Dave Fletcher's Government and Technology Weblog, v. 2.0

Setting the Agenda for 2012 and Beyond

2012-01-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

I'm looking at the Federal agenda for 2012 as set out a few weeks ago by Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel. This is what I see:

Cloud
Mobility
Modular Development
Cyber Security

Nothing wrong with this, but it seems to me that for 2012 from a strategic perspective this is looking backward a little. The federal strategy for cloud was layed out by Vivek Kundra and it was a good one and is moving forward. Mobility is here, it is a fact. We should already be where it is we're trying to get to. It is driven by the private economy and we are consumed by it. We should be delivering services to it and we are so it is a matter really of continuing along a path that is already established. NASA, for example, has some wonderful iOS and Android apps as well as EPA, TSA, and many others. Continue to push mobile, that is good, but it is already a well established path prior to 2012. I'm not sure exactly what all is envisioned with the modular development concept based on this information, but it too seems like a preexisting thing. And cyber security, now that has been water that we all must drink and it's not about to disappear any time soon. Applying it to the cloud environments we are moving to is something that must be adopted to and incorporated ASAP as well as a new approach that is focused on a better understanding of threats and vulnerabilities.

The 2012 strategic agenda that I am looking at is more like this:

The Internet of Things
Semantic Web
Artificial Intelligence
The Social Web, eDemocracy, and the Explosion of Knowledge

I know that these concepts have been around for a while as well, but beginning in 2012, we have ways to leverage them as never before to dramatically impact government. I'd love to hear your ideas.

Best of Digital Government in Utah 2011

2011-12-27T09:35:00.002-07:00

It's time to move on to 2012 and it's now been ten years since I started posting the best of digital government in Utah. I started this blog on Radio Userland in 2002 and moved it to Blogger in 2005. Every year, I've done an annual review of our digital progress in Utah State government. Here's some of the best of 2011.

The new Utah.gov. In June, we introduced a completely new look to Utah.gov. Although it was much more focused on search, the new portal also introduced a single page design that included new infographics, integration of social media, and an enhanced news format, along with new geolocation and contextual services. After being ranked #1 among state portals by the Center for Digital Government in 2007 and 2009, this version of the portal came in second among the fifty states. It also received a Gold Award in the W3 web awards and a Best of Class for government in the IMA International awards. 2011 was also brought new levels of involvement to the Utah.gov domain with at least 1.2 million unique visitors to the site every month of the year.
Online Redistricting. The Legislature took its redistricting efforts online this year in an effort to make the process more open and get more public participation. Although the process received some criticism for the way the final decision was made, this was a major step forward as citizens were able to draw up their own map proposals online and share them with those involved directly with the process.
Connect Plus. The new Connect portal was created specifically with tablet users online as a way to give them access to the growing body of social media content and news updates produced by Utah government. The site was created with HTML5.
Accident Reports Online. This great new service gives citizens access to current accident reports from the Highway Patrol and the Utah Department of Public Safety and will be expanded to include reports from local law enforcement agencies.
Google Apps for Government. Utah signed a contract with Google in 2011 to move applications and email into Google's collaborative cloud environment, freeing up resources that were supporting some of these services to do other creative things.
UtahPublicEducation.org. Utah's State Office of Education moved into social media in a big way, not just by creating this constantly updated blog, but also adding Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook services to significantly add to education outreach in the state.
UDOT's new mobile app. Overall, growth in mobile services loomed large in 2011 with many services being added to the mobile portfolio as the use of smartphones in the state continued to explode. UDOT's new mobile app was one of the best and is available for both iOS and Android.
MyCHIE. Utah continues to be a leader in supporting the delivery of electronic health record exchange and services, while supporting citizens' rights to exercise greater control over those records.
New Statewide Warrants Search. Another popular service from the Utah Department of Public Safety, this service lets user search the database of over 100,000 warrants.
uGATE. UDOT creates a new agency data portal with lots of data in reusable formats, including KML for geodata. Nice addition to data.utah.gov services.

Also see: Best of Digital Government / IT for Utah 2010

Connecting the Data Dots

2011-11-22T10:36:00.001-07:00

In our latest Utah Architecture Review Board meeting, we recommended moving ahead with a couple of related initiatives.

Add Data as a Service as a key element of Utah CloudPlan 2.0, the next iteration of our statewide cloud computing strategy.
Initiate a new process for identifying and cataloguing Enterprise Reference Data.

These two concepts are closely connected. They also help support the future of Data.Utah.gov, the state data portal that we put into place 2 1/2 years ago.

Establishing the reference source of enterprise data will enable a more agile and flexible information system development ecosystem which can respond to the needs of state and local government agencies as well as an increasingly integrated citizenry and business community, particularly if this is made available as a cloud-based service.

One of the largest tasks will be the completion of the enterprise reference data catalogue. Within a state enterprise, there is often a lot of data that is duplicated among agencies and no single source may be identified as the source of truth. Establishing that, and making sure that all reference data has a mechanism to ensure that it is current will be an important part of the process. This pool of data resources, combined with the standardized services and automated discovery capabilities will enable much more rapid development of agency applications and services in the future as well as even more opportunity for cross-boundary / enterprise integration.

Another Great Mobile App

2011-10-21T16:17:00.002-06:00

A couple of years ago, the Utah Department of Transportation created a new program called TravelWise as a way to get people to think about their commute and travel habits. The program even set up incentives to encourage carpooling, the use of public transportation, bicycling, etc. Businesses were encouraged to set up teams that could work together to track ways that they were saving miles and reducing energy demand, as well as helping clean up the air. Many businesses signed up. Now, we have a new TravelWise mobile application that lets you enter your saved miles and trips from your smartphone. This is a great way to track how you are contributing to the program.

These kind of apps often spawn more innovative thinking, so expect to see more mobile apps in the future. You can find more great mobile apps and services at Connect.Utah.gov.

Working Toward CloudPlan 2.0

2011-10-18T18:22:00.003-06:00

It's been two years now since we created Utah's first cloud computing strategy so we are now working on version #2. Several factors come into play as we create the new plan.

Mobile technologies have improved substantially in just the past two years and many of our agency customers now use mobile devices for a growing variety of purposes. The need for cloud-based mobile productivity tools is greater than ever before.
Collaboration has exploded. In 2009, we had just introduced connect.utah.gov as a way to aggregate our social media content which consisted primarily of about 100 Twitter feeds, a few Facebook pages, and a number of blogs. The amount of dynamic content has exploded in two years and is continuing on a regular upward trend. Now, instead of just aggregating the content, we integrate it throughout Utah.gov. Cloud-based collaboration and social media tools have become an integral part of many employees daily regimen.
We completed the consolidation of our data centers and implemented virtualization on a broad scale. Servers and platforms are now provisioned in close to real time. Expectations are elevated. Long software development cycles are generally unacceptable.

We recently completed an RFP for hosted email with associated productivity tools. Once a contract is in place, the state will begin a process of converting to GMail accompanied with an enterprise implementation of Google Apps. These productivity tools will bring new opportunities for greater team-building, collaboration, knowledge-sharing, etc., hopefully in ways that will greatly enhance our abilities to deliver world-class digital government services.

SCR & QR Codes

2011-07-21T13:44:00.003-06:00

QR Codes are a great technology with lots of potential uses. I love being able to scan an item into my iPhone and then draw comparisons from all over the web. For example, when I go into Best Buy, I will usually scan the QR code of items that I'm interested in and then get price comparisons, product details, customer reviews, and other information about the product from across the web.

We are getting ready to release another state government online services with QR code functionality. In this case, it is the State Construction Registry which tracks activities and information relating to all construction projects throughout the state. It is a system that is widely used by contractors, sub-contractors, lien holders, local government, owners and buyers. The original system went into place just about 5 years ago. The new release, which is set to go live on August 1st will let the contractor print a QR code that can be posted at the construction site. Then, whenever any party needs to update a record associated with the project or get information regarding it, they can start simply by scanning the QR code.

