How My Information Handling has Changed

The breadth and intensity of digital government has increased dramatically over the past 12 months. When we put together our 2007-2009 Utah eGov Strategic Plan, I'm not sure we fully envisioned where it would take us. Now, in January 2010, I find myself flooded with information from many sources in ways that are morphing almost daily. The information revolution that began in 1993 has been revolutionized. I am collaborating daily with dozens, maybe hundreds of people, many of whom I have never seen. Twitter and Google have made us become a real-time enterprise. If it's not real time, it's not good enough. Initiatives are constantly improving because of the deluge of good ideas that come flooding in. Even though I still keep about 40-50 tabs open in Chrome, I now have instant access to this flood of information through Chrome Extensions that provide instant access to hundreds of related news and informational items from any page that I'm working on. Del.icio.us helps me categorize several thousand websites for theme-based access. Google Reader now lets me develop and group feeds from hundreds of sites that I need to track and I can review and share them to anywhere from anywhere with the Reader iPhone app. I put together a few numbers to summarize some of our 2009 metrics. For Utah.gov, we added 51 new state online services in 2009 and now have a total of 891. Adoption rates for some of these services is approaching 100% online, others are still growing. We averaged about 945,000 unique visitors per month in 2009, a number we still want to increase in order to reach as many Utah citizens as possible and ensure that our government continues to get more efficient. I assessed our use of social media and was shocked by how extensive state and local government use of Facebook has become and how creative some agencies are in making use of it as a new outreach tool.