NECCC

NECCC's tenth annual conference wraps up today in Sacramento. The conference has had some great moments like JD Williams' call for leadership with examples of Eisenhower and Lincoln. I was there to talk about the Utah portal, but was able to gain some additional insight into what others are doing that we might benefit from. Texas, with a Bearing Point partnership, is claiming to now offer 784 online services, having processed over 16 million financial transactions online. I think a very high percent of those are license renewals, but that's ok. They espouse something called their "Intelligent Transaction Manager" which incorporates a number of services into a common engine for processing the online transactions. Carolyn Purcell also mentioned their development of a common payment engine similar to Utah's GovPay. Interesting to see Texas CIO Larry Olsen resign on the same day.

PK Agarwal has been the California CTO for the past year or so. His CTO role encompasses management of the central IT shop. The CTO role throughout the US seems to be very inconsistent in definition, having a variety of responsibilities that differ tremendously from one organization to another. Here is a webcast interview with PK if you can sit through the long introduction and advertisements. PK mentions that California has two primary data centers, but they are both in the Sacramento area. Their plan is to relocate one of them somewhere more remote for business continuity purposes, similar to Utah's two primare data centers. PK later shared some thoughts with the CDG.

NECCC's power is that it encompasses a variety of disciplines that all have interest in moving the business of government online, people like comptrollers, secretaries of state, archivists, come together with IT professionals from inside and outside government to propose solutions to challenges that face everyone.

This year's conference has looked extensively at digital archives, back office functions, and digital ID.... all very interesting and relevant issues. They have published several whitepapers available here.

I stopped by the capitol for the Christmas tree lighting while I was here.