Fusing the Fusion Centers

posted by Josh Goodman

from Governing's Managing Technology Conference in Seattle

"Fusion centers" have developed over the past few years as places for local, state and federal law enforcement and homeland security officials to share intelligence information across jurisdictional lines. The silos are being busted.

But an interesting concern emerged out of a session on data security led by Major General Timothy J. Lowenberg, the State of Washington's top homeland security official. Fusion centers aren't very good at talking to one another, which, of course, places limits on the sharing of information.

The Public-Records Question

posted by Zach Patton

from Governing's Managing Technology Conference in Seattle

At the final conference session on Friday, public sector leaders talked about how Web 2.0 is already changing government -- and how those tools will continue to bring about drastic changes in the coming years.

A lot of the conversation was spurred by Governing's May cover story on this topic, "Working in Wiki: How to Assemble Real Ideas in a Virtual World."

It was really cool seeing how some states and cities are already using Web 2.0, including Missouri's recruiting kiosk in Second Life, the Washington Secretary of State's MySpace page, Seattle's real-time mashup of emergency-response info, the LAFD's Twitter feed and the state of California's YouTube channel on paying your taxes (which we actually wrote about a couple months ago).

So anyway, yay technology! Yay, government!

But there's a rub.

The different speakers at Friday's session -- and conference attendees in the audience -- kept coming back to one key question:  When does this become public record?

Is your presence in Second Life part of the public record -- and subject to open-records laws and retention requirements?  If your agency uses a wiki to collect ideas, must you save every version of that document?

It's a question that no one has completely figured out, but it's a very important one.

Tough Crowd

posted by Will Wilson

from Governing's Managing Technology Conference in Seattle

Bill Gregoricus, a senior consultant in Tennessee's Office of State Planning and Policy, had an interesting--and somewhat disheartening--explanation for why government can be overly risk averse, sometimes eschewing best practices that entail risk in favor of the safe route:

I can deal with the board and shareholders, but I don't want to deal with the press or angry legislators.

It strikes me as sad that government is precisely where concern for the good and for getting it right should trump all other issues, but often doesn't. Many a government problem, it seems, leads to an eruption of headlines and hearings without ever addressing the root causes or underlying institutional challenges that created the problem in the first place.

For boards and shareholders, the primacy of the bottom line means that when something goes wrong, assigning (and shifting) blame, grandstanding, and political point-scoring all take a back seat to fixing the problem.

Managing Expectations

posted by Josh Goodman

from Governing's Managing Technology Conference in Seattle

When I worked at the Big Belly Deli, I had a philosophy when someone called in a carry-out order. I'd always lean toward overestimating the time that it would take to make a sandwich (telling the caller 20 minutes when I thought it would take 15), rather than underestimating the time. I figured that customers are never grouchy when their food is ready early, only when it's late.

I'm glad to find out that the same philosophy is alive and well in state government. The state of Washington has become the first state to develop an enhanced driver's license (complete with RFID, etc.) that doubles as a passport.

Since it takes a rigorous documentation check to get an EDL, you can't get one the day you apply. The state tells applicants that it will take two weeks for the EDL to arrive. However, Liz Luce, the director of the Department of Licensing, confided that often it takes just one week.

Debunking Conventional Lessons Learned

posted by Zach Patton

from Governing's Managing Technology Conference in Seattle 

One of the mantras you keep hearing at this conference is how managing technology isn't really about good technology, it's about good management. Or, as our publisher Peter Harkness likes to say, when it comes to IT, the focus used to be mostly on the "T." Now it's mostly on the "I."

That concept was alive and well in a session I attended this morning on managing major change -- how to steer your government through large-scale IT changes and evolutions. The three panelists, Bill Bott of Missouri, Ron Huston of Colorado and Jerry Simonoff of Virginia -- have each recently helmed a major reorganization of their states' IT systems.

As Jerry Simonoff said, upgrading the actual technology was the easy part. "Technology is a very small part of the change. It's an important part, and it has to be done right. But the truth is, we know how to do that. The cultural change is what you're really doing here."

Simonoff, Huston and Bott each talked about the lessons they've learned from doing a massive IT reorganization. Many of the lessons they talked about -- while good and worthwhile and interesting -- weren't exactly that surprising. You know, you need executive buy-in from the top.  You need legislative support to get adequate funding. You need to do your homework and talk to other states that have done this before.

More interesting to me was the unexpected lessons they learned -- the ones that really challenge some conventional notions about management.

Gov. Christine Gregoire: The Importance of the "Why"

posted by Zach Patton

from Governing's Managing Technology Conference in Seattle

After an extremely interesting pre-conference session on city 311 systems, Governing's Managing Technology conference officially kicked off this evening with an address from Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire.

