I asked several chief information officers to contrast the world of state and local government today with what it was like before the Internet burst onto the scene in the mid-1990s. What they came up with may surprise you.
The short answer is that old practices are gradually being replaced with new ways of conducting business--ways that are visible only to those intimately involved in the daily operations of government. By all accounts, the greatest changes lie ahead.
There is a surprising belief that the initiatives to Web-enable the basic services of government, such as licensing, are by no means the most significant Internet-precipitated changes. Bradley Dugger, Tennessee's CIO, finds the Internet is enabling government to become much more open, inclusive and participatory and allowing governments to break new ground on how they communicate with citizens.
Groups that heretofore had been unable to participate in the process of government, primarily because the cost of doing so was simply too high, are able to follow what is occurring inside government, provide input at critical stages and help shape the course of government action. Many more advocacy groups, for instance, are able to get their points of view heard in a timely manner on proposed regulations and rules. As a result, government is reaching out to constituent groups to include them in the process at much earlier stages.
The Internet is also acting as a catalyst for multi-agency integration projects that in a pre-Internet era were simply too difficult, complex, lengthy and risky to undertake. Integrated criminal justice systems are a case in point. For years courts, prosecutors, public defenders and law enforcement and corrections officials struggled to build integrated computer systems to seamlessly move information through the criminal justice system. With the Internet, the goal of connecting everybody to everything is within reach.
Traditional approaches to systems development are also being cast aside or modified. Incomplete versions of systems are being deployed much more quickly and improved upon over time. In addition, many senior officials, whose involvement is key to success of these initiatives, are actively participating. They aren't as intimidated by the Internet as they were with previous generations of technology.
The Internet has led to an unprecedented degree of innovation. Dugger senses that there is tremendous support at all levels of government for doing things differently and trying things that just a few years ago would have been viewed as heresy. For example, car dealers now are responsible for entering data directly into government computers rather than submitting paperwork that is entered by a government employee at a later point in time.
The job of a CIO is much different. In the words of Aldona Valicenti, CIO of Kentucky and President of NASIRE, there is very little room for "downtime" any longer.
Carolyn Purcell, CIO of Texas, reports there is a greater ability to share information, a much faster rate of adoption of new technologies and quicker response times, plus the opportunity to work with a sophisticated group of stakeholders inside and outside of government. It is not unusual for IT leaders from across the globe to contact states to share best practices.
One wild card is the very difficult policy issue centering on privacy, access and security. What may look like an obvious direction to take today could easily turn into a dead end tomorrow as legislatures tackle these thorny topics. States are scrambling, like every other major business, to anticipate future policy direction. And many CIOs expect their states to adopt very different policies regarding issues such as accepting fees in return for advertising on government Web sites.
The one "elephant in the room" is what the Internet means for changes in intergovernmental relations generally, and unifying processes, systems and information across levels of government specifically. There is a growing consensus about the need for common data definitions and architectures across government. But most CIOs I talked to expect the focus in the short term will be on unifying systems and data within state boundaries.
Eras in technology are as defined by the expectations of what technology can do as by the technology itself. The Internet is sweeping away old expectations as to how government delivers services and how government conducts its business. Old issues are being supplanted with new ones. A new era in state and local government is clearly emerging.