Road Map for the Digital City

2011-06-30T16:49:00.002-06:00

On May 31st, New York City's Chief Digital Officer, Rachel Sterne sent me a copy of NYC's "Road Map for the Digital City: Achieving New York City's Digital Future". The document is a masterpiece at portraying the current status of digital government in the city and identifying key, realizable objectives for taking New York to the next level where it will be among the nation's leaders in digital government. This is a very good thing for all of us who live in the egov world. In just a few months NYC has gone from average to a position of leadership which will help drive us all forward. One of the great things about it is that Rachel appears to have the full support of Mayor Bloomberg, "We want New York City to be the nation's premier digital city..." If more political leaders shared that perspective and drive, we would see major improvements not only in the operations of government and the efficiencies that it provides citizens, but we would also see greater improvements in the upward trending of the innovation economy which is absolutely critical if this country is to get out of the funk that it has been in.

Immerse Yourself in Utah.gov 2011

2011-05-31T11:43:00.011-06:00

Utah.gov 2011

It's been two years since the state of Utah did a major upgrade to its website and a lot has changed during that time. The internet continues to represent an enormous opportunity for state government. In just five short years, the number of visitors to the Utah.gov domain has doubled, reaching 1.4 million unique visitors in March 2011. The new site has been developed, based on extensive research, to address the most important needs of Utah citizens. It takes into account changes that have occurred in Utah society and with technology. We appreciate the fact that Utah.gov has come to represent a trusted source for all kinds of information.

Two years ago, social media services, such as Twitter and Facebook, were still new to many Utahns, so we provided aggregation services where citizens could discover new agency Twitter feeds and begin to interact. The new site, integrates collaborative features into more aspects of the site so you will find information from Twitter and Facebook, and videos from YouTube integrated into many of the pages of Utah.gov. We continue to use the internet to open up government and make it more accessible through services like Open.Utah.gov. There's also lots of data available in a variety of formats at Data.Utah.gov. Of course, we try to be as open as possible while still maintaining the privacy of our individual citizens.

Still, the most important features on Utah.gov are the numerous services that save time and money for citizens, while bringing tremendous efficiencies to state government as well as the vast libraries of information on topics as varied as healthcare, transportation, caregivers, business creation, and hunting. In 2010, Utah citizens engaged the domain for over 25.1 million interactive transactions, saving hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.

Here's a brief introduction to the new site. We hope you enjoy it.

The best and worst states at providing broadband

2011-05-30T13:34:00.002-06:00

"The best and worst states at providing broadband" was a recent headline in Government Computer News.

The headline disturbs me, because it implies that places like Delaware, Rhode Island, and Washington, DC, which head the list are doing a much better job at delivering broadband service than some of the rural states such as Kansas, Idaho, or North Dakota. That may be the case... or it might night. The fact is, it is much easier to deliver broadband to a highly urbanized society that it is to someplace like South Dakota, or even Utah. It's like comparing South Korea to Australia. The cost to deliver broadband to remote areas is high and yet we are doing it and hopefully it will all pay dividends.

Project Prologue Documents Early Years of Egovernment in Utah

2011-05-30T12:45:00.006-06:00

In 1993, Governor Mike Leavitt, in his Information Highway speech, issued a call for Utah government agencies to open up government data, put government services online, and work together to create an enterprise model for digital government. After 18 years, we have made substantial progress towards these visionary goals. I'm glad to see that some of those initial years are partially chronicled in Project Prologue, a record of the Leavitt administration that is now hosted at Southern Utah University.

For information on information technology in Project Prologue, please visit:
http://leavitt.li.suu.edu/leavitt/category/information-technology/

Not everyone agreed with the Governor's vision for an electronic future. There are still a few around who don't perhaps, but it is the present, as evidenced by 25 million online transactions by Utah government in 2010. I don't think there is a single area in Utah government that hasn't been significantly influenced by it. Here's an article from 1994 that reminds us that there are always those who fight against the inevitable, and they actually did have some success in slowing it down:

IS `HIGHWAY' DESTINED TO BE DIRT ROAD?

The Shuttering of America.gov

2011-04-25T15:39:00.005-06:00

Many different voices on Twitter have been praising the State Department for the shuttering of America.gov. They say that it is a good thing the Department will now be spending more time reaching out through social media. America.gov is now a ghost town, a mere relic pointing to an archive of a not so distant past. This once beautiful website, which shared with the world an understanding of what the United States of America is about is gone. Here's what you now see:

This article on The Hill says that it is so the State Department can focus its precious resources on something more important, that is, on its social media efforts.

Personally, I'm having a hard time with this. After all, the purpose of Web 2.0 was to be able to maintain content in a way such that it doesn't have to be maintained all over the place. With a few inexpensive modifications (unlike some of the multimillion dollar websites that we sometimes hear about with the Federal government) America.gov could be cast in a way that it would be fed by the same social media efforts that the State department is talking about emphasizing, whether those are in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Most social media content is portable.

America.gov is too valuable of a property for this to happen. It now looks like the digital version of some of America's blighted urban areas. I hope someone has the sense to bring it back to life where it can prominently integrate with the social media efforts that have replaced it.

Community Broadband Networks

2011-04-04T17:30:00.004-06:00

An interesting article in Government Technology magazine refers to a new community broadband map published in March 2011. Just as interesting as who is on the map, is who is not. Several communities in Utah, for example, were among the very first to build community fibre networks. In 1997, a group of neighbors that had begun by networking their homes together for multi-player gaming started a company called Airswitch. The company began branching out to neighboring communities, including American Fork and Pleasant Grove. Eventually, the cities of Springville and American Fork purchased their portions of the network from Airswitch. Four years later, American Fork was looking to sell the network it had purchased. I am still a user of that network which has provided excellent service and high capacity bandwidth at reasonable prices for over 10 years.

The Airswitch experiment continued to spawn interest in community broadband in Utah. Even without these early networks showing on the community broadband map mentioned above, the extent of broadband networks in Utah is well under-represented. UTOPIA was created by 16 Utah cities as a way to bring high capacity network infrastructure to their communities. These cities, which are mostly not represented on the map, include Brigham City, Cedar City, Cedar Hills, Centerville, Layton, Lindon, Midvale, Murray, Orem, Payson, Perry, Riverton, Tremonton, Vineyard, Washington, and West Valley City.

iProvo was another broadband service that was also created initially by the city of Provo and later sold to a private provider. After lining up over 10,000 subscribers, but continuing to lose money, iProvo was sold to Broadweave Networks which today operates as http://www.veracitynetworks.com.

Even though as a general observation, the map shows more community networks than expected, the networks shown in Utah are actually less than expected.

Administrative Control of Utah.gov

2011-01-25T09:10:00.003-07:00

Recently, a hacker posted to his website that he will sell administrative control to a number of government websites, including Utah.gov and Michigan.gov. I tried to get my arms around that, and how it might be done. Problem is, Utah.gov is not a simple construct with an administrative console that controls it all so what exactly is this hacker selling for $99. Well, the Utah.gov domain consists of about 6 million pages, over 950 services, dynamic feeds, all somewhat linked together with a central portal which itself is an entire suite of applications built to support the complex array of interactions between citizens and government. It appears that the hacker gained access to a lightly used subdomain that is not even managed by the state's central IT so this was reviewed, patched, etc. With state and federal government websites proliferating as they have, this is almost an unfortunate inevitability as many government employees seek to deploy their content to the web outside the structured professional support channels. I regularly see sites across the country that have injected pages advertising products like cialis and viagra as rogue businesses try to bump up the search engine ratings of their websites through leveraging legitimate government sites. Even organizations with well-structure standards and deployment policies and procedures fall prey to this. With government being as diverse as it is, someone in each organization needs to remain vigilant and aware of these kinds of activities.

Best of 2010 for Digital Government / IT in Utah

2010-12-13T15:07:00.003-07:00

Almost time to wrap up 2010 in the way that I've been doing since 2002. Every year, I have created a top 10 list of digital government achievements in Utah government.

Utah completes its statewide consolidation of data centers. The consolidation was completed in June 2010 after just 18 months; right on schedule. In total, 38 data centers were consolidated, leaving just two primary data centers, one being primarily for backup and redundancy and being located off the Wasatch Front earthquake zone. The project will save the state over $4 million in ongoing costs. Over 1800 servers were virtualized and moved into these central locations, leaving less than 600 physical servers. A second phase of this project will produce additional benefits. The new consolidated center will also provide an important private cloud component in Utah's overall hybrid cloud strategy.
Utah again recognized as the #1 digital state. In August, the Center for Digital Government completed its biennial survey of the states, with Michigan and Utah both receiving "A" grades.
New Driver License System with associated online services goes live, lots of new automation added to every terminal. The new system is developed using Google Web Toolkit.
A new Jobs.Utah.gov. The Department of Workforce Services begins to accept Open IDs on their new MyCase System with single sign-on for once disjointed services. The economy unit publishes a new blog with the latest economic news.
Advances in mobile websites and services. The mobile version of Utah.gov adds location aware services to the state portal.
IT recommendations from Governor Gary Herbert's optimization team. The optimization team recognizes the value of technology and online services and encourages agencies to do more.
Online Continuing Education for the Division of Professional Licensing (DOPL). This is the beginning of a new trend as the Utah Department of Commerce works with online course providers using a web-based admin console and ties professional license holders directly to course providers for continuing education.
Growth of Broadband Use by Utah Citizens. Utah ranks #1 in broadband use among states, confirming the value of its efforts to push more services and interaction online.
Use of social media in critical situations. Twitter became a key communications tool in multiple emergency scenarios. When a large wildfire threatened the community of Herriman, city, county, and state emergency responders, along with traditional media used Twitter to get the word out to citizens about evacuation routes, fire conditions, emergency shelters, etc. In December, southern Utah communities were threatened by flooding and emergency responders again used Twitter to get information out to the community at large.
Public and Higher Education Added to Transparency Website. The Utah Public Finance Website has added data from education units across the state. This is a significant step forward in meeting the transparency requirements of the Utah State Legislature. While the site itself is much the same as last year, the addition of higher education institution, school districts, and charter school information is a major success.

Preparing for the next five years: checklist

2010-11-23T08:38:00.003-07:00

In looking forward to 2011-2015, there are some things that most government IT shops should have done by now. Here's a list of some of those:

Virtualized 90%+ of all server-based applications
Created and implemented a social media policy
Reduced physical server counts by upwards of 60-70%
Implemented a cloud strategy and begun moving major applications and services to the cloud
Developed a plan for supporting mobile platforms - smartphones and pad devices
Planned to support virtual desktop environments
Developed your first mobile apps and services, along with a mobile version of important websites
Consolidated data centers with a strong business continuity plan that supports redundancy for all IT critical applications and services
Have a well-established security structure and auditing process in place for online services and transaction-based applications
Implemented a first or second phase plan for sharing data on the web (data.gov)
Have a structure in place that is capable of implementing cross-agency, enterprise applications and services
Shortened development cycles by 50% or more
Have processes in place for monitoring and reporting IT performance on a regular basis
Incorporated GIS as a critical part of your go-forward strategy

Right now, I'm still pondering some of the key initiatives that will drive the next five years. I'll try to post more on that soon.

Flipboard

2010-10-28T13:33:00.006-06:00

I've been using it since the day it came out and it is perhaps my favorite app of all time. I've talked to people who said they had to get an iPad for this one app alone. If you understand the real value and potential of Twitter you must love Flipboard. I use it to aggregate information for Utah Government, Utah Education, Utah Media, and much more. It portrays why Twitter lists are so valuable.

Flipboard is personalized media for every user. You define what you want to see and Flipboard intelligently transforms 140 character Tweets to news content complete with video and images. My Flipboard is all about digital government and technology. Yours?

Tools like Flipboard are the future.

OPTIC Pushes Forward the Digital Agenda in Dominican Republic

2010-10-28T07:14:00.007-06:00

OPTIC, the central IT agency in the Dominican Republic is doing a great job in moving the digital agenda forward. A quick look at their website reveals a strong understanding of what is possible and that technology has the potential to make a huge difference in the lives of citizens. The office has published the third edition of Gobierno Digital, an issuu-based publication that provides a useful perspective on egovernment in the country. Their strategic plan is current, updated every year since 2006, although I would love to see a few more details of the kinds of projects they are actually moving forward. OPTIC is also doing a good job measuring their performance and I think understands where they are, as well as where they want to be.

OPTIC's goals for 2010:

Promover el desarrollo del Gobierno Electrónico en los ámbitos de decisión del sector público.
Promover el uso de los servicios de Gobierno Electrónico en la sociedad Dominicana y el sector privado.
Impulsar la capacitación de los empleados públicos en el uso de las TIC.
Acelerar el desarrollo integral del Gobierno Electrónico con criterios de eficacia, eficiencia y transparencia.
Evitar el doble empleo de recursos en el desarrollo del Gobierno Electrónico.
Racionalizar las inversiones y gastos en TIC del sector público.
Difundir las mejores prácticas en materia de Gobierno Electrónico.

Digital Disruption: Lessons for Government

2010-10-26T11:46:00.002-06:00

From Google's Eric Schmidt (publicly available in Foreign Affairs until 12/19/2010):

For the world's most powerful states, the rise of the interconnected estate will create new opportunities for growth and development, as well as huge challenges to established ways of governing. Connection technologies will carve out spaces for democracy as well as autocracy and empower individuals for both good and ill. States will vie to control the impact of technologies on their political and economic power.

Overall, an excellent treatise on how government can deal with the growing empowerment of individuals and networks.

Federal CTO Discusses Government's Use of New Technologies

2010-10-26T10:28:00.007-06:00

Aneesh Chopra was recently interviewed on the FCC's tech cast. I was glad to see that he is promoting ways to leverage mobile platforms to connect with citizens.

We are certainly supportive of that direction in the state of Utah. We have been adding citizen-facing apps and services to our site on a regular basis and will continue to work to make our services more usable by the growing numbers of citizens using iPhones, Androids, Windows 7 phones, and other types of smart devices. Earlier this year, we added local to our mobile website so that Utah.gov will automatically provide services and information based on your location (after you grant permission).

irekia - the most open of governments

2010-10-07T11:59:00.002-06:00

For many of the readers of this blog, the words irekia and euskadi mean little, if anything at all. But the Basque Country of Spain is quietly becoming a significant example of open and participatory government. The Basque Country website is built entirely around the concept of open government and teems with excellent examples of how government can involve its public. (The site is available in Spanish, Basque, and English). Every section of the site invites, almost demands, comment and participation. How does the Basque region resident avoid participating? And the open data portal on this site rivals that of any state in the U.S. And when you submit a proposal to the strategic planning process you can sign in with your Twitter account using OAuth. Polls, active listening, and multimedia all help make this government site work.

The Herriman Fire: Another Example of Social Media in an Emergency

2010-09-20T08:49:00.004-06:00

Yesterday afternoon I noticed an extraordinary amount of smog in the air and suspected that there must be another wildfire in the western part of the county, not an unusual event during August and September. What did become extraordinary was the size of this fire and the proximity to Utah neighborhoods. The next twelve hours became a flurry of activity as resources moved into play to keep thousands of homes safe from the rapidly spreading fire.

Camp Williams Fire - View from Traverse Mountain, Lehi from aesonica on Vimeo.

Herriman City has been very active in developing social media as a tool for emergency response and prominently features their Twitter feed, @bereadyherriman on their city's website.

A live ammunition exercise at Camp Williams, located on the county line between Salt Lake and Utah County, caused the fire to start at about 12:30 pm. Three hours later, when it became apparent that they would not be able to contain the fire, the military notified the Utah Fire Authority of the blaze. At about 5pm MST, the city began tweeting when it first became apparent that this fire might start to grow:

Per Herriman City, CERT teams please be on standby due to fire south of Herriman. NO ACTION IS REQUIRED AT THIS TIME."

The CERT teams were alerted.

Several official Twitter channels, including @HerrimanCity and @Utahgov began to share updates. Within a few hours, the dynamics of the situation had changed dramatically.

Everything south of Emmeline, Butterfield Parkway and Blackridge reservoir is now being MANDATORY evacuated. That's south of 14200 South.

Prior to that mandatory evacuation order issued over Twitter by city emergency officials, a shelter had been set up at the junior high school and then moved to the high school, evacuation routes were shared over Twitter, instructions were issued for evacuating animals the the county equestrian park, and FEMA had responded with support from the region. Governor Herbert was also responding on his Twitter channel and was on site. The common use of the #Herrimanfire hashtag made it easy to track all the traffic related to the fire.

In addition to Twitter, maps were posted to Google Maps and YouTube was used to share personal video of homes burning which were used by the media. When the city's website became stressed, citizens responded by reposting key information, like maps of the evacuation routes on sites like DropBox. At the same time, citizens were reminded by officials like @UT_MIT "Please do not self-deploy as a volunteer #Herrimanfire" and traffic management instructions were issued. Citizens posted photos and information to Flickr and other sites:

Reporters from traditional media channels, like @BenWinslow also became very active in the conversation and getting information out to the public:

Guv says 4 Blackhawk helicopters ordered to help. "Today looks very good for us to get this fire out." @fox13now #Herrimanfire #Utah

By this morning, the situation was more under control, about 10,000 acres had burned, more than 1600 homes were evacuated, four homes had burned to the ground. Seven area schools were closed and residents were notified via Twitter. Governor Herbert flew in a helicopter over the area to survey the situation. At about 7:30, he posted to Twitter:

Just landed after aerial tour of #Herrimanfire. An amazing scene, firefighting efforts are making a difference, even over last night.

Finally, Utah had one more example of the effectiveness of social media in helping to respond to a significant emergency.

Innovating in 2010

2010-07-20T14:19:00.009-06:00

I am currently looking at innovations across the country to glean ideas that we can build on within Utah government over the next decade. We have been able to leverage technology to save many millions of dollars for state government and I am very certain that there are still many opportunities that will produce incredible results over the next ten years. Many of these innovations have not yet been identified so we are currently working hard to identify those that we can implement in 2010 and 2011 while also creating our ideas database for the decade. This year is particularly challenging because I have not yet seen many, if any, examples of what it is that we want to create that will elevate and expand our digital community.

Most of what I see in the growing number of egovernment bulletins and publications is more of the same, the latest government experiment with second life, some new online services, more use of social media. Nothing wrong with any of these, except that we can stop pretending that they're innovative. We've been doing these things for years now. Some of these innovations have become very mainstream and common; even most counties and city governments now use Twitter and Facebook; how effectively is another question. I'm not certain when virtual 3d environments will become more common or whether government in Second Life will ever become ubiquitous. I'm thinking that the platform will have to change before that takes off.

The rest of what makes up egovernment in 2010 has become pretty standard across government, online services and information is the norm, while the presentation and search tools continue to improve, the improvements are mostly incremental. The egov community has grown tremendously thanks to Govloop and Twitter with collaboration reaching a crescendo these past two years. Last year, augmented reality looked like it held some promise and it still may. The semantic web is still ahead of us in terms of data integration to its fullest degree at an enterprise level as well as between government enterprises.

There are still innovations to be had, but the best of those seem like they will require more work on the back end to really make them successful. I believe that for egov to reach its zenith, it will need to force a more serious restructuring of government at a larger level that extends across tiers of govt.

Whether those of us in the U.S. realize it, there are some great innovations happening all over the world right now in this area. Just look at the ambitious goals outlined for Singapore in iN2015:

To be #1 in the world in harnessing infocomm to add value to the economy and society
To realise a 2-fold increase in the value-add of the infocomm industry to S$26 billion
To realise a 3-fold increase in infocomm export revenue to S$60 billion
To create 80,000 additional jobs
To achieve 90 per cent broadband usage in all homes
To achieve 100 per cent computer ownership in homes with school-going children

Although those goals are not necessarily egovernment goals, they are promoted through digital government and will have major impact when achieved. I have been fascinated to see where innovations are cropping up in places like Veracruz, Mexico, Peru, Estonia, Bahrain, etc.

Related Links
MIT World - The Future of Government - Citizen Engagement

Y Xu - E-Government: Innovation in the Public Sector

Architecting the Connected Government: Practices and Innovations in Singapore

NIST on Innovation

2010-06-24T09:04:00.002-06:00

eGov Site of the Day

2010-05-20T07:48:00.002-06:00

I've been usine EIA's energy statistics and data for a long time. The Energy Explained website contains lots of great info, including local data. Speaking of data, Wired just published this article on the one year anniversary of Data.gov. And the site is looking better, with more data, than ever before!

Mexico's Bicentennial

2010-05-17T09:13:00.003-06:00

For my egov site of the day, today I select Mexico 2010, a federal site honoring Mexico's bicentennial. They've thrown everything at this site, it really overwhelms you with content. They've even created individual Facebook pages for many historical figures that contributed to Mexican independence. If you're looking for social media, it's there, open government? yep, and lots of video, historical newspapers, a digital library, even patriotic music. Like I said, it's a little overwhelming.

eGov Site of the Day

2010-05-16T12:15:00.002-06:00

I know I haven't posted anything for a long time. Still, things have been very busy. I have been posting more recently on GovLoop.

OK, let's see how long this lasts. I will try to post a site a day for a while.

I visited for the Sioux City website for the first time today. Good use of Twitter and a growing number of online services show that the city wants to reach out and involve citizens. You can also watch city council meetings online. I would recommend integrating the use of Twitter with the city council meetings site so that citizens can respond in real-time and have someone at the city monitoring the responses to make these online meetings truly interactive.

How My Information Handling has Changed

2010-01-28T17:53:00.004-07:00

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.

Sitemapping provides you with new partners

2009-12-14T14:14:00.003-07:00

Customized RSS for jobs data

For a long time, I was hoping that our Department of Workforce Services (DWS) would provide RSS feeds of new jobs as they were added to the jobs database. Now it's not really necessary. By sitemapping the data and making it available to search engines, DWS has freed the data and doesn't have to worry so much about the presentation layer. In a previous post, I mentioned how companies like Indeed.com take care of that. I can do a search for any job title and location using Indeed's search engine and it will provide me with the data, much of which is gathered in near real time. Even better, Indeed provides me a custom RSS feed for any search combination of jobs that I might be looking for.

Woopra
I was checking Carlos Guadian's excellent K-Government blog this morning when out popped Carlos in a Woopra chat window. Woopra had notified Carlos that I was reading his blog, so he just initiated the chat. Very cool and surprising.

Best of 2009 for Digital Government / IT in Utah

2009-12-14T11:37:00.007-07:00

It's about time for the wrap on 2009 that I've been doing since 2002. Every year, I have created a top 10 list of digital government achievements in Utah government. I have been maintaining a shared Google Doc to track daily developments on the Utah.gov domain over the past 18 months. There is a lot to choose from this year so it's going to be difficult, but here it is:

New Utah.gov portal - the new Utah.gov portal went live in early June of this year and received rave reviews from across the country. In September, it received the "Best of the Web" award from the Center for Digital Government, which was one of numerous accolades it received throughout the year. The design team from Utah Interactive did an excellent job this year.
Transparency - In May, the Utah Division of Finance and the Transparency Board, introduced Transparent.Utah.gov, a new website that allows the public to access all of the state's financial records in detail. The creative interface makes it easy to analyze and aggregate specific types of expenditures as well. In light of the growing trend towards open government, this was a big win for those who want to know what the state of Utah is doing. The site was recognized as a top 10 project this year by Government Computing magazine.
Data Center Virtualization and Cloud Computing - Utah is consolidating its (once upon a time) 39 data centers. The state is using virtualization to also reduce its server farm substantially. The savings from this project will be no less than $4 million dollars while providing all kinds of benefits including better scalability and redundancy. In the spring of 2009, Utah CIO, Steve Fletcher, announced a new cloud initiative that would be partially built on this new optimized platform as well as general services from the public cloud.
Utah.travel - dozens of new agency websites were introduced this year, beginning with Governor Huntsman's inauguration in January, with the new housing.utah.gov just rolling out today. The overall quality of presentation and content continues to improve across the board. Services provided online have increased as well with the statewide total now approaching 900. The Utah Travel Council's new website stands out for its excellent design and excellent use of social media.
Use of Social Media - State agencies are now utilizing social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook (but many other sites as well) to interact with citizens, businesses, and the traditional media. Almost every agency is on Twitter with over 150 Utah government twitter feeds now being aggregated and tracked. There are also 42 new Facebook sites created over the past year. Utah provides an aggregated site at connect.Utah.gov that helps citizens navigate this growing volume of information. Another example of Utah's use of social media is on Slideshare. Most recently, Utah's GIS community is using Google Wave to coordinate future GIS initiatives.
Utah Technical Architecture - Although there will always be a lot to do, we've made a lot of progress in setting technical architecture standards for the state. We set up a wiki using wikispaces that is regularly updated and used for sharing all of the new information that is being developed.
More and Better Multimedia Content - Our first generation multimedia portal had a database with several hundred videos that could be searched, all in a variety of formats. The new portal uses YouTube for a common format and provides a couple dozen channels to all kinds of new videos on topics like wildlife, technology, and transportation. The quality of video content that agencies are producing continues to climb.
Mobile Services - in May, the state introduced the first state government developed iPhone app in the Apple store. Citizens using the app are now able to access current professional license information from anywhere. The Department of Public Safety produced an award-winning PIO portal this year and extended it using HTML-5 as a mobile application. Even more recently, Utah State Parks has created a new iPhone application for mobile users visiting Utah's park destinations.
Innovation Community - USTAR continues to push innovation forward in Utah's science and technology communities. InnovationUtah.com also includes a New Media portal. Lots of innovations coming in areas like nanotechnology, bioengineering, remote-sensing, and renewable fuels.
New Drivers License System - The Utah Department of Public Safety developed the new drivers license system using Google Web Toolkit. Drivers License stations are now equipped with individual point of sale, scanners to capture documentation, and other new capabilities. The system also has an online scheduler which allows customers to post documentation in advance of a prescheduled appointment to streamline the process as much as possible.

Here is my top 10 list from last year.

From Nebraska to Singapore

2009-11-25T11:07:00.007-07:00

Just finished our latest Architecture Review Board meeting. Our architecture process is nimble and enabled through a technical architecture wiki that is hosted in the cloud (wikispaces). We have been adding database functionality to it a little at a time using Zoho Creator in order to track the architecture requests and potential exceptions. It all seems to be working well together.

We've been discussing the cloud a lot lately. Last week I had the chance to speak about our cloud strategy at the Nebraska Digital Summit and then later via videoconference with a FutureGov conference on cloud computing in Singapore. Casey Coleman of GSA also shared information on how the federal government is implementing apps.gov. In Utah, we are working on a very similar approach to provisioning apps and services in our hybrid cloud.

I have been thinking a lot about how various aspects of augmented and virtual reality can be effectively applied in government. Then I had send someone send me this video of Pranav Mistry speaking at TEDIndia. Phenomenal!

I finally received my invitation to Google Wave a couple of weeks ago and have been trying it out. It certainly has a place in the overall mix of collaboration tools so I was interested when Novell announce their new Pulse product which integrates with Wave.

Cathilea Robinett from the Center for Digital Government was here yesterday to present the Best of the Web award to Governor Gary Herbert. The Governor said some very encouraging things about the importance of our digital channel and online citizen services. Lt. Governor Bell is also reaching out with his new website which includes a Facebook site, YouTube, RSS...

Layar and Augmented Reality

2009-10-27T12:32:00.007-06:00

Layar is a new free app for iPhone 3GS and Android that is essentially an augmented reality browser. There are quite a few potential applications for this technology using government data. Sunlight Labs put together a very cool layer using ARRA data.

Here's a review of the technology that might help as you begin envisioning how to use it:

Boyd Webb is starting to post other examples of augmented reality on the Investigating Augmented Reality blog.

Creating Utah's Hybrid Cloud

2009-10-21T09:38:00.002-06:00

In 2005, the state of Utah began testing server virtualization and provisioning server slices for LAMP dynamically. More recently, a decision was made to move all 38 data center and server room servers into two primary data centers, one in Salt Lake City with a secondary location in Richfield where it could be in a different earthquake zone for business continuity purposes. In August, Utah's CIO announced that Utah is preparing a private cloud in an interview with Government Technology magazine. Utah's private cloud is a critical piece of our overall deployment of a hybrid cloud environment which will include infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and, of most interest to me, software as a service. The goal will be to enable dynamic provisioning of all of our important services. Here's a little more detail on our plans.

Government as a Platform

2009-09-09T07:37:00.003-06:00

O'Reilly is putting on a phenomenal conference today in Washington DC, the gov2.0 Summit. Utah's Jeff Nigbur was able to participate as a presenter in the Gov 2.0 Showcase which featured presentations in several categories. Jeff's presentation was a winner in the "Government as a Protector" category. I believe that you will be able to view it online at blip.tv. His presentation was about the new Public Safety media portal which uses Twitter, Google maps and a variety of other services to keep the media and the public aware of incidents as they occur throughout the state. A new html 5 mobile app is completed this month which will meet the needs of reporters especially as they are mobile and need real-time information.

I have been thinking a little about Tim O'Reilly's statement that government is a platform. Government does not need to provide just neatly packaged applications and services like we have focused on in the second phase of the egov revolution, but can provide information and services that can be built upon and leveraged by others. This was part of our thought when we developed http://data.utah.gov which rolled out earlier this year.

Two years ago, Utah and three other states partnered with Google on a project to increase access to government information. A key part of this project was sitemapping key data sets, one of which was the Utah jobs database. Users can now access new jobs directly through any search engine as they become available in the state's database. Several weeks ago, I noticed that Indeed.com was one of the top referrers to the Utah.gov domain so I spent a few minutes to see what they were doing. Indeed has become one of the top job search sites on the web and I could see how effective they were at mining the information that we had made available. Then I discovered that Indeed has an iPhone mobile application that is extremely effectived at finding jobs based on location. A lot of the jobs available through the Indeed service locally are those that are available from Jobs.Utah.gov which Indeed discovers! Jobs.Utah.gov has done 4,109,869 online referrals just through August this year! Only 172,641 referrals have been done through the offline traditional channel. Shows what can happen as information is made available. By the way, Utah unemployment this year has averaged about three percent less than the national average. I'm not sure what other ways people are leveraging the jobs data to add value, but it certainly has been effective.

2009-08-06T09:15:00.004-06:00

From the Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center:

A recent EU report says that Europe has more broadband subscribers and better mobile Internet penetration than any other nation on earth. The 114 million subscribers of the 27 EU member countries comfortably exceeds the 84 million broadband subscribers in the U.S. and 88 million broadband subscribers in China as reported by UK research firm Point Topic.

I'm glad that the US has rebooted their broadband and wireless strategies. We shouldn't be lagging in this area and although huge progress has been made, I don't think we have exactly quantified what that progress is and identified where the gaps remain. Continued progress will be important for us to implement new augmented reality, virtual reality, and other kinds of immersive and semantically integrated services.

Twitter Outage

2009-08-06T08:06:00.006-06:00

Twitter is down this morning. So far, it has been down for 58 minutes in August and I think all of that is this single outage, longer than any I can remember with the service. Over the last six months, Pingdom reports uptime of 99.79% for Twitter, but any outage seems like a long time. Our emergency management people view Twitter as a critical component for their public communications. Unfortunately, there is rarely a failproof communications method, that is why we have backups and alternatives.

Update (8:12 am MDT): outage is now an hour and 5 minutes.

According to the latest update (8:49 am MDT) Twitter is defending against a denial of service attack. Apparenty, this attack has had some impact on other services, including Facebook.

Thinking about ROI on a State Website

2009-07-15T17:40:00.002-06:00

The last month has flown by and I haven't had a chance to respond to many of the comments that I have received via email, Twitter, etc. We have made a number of changes to the Utah.gov website based on feedback that we have received. At the same time, we are moving forward now with new services and many other interesting initiatives. I also tend to pay a lot of attention to quantitative data to help determine how to proceed with things and it is no different with our egovernment initiatives. In 2007, we put together a strategic egov plan for the state of Utah with input from across the state. That plan was designed to go through mid-2009. We began putting together the 2009-2012 egov plan over 6 months ago and it is now quite robust. We just haven't had time to put it into a publishable format.

The goals and concepts laid out in the plan have been shared internally with key personnel in state agencies. That gets to the ROI question. How do we determine that the value goals that we set up for our egovernment initiatives are being met and that we continue to move forward, rather than treading water or worse, move backward? We have learned that putting up a nice website is not a guarantee for increasing its use, or more importantly, increasing the use and utility of the services and information associated with it. Here are some things for managers of government websites to ask and measure:

Is your web initiative aligned with the policies and goals of elected leaders?
What are the utilization trends for your overall domain?
How many services do you offer? What is the adoption rate for those services? (percent of the total transactions performed - online and offline) How are the adoption rates trending?
Is your site optimized for search engines? Are you using sitemaps and metadata that helps external sources direct traffic to your domain?
Do you understand you user demographics? How are you using that information to improve what you offer?
Are we making business process adjustments to fully leverage potential efficiency gains?

Once you have the answers to these questions, there are many more that could, and should, be asked. But if you can optimize on these, you will be progressing. And you can't just do it and stop. In 2008, with support from many state agencies, our traffic and adoption both climbed dramatically. In the first few months of 2009, it has declined from 2008. We're not even sure yet what caused that, there are perhaps too many potential factors to completely understand. On the other hand, we are still significantly better than we were in 2007 and know that there are things we can do to improve the statistics.

Here are a few of the tools that we use:

Compete.com
Google Analytics
Quantcast
Alexa
Utah.gov custom service satisfaction surveys
Social media feedback
Press releases

Absorbing comments on the new Utah.gov

2009-06-15T14:22:00.005-06:00

In the process of developing a new design for the state government portal, we spent many months analyzing how the citizens and businesses of Utah were using our site and our services. We have done this each time we have made significant changes to the portal with several objectives in mind.

Increasing utilization. We want as many people as possible using the website. That is why we want it to remain alive and vibrant. We want citizens to realize that when they come back, they will find something new. We wanted a portal that will remain in people's memory. There is much competition for attention on today's internet and we believe that Utah.gov offers something important for our citizens. By 2007, we had plateaued at about 800,000 users so we made a lot of enhancements. We noticed a significant growth in users in 2008 as a result as our average unique users climbed to just over a million. Our growth seems to have leveled at around a million unique users on average. We hope that the new portal and many new services introduced in 2008-09 will generate enough interest to increase the number of online users.
More efficient government. As use in the portal grows, we have observed commensurate growth in the use of our online services. As adoption of online services grow, the average cost of providing that service drops. We have been able to document and demonstrate that repeatedly over time. Many services on Utah.gov are approaching 80-100% adoption rates. Utah now has over 860 online services and has been able to make many efficient business process changes as a result. We want them discoverable from the portal. Long lists of services no longer suffice.
Usability. We want all citizens to use and appreciate their state portal. We have long included an assessment of user communities in the process of building our portal. Through analytics, we observed that 97% of our users had Flash installed when they visited Utah.gov. We also noted the growth in bandwidth available to the majority of site visitors. The new site is an attempt to benefit from those changing demographics.
More open government. Utah seeks to be responsive to its citizens. Many of our new features (Data, Multimedia, Connect) have that goal in mind, along with our participation in social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

Based on the vast majority of the feedback we have received, we assume that the changes we have made to Utah.gov have been very well received. We have never received as much response as with the current upgrade. We have already made several changes to the site in response to the feeback such as slowing our Explore Utah carousel, adding a pause component, etc. We have processed the site through several automated accessibility checkers both before and after launch and made a few changes to ensure accessibility for our users.

Perhaps the most challenging comments came from a couple of Wisconsin state developers (I'm assuming they are developers from the nature of their comments) on Paul Taylor's blog. I'm not going to spend a lot of time debating the merits of our approach vs. theirs. I haven't done an assessment of their user base and our site at one time looked a little more like theirs. I can say that we will continue to try to provide the very best digital government product possible to our citizens in Utah.

Images of Utah's State Capitol

2009-06-10T17:48:00.000-06:00

New Utah Travelwise Videos

2009-06-10T16:52:00.001-06:00

Utah.gov Acknowledgements

2009-06-09T07:04:00.007-06:00

Day One for our new Utah.gov portal is now history. That's always a little challenging, especially when you make the kind of dramatic changes that this effort has meant for us.. Even though lots of testing and analysis was done in advance, it's never possible to predict how something new will be received. Overall, the response was very positive. We are also learning in the process and will apply what we learn to future activities.

The efforts that resulted in the new portal really began in 2007 when we put together our new state egovernment plan. That plan was intended to take us through this summer and we have used it regularly as a mechanism for progress. We have now achieved much of what was outlined in that plan and have a lengthy draft of the 2009-2011 egov plan ready to complete.

In developing our plans, we have sought to learn from the best minds in the business. I can't mention them all, but I will mention a few.

Tim O'Reilly - like the hundreds of thousands of people who follow Tim on Twitter, we track his vision for the web and for society. We have tried to integrate some of that vision into what we are doing with Utah.gov.
Dion Hinchcliffe - Dion understands architecture and does a better job visualizing it than about anyone I can think of. Architecture is an important part of what we are doing in the state right now and our technical architecture wiki is beginning to reflect that.
Paul Taylor - Paul has a tremendous vision for digital government. His contributions to the field, along with Cathilea Robinett and the Center for Digital Government have provided an incredible forum for sharing ideas on egovernment
Steve Fletcher - as CIO of the State of Utah, he has provided an environment where we are able to implement new ideas in productive ways.
David Stephenson - one of the more strategic thinkers about how web 2.0 can be used to improve government, particularly in the homeland security space.

Obviously, there are many more.

Tools of the Trade
A big part of our planning has been focused around developing more and better collaboration between agencies, citizens, and the global community. We have tried to use tools that support that paradigm, including:

Google - Our relationship with Google has been great. The partnership that was implemented in 2006 and the use of their CSE has been phenomenal. We have also used Google Docs for sharing ideas and managing projects associated with the latest release.
Twitter - this tool gives us access to interaction with and real time response from the global community. Our new Utah.gov site features over 100 state and local government Twitter feeds that provide daily interaction with Utah citizens and other interested parties from beyond our state borders.
Slideshare - this is one of the many additional web 2.0 tools that we will continue to leverage now and in the future. We have incorporated them into our enterprise technical architecture standards. I could also mention Wikispaces, Swivel, YouTube, Ning, etc., all of which have helped make us a more collaborative state.