We couldn't have had anyone more appropriate to get the conference under way. Aside from being the governor of our host state, of course, Gov. Gregoire has made great strides in harnessing the power of technology -- and, much more importantly, information -- to effect some real, tangible changes in Washington State. Through her implementation of GMAP -- the Government Management Accountability and Performance project -- the state is measuring the results of its efforts and holding agencies accountable for meeting and improving those results.

The key, Gregoire said, is the "why" -- finding out if a state program isn't working, but then drilling down to why it's not working and how it can be improved.

"It's relatively easy to show what's happening," she told conference attendees. "It's a lot harder to say why. Technology, to me, is just a tool for getting to the why."

Sounds good to me!

The full text of Gov. Gregoire's prepared comments is after the jump.

MORE from Governing's Managing Technology conference.

Building a Better Mouse Trap

posted by Mark Stencel

from Governing's Managing Technology Conference in Seattle

Making Web sites and other electronic interfaces easier to use needs to be more than an aesthetic afterthought. In some cases, such as voting systems, interface design is about guaranteeing a democratic right. And in the case of migrating government services to the Web, design and usability are key to increasing clicks.

A panel that I'm moderating Thursday at Governing's Managing Technology conference in Seattle is all about "building a better Web site." David Fletcher, Utah's chief technology officer, and Kenneth Theis, the chief information officer in Michigan, will be talking about their states' sites. But the subject of online usability and design also came up during Wednesday's executive forum on 311 services.

Migrating large numbers of citizen questions and service requests from the phone to self-help online tools could save money and increase efficiency, reducing the burden on stretched call centers and accelerating response times. But several 311 system managers at the forum said they receive relatively few requests via their Web sites.

Michael Major, director of 311 customer care operations for the city and county of Denver, said only a couple hundred of the 45,000 cases a month that his staff handles come from the Web. One reason for the limited use of the Web site, Major said, is that it was a rush job. Denver plans to start over, rebuilding the interface from scratch.

Phillip Hampton, Chicago's director of 311 services, said his city's experience was similar, with 1 percent of its caseload coming from what he described as a "poorly developed" Web page. He also said the 311 interface was not prominent enough on the city's site. "I see why people don't use it," Hampton said.

User demographics might be a factor. Some people do not have access to a computer and the Internet, several panelists pointed out, and some customers just prefer to pick up the phone and call rather than fill out a form online.

But the digital divide is not the issue in Los Alamos County, N.M. Communications and public relations administrator Julie Habiger said the high concentration of people with advanced degrees there means "almost everybody has one if not two computers." And yet the use of the online 311 interface in Los Alamos is light there too.

The culprit, once again: design and usability. "Our Web site is not as friendly as we'd like," Habiger said.

311 is not as easy as 1-2-3

posted by Ellen Perlman

from Governing's Managing Technology Conference in Seattle

So we just finished a special pre-conference session on city 311 systems, and some of the panelists cited a common problem: You set up this great 311 system so your residents can get information and customer service quickly, and then what happens? Other departments and jurisdictions want to horn in on your success without paying their fair share or doing the work!

No fair, says the director of the Chicago 311 call center, known for its smooth operators and efficient service.

Chicago's 311 call center was getting 2.3 million calls in 2001 and that number practically doubled this year, to 4.5 million, said Phillip Hampton, director of 311 City Services. In return, the call center is being pushed and prodded to take over the Chicago Transit Authority's call center.

"Once a system works well," he said, "you get demands from other agencies and sister departments."

Then there's the issue of county residents getting "free" city help. Some 15 percent of calls to Chicago's 311 are actually county-related. But the county provides no funding or staffing to help out. "We're being taken advantage of," said Hampton.

The Chicago call center reps won't hang up on people calling the city's information line with questions about county services. That wouldn't reflect well on the center, or its mission of providing quality service to all callers. So the city does the heavy lifting for the county, which does not have 311, but small individual call centers buried in various departments. Those departments are not open on weekends, when Chicago's call center is.

In July, Governing will publish a feature on regional 311 that addresses some of Hampton's concerns, focusing on the issue of regionalizing 311 systems.

The 13th Floor -- Live from Seattle!

posted by Zach Patton

It's time for Governing's Managing Technology conference, so we're trading the unseasonably cool and rainy D.C. for the seasonably cool and rainy environs of the other Washington.

Yep, the 13th Floor is heading to Seattle.

Watch the blog this week for dispatches from the conference, which should actually be really interesting.

Meanwhile, if you need us, we'll be, uh, staying out of the rain by surfing Internet Explorer in the Space Needle while sipping Starbucks and listening to Nirvana.

Oh, and we'll definitely be riding the SLUT.

See you in Seattle!