, Jeremy Harris faced a "terrible conundrum" when he was elected mayor of Honolulu in 1994. The local economy was in the tank, but Honolulu's population was growing and becoming more demanding of better services from city government. Drawing on years of experience as the city's managing director, Harris was ready "to make substantial changes in how we run the city. We realized we had to reorganize from the ground up." That meant using automation and technology to increase productivity.
The city consolidated departments and created a technology department headed by a chief information officer. Today, driver's license renewals, payments by credit card, land use permits, job applications and reporting of problems such as potholes all can be done online. "The goal is a paperless city, a virtual city," Harris said.
Technology in Honolulu means more than information technology. The city automated refuse collection: Now, one person does more than a three-person crew used to do. Technology helped modernize the sewer system as well.
"We're running the city with millions less," says Harris. With tax revenues $62 million less than in 1994 and 8 percent fewer city employees, Honolulu has better services and more parks, police and fire stations and picks up garbage with fewer workers. Harris' message: "It works. Bite the bullet."
"What is technologically possible may not be organizationally feasible or socially or politically desirable," said Sharon Dawes, director of New York's Center for Technology in Government. As Mayor Harris demonstrated, "It is the task of leadership to balance those factors and determine the direction in which government should go."
Dawes outlined four components of e-government:
- e-Services--government's response to customer and constituent needs.
- e-Business--the use of technology to modernize how government works internally.
- e-Democracy--online voting and online forums.
- e-Management--the least considered and the most important for senior government officials. This includes the organizational changes that technology makes possible, including networked and virtual organizations, process changes including electronic records, security, data management and analysis, and the challenge of finding, getting and keeping a skilled work force.
Given the large dollar figures involved, legislatures are in-evitably involved in a state's effort to harness modern technology in the public service. Making that involvement a positive one takes time, effort, energy and skill on the part of everyone involved, including the legislators.
There's a need, overall, for better information. Legislators and council members need to know before a project is started what the real costs and benefits are going to be, said Richard Greene, project editor of the Government Performance Project. Legislators must set the stage for a non-scapegoat mentality. If something doesn't work, project people need to feel free to tell the legislature that it's not working and that its funding should be cut.
Arizona has created a Government Information Technology Agency to provide oversight and strategic direction for the state's technology initiatives. "We are the place they can come when projects start to fail," said Susan Patrick, strategic communications manager. "Instead of another layer of bureaucracy, we created a place where agencies come to get help turning things around."
Convincing lawmakers that investing in technology is worth their tax dollars is important, said state Representative Ed Jennings Jr. of Florida. Patrick agreed: "If you can identify and educate members of the legislature, it's not old power politics, it's people working together to move forward."
What else can legislators do? They must make the tough decisions to make their states competitive by investing in training and infrastructure, said Pennsylvania state Senator Jake Corman, who chairs the Senate Committee on Communications and High Technology. Tax breaks are not enough; if they don't provide broadband wires for businesses, they won't be able to attract businesses, he said. "It's a tough transition to move to high-tech," he said. "But that's where the jobs are going to be. It used to be the jobs were where rivers met, then where highways met. Now, it's going to be where the work force is."