My goal in mentioning these tools is not to promote a specific product, but to give credit to companies that have helped us develop a broader vision for what we can become as a government.

Day One Commentary on Utah.gov
We appreciate those who have commented on our initial release of Utah.gov in traditional media, on blogs, and on Twitter. Here are a few I have gleaned...

Finally, I acknowledge the efforts of our development teams, state agencies, and state leadership. When we put together the 2007-09 egov plan we had 550 online services. In just two years, that number has climbed to over 850. Utah Interactive developers and designers have put in long hours to help us achieve this plateau in our climb upward and have responded incredibley to the requests made of them. Rich Olsen, Sara Watts, and Bob Woolley have been a critical part of making this a reality. Also thanks to Chris Neff and Hillary Hartley for helping us clarify our strategy. Our climb won't stop here.

New Utah.gov

2009-06-08T07:42:00.005-06:00

Look for the new Utah.gov to go live soon. We have worked hard to create a new experience for users of the Utah.gov portal. The new website is a dramatic departure from traditional state portals with an abundance of new features. In 2007, we worked hard to create a similar kind of experience. At the end of the year, we had set the goal to achieve over a million unique visitors in a given month in 2008. It happened quickly, and in fact we average over a million uniques that year. Our purpose of course is to create a government which is more efficient, as well as responsive to its users. We hope that the new portal will have the same kind of reaction. It has much more integration with government 2.0 and social media tools, including multimedia. It also includes a data portal which will provide better access to data available from the state. The data portal is just a beginning. We will continue to add data over time which can be reutilized by citizens and businesses. I'll let you know more as we roll out the site. For now, here's an early preview of what it will look like...

Google Squared

2009-06-03T17:35:00.002-06:00

I tried out Google Squared at the end of a long day and immediately fell in love with it. Even though it is not yet perfect, it holds tremendous potential for all kinds of things, including many that we may do in government. I'm hoping that Google will eventually provide tools to export the data, to mash it up if it has geography, etc. Here are a few examples of the kind of results you can get:

You get the idea. As Google continues to refine this tools, it could be absolutely tremendous.

Transparent.Utah.gov

2009-05-19T10:57:00.002-06:00

Our new transparency website is now live. Lots of effort has gone into making sure that this site is the most usable and most detailed transparency site around. I just got back from the press conference where it was announced. Here it is:

Swine Flu Map

2009-04-29T13:19:00.001-06:00

View Swine Flu 2009 Map in a larger map

Government Offices in Utah

2009-04-27T18:04:00.001-06:00

View Larger Map

Word Cloud of this Blog

2009-04-27T11:09:00.001-06:00

Presentation of Web 2 Aggregation Tests

2009-04-22T13:51:00.011-06:00

Please excuse me while I work on a few ways to present aggregated content from various web-based sources such as Twitter, Flickr, etc. As we leverage these kinds of tools to a larger degree we are also looking at ways to aggregate and enhance the content presentation.

Utah Government and Related Services on Twitter

Test Widget for Surplus Property

2009-04-06T15:03:00.002-06:00

Here's a test widget for access to the latest sales available online from our State Surplus Property Program:

Slideshare

2009-03-26T15:09:00.005-06:00

Slideshare is one of many creative interactive services that I have tried over the last few years. I'm impressed with the vision shared by their CEO, Rashmi Sinha.

Here's a widget with some of the slideshows I've shared on Slideshare:

| Get your Presentation Pack

Random Comments

2009-03-25T11:03:00.002-06:00

I'm interested in the use of Buzzable by the Whitehouse and Gov. Schwarzenegger.

I checked this morning and there were over a million new or updated web pages in the dot gov domains over the last 24 hours. Some are very interesting and creative, others are not at all.

National Parks are finding new services to add to their mobile services like this from Acadia National Park. State and local parks should be thinking of the same kinds of things since people are more likely to have mobile devices when visiting the parks. A good idea at the state level would be to include other points of interest such as museums and local, federal, or regional parks and recreational opportunities into a mobile app that helps you discover their location using built-in GPS.

We're putting together a new wiki for our technical architecture and I've rediscovered once again how much I like the platform for adding and maintaining new content.

Digital Government Controversy

2009-02-27T20:32:00.003-07:00

Each year, the Utah Legislature becomes more involved in Utah's egovernment efforts, particularly as they have witnessed some very significant results. This year, online government is a feature of a growing number of bills in the House and Senate. For example, several years ago, Rep. Mike Morley put through a bill establishing the State Construction Registry that helps home owners track subcontractors and payments on building projects to avoid liens. Every significant construction project in the state is now tracked in this system. Now, in Senate Bill 230, Senator Bramble would like to put even more requirements on system participants such as posting balance statements and allowing people to use the system to make demands for adequate insurance. Representative Morley also has a bill modifying the system.

Utah's comprehensive Public Meeting Notice system has already been so successful that Senator Steve Urquhart would like to require that all legal notices be posted online in a similar system, which could potentially have a multi-million dollar impact on the state's newspapers.

These are only a couple of the many ways that legislators are trying to achieve policy goals through the regulation of digital government. At the same time, digital awareness has also resulted in a system that is far more open than EVER before and I expect it to become even more so. I have been analyzing the impacts of Utah's egovernment efforts and they amount to at least tens of millions of dollars in savings to the state, its businesses, and its citizens. It has also had a large impact in lowering unemployment, improving the business climate, and promoting entrepreneurship. There are some challenges in quantifying this impact, but even for some individual online services, the numbers are surprising.

There are also, many fringe benefits, such as reduced carbon emissions and a decline in paper utilization. All this, and we are really less than 15 years into this huge paradigm shift. Eventually, egov and technology needs to have an impact on the very structure of government if it is to produce its ultimate benefits. There are many potential new things that can be done to improve what government offers to citizens, but if we are to do them, we really need to glean all the efficiencies and benefits that we can and then reinvest them into new and better government.

Demo Air Quality Widget

2009-02-11T10:54:00.001-07:00

This is the widget developed during the short widget building demo in today's eGov Product Management Council meeting. Sprout also has a complete tracking tool. In the first day, widget #1 had 104 views, most coming from UtahPolitics.org and Google searches.

Creating Widgets for Government

2009-02-10T13:02:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow, during our eGovernment Product Management Council, I plan to give a live widget building demo, so in preparation I build this widget with SproutBuilder which I found to be a very good tool (I've used a variety of others). It took about 15-20 minutes for a first-time user to build this widget. Certainly, if this were more than a demo widget, you would spend a little more time with the imagery and maybe even produce a video specifically for the widget, but overall the concept is simple and the opportunity to use widgets has low barrier to entry.

Governor Huntsman Delivers State of the State address

2009-01-28T09:26:00.003-07:00

Here is his speech from last night. Several good references to the State's egov accomplishments, emphasis on education, transportation, renewable energy, and health care accessibility.

Video Courtesy of KSL.com

Budget Cuts

2009-01-13T06:48:00.002-07:00

Lots of cuts are being proposed by the Legislature and staff as they prepare for the 2009 Legislative Session. Altogether, these are close to a billion dollars. You can see the proposed cuts by the Legislative Fiscal Analyst (as of 1/10/2009) here. Certainly, there will be impacts on the state's information technology. In fact, a significant number of layoffs have already occurred within the Department of Technology Services as revenues shrink due to agency restraint. Less support for financial systems, fewer programmers to support all the revisions in Tax information systems, reductions in funding for the controlled substance database, longer replacement cycles for servers and PCs, and digitization initiatives are just a few of the areas that will possibly be impacted.

What this means for egovernment is that, like always, we will need to get more creative and find ways to get what we need done for less.

Time to Prepare for Level 5 in the eGov Maturity Model

2009-01-07T14:58:00.005-07:00

For those who are really interested in where e-Government should lead, it is time to engage in a more thoughtful period of research and debate linked with heavy transitional activities. Thus far, there has been a rush to put content and services online. This is all very useful and productive, but it should not be the end goal for egov advocates. It is time to explore the multidimensional and paradigm-changing potential of digital government. I'm not sure where this will start and where it will end, but it should include concepts such as multidimensional variability, intelligent agents, context awareness, collaborative design, virtual reality, paraverse vs. metaverse, platform independence, and semantic transactions. In the correct political environment, it would involve looking at the very structure of government itself and reengineering to meet 21st century capabilities and realities. I won't get around to discussing many of these concepts today or why they are important and relevant, but it is time to define and plan for a 5th level in the egov maturity model. The discussion is occurring more in earnest in Europe than in the U.S. currently I think.

Here are a few references for you to look at while I continue to formulate our 2009-11 strategic plan that will begin to explore some of these concepts.

Goodbye to 2008

2008-12-31T15:30:00.004-07:00

2008 really has been an amazing year. Clearly, the focus nationally and globally has been on the economy, then on the U.S. elections. What happens from here remains to be seen.

Regardless of those distractions, it has been a year with unlimited learning and growth potential. Opportunities abound everywhere at a time where we are nearing a few major crossroads. Transportation and energy will continue to emerge and hopefully we can make a major breakthrough that completely changes our transportation and energy paradigm. If not, we will have to make major adjustments.

The internet continues to grow at a phenomenal pace and access to information is obviously unlike anything in history. Broadband is now abundant which feeds this opportunity. Interoperability is growing, but not in all the areas it should. There is still reluctance by many and efforts to control data that maybe should be public.

We are nearing conclusion of our egov plan, although it still isn't quite as innovative as I would like it to be. We'll get there, the proof however will be whether we can implement a new vision that takes us well beyond where we are today.

Happy New Year everyone!!

Sharing Data, If it could all be so effective as this

2008-12-23T09:45:00.002-07:00

One of the best examples of sharing government data is with traffic information. The Utah Dept. of Transportation (UDOT) collects data along Utah's state freeways and highways. The real time data we're talking about comes from cameras, sensors, and reports. It is shared with the public on the State's Commuterlink website where users can see a mashup of all this information. But the data on Commuterlink goes well beyond UDOT. Traffic incidents are reported by the Utah Highway Patrol and other law enforcement and then made available through an XML feed to UDOT and others. Incidents are combined as another layer of the Google map mashup. National Weather Service data also impacts traffic so it is included in the site and users can get NWS data for their individual communities.

The Commuterlink app is multimodal so the same data is presented to mobile users through a different interface.

We could stop there, but the data becomes even more effective when it is publicly available. Take a look at these sites. They all use the same real-time UDOT / Public Safety data, but present it in different ways and with different functionality:

These are a few, there are actually even more. Some combine other data such as gas price reports or jam factors. The end result is that Utah government data actually has much broader disemmination and utility than just what is presented on the state's website. With hundreds of information systems, there are many more examples where this kind of sharing could be valuable, but it doesn't happen. It's a big opportunity.

Top 10 for Utah.gov in 2008

2008-12-09T14:07:00.009-07:00

For each year since 2002, I have posted what I felt were the top 10 e-government / technology accomplishments for the state of Utah. This has been another good year. Here you go:

Utah is named the Digital State by the Center for Digital Government. In October, Cathilea Robinett, the Center's director came to Utah to present this award, given every two years to the most tech savvy state to Governor Jon Huntsman.
Public Meeting Notice website goes public. The PMN provides open access to public meetings from approx. 3,000 public entities in the state of Utah. Users can subscribe by RSS or email to receive updates from any of these entities.
Green IT Initiative. Utah is in the middle of an extensive green initiative to conserve energy and other resources. Desktop computers are being converted to more energy-efficient models and the state is implementing a virtualization strategy which will significantly reduce the number of servers being used.
Commuterlink truly goes mobile. A complete redesign of Commuterlink.utah.gov was announced in November that makes use of dynamic Google maps and real-time access to incident and weather info. An interactive mobile app provides access to the same information from any mobile platform.
State Senate and its Web 2.0 experiment. The Utah Senate is using everything from YouTube and GCast to Twitter and blogs to communicate with constituents.
Utah Moves to a 4-Day Work Week. This was a big and bold move by Governor Huntsman to save energy and shake up the status quo a little. The fact that Utah had over 800 key services online helped make it possible. Citizens and businesses can still get much of their work with the state done on Fridays even though 17,000 employees are off on that day.
Increased utilization of Utah.gov and associated online services. Unique visitors surpassed one million in January 2008 for the first time and stayed at that level for the first 6 months of the year. Transactions for online services also increased with a growing number reaching close to 100% online.
A new portal for State History. History was one of many agencies who implemented new agency websites in 2008. The new history site includes interactive forums, Flickr photo galleries, and other kinds of dynamic content.
Utah Educators Service Suite. This compendium of services helps teachers keep their license current. It was awarded a Digital Education award in 2008.
Access to Online Media Collection through Utah Pioneer. Download audio books right to your iPhone, your laptop, or other portable device from the State Library. This is a new type of service, and one we want to encourage.

Here's what was happening 5 years ago .

Also, take a look at last year and other prior years here.

Government Technology presents some trends for next year.

Recent news and info from the World of eGov

2008-12-06T09:14:00.003-07:00

"Wheeling Mayor Andy McKenzie has a goal to make Wheeling the first city in West Virginia to be totally "e-gov" within one year." - Wheeling News Register

NIC Dominating Its Niche In Cyberspace (EGOV) - Investopedia

Just discovered OhMyGov.com, a resource for government-related news.

The state of Maryland is now auctioning boats online.

Report says that councils in the UK are not using egov enough.

Alabama.gov puts animal industry directory online.

Here's an online egov magazine for Asia.

"The call for papers for the eighth annual International Conference on electronic Government has now been published under http://www.egov-conference.org/egov-2009/. The conference annually brings together more than 130 experts from research and practice all over the world. in 2009, it will take place in Linz (AT), from 30 August till 2 September." - Maria Wimmer

Interesting photo stream from a recent egov conference in Asia.

Singapore agrees to help Kuwait with egov projects.

Craig Thomler in Australia is asking whether government needs to go through a cultural change before it can effectively deliver web 2.0 services. He also references a nice little slideshow from David Osima on the topic.

Some interesting egov blog posts from Larry Freed, CEO of ForeSee Results, the company that surveys USA.gov users.

Tech in Gov

2008-12-03T16:40:00.003-07:00

Have you heard of Flower Mound, TX? It's one of the most advanced towns in the country as far as its website is concerned. I like their use of Google Calendar.

There's a lot of new uses for social networking being implemented at all levels of government. The State Department opened up its new Exchanges site with Facebook pages, online video, with forums, blogs, and hosted pages at connect.state.gov. I'm expecting more use of social networking from FEMA soon as well. In fact, with everything being promoted at change.gov, I expect a lot more agencies trying to get an early start on what they expect will be the future direction.

Social networks are becoming more integrated at the user level, with many tools that allow you access to all your networks through a single tool on your mobile device. I really like Vlingo which allows you to post voice activated updates to Twitter and Facebook. Check out what Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital, has to say about the coming impact of social networks on government in this video:

This Week on Utah.gov

2008-12-03T15:59:00.003-07:00

Lots of stuff happening on the domain since I last reported. Here's a quick list:

eLiens service goes live allowing financial institutions to transfer vehicle titles online.
State History division presents "Peoples of Utah" digitized exhibit online using Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/28521997@N08/sets/72157608623746284/show/)
New Travel website offers widgets, iPhone app, wallpapers, and YouTube video in promoting Utah winter sports. (http://www.utah.travel/snowflake/)
Added Google translation services to Utah.gov footer with translation for 35 languages
USTAR Radio produces its second podcast
ARB approved the creation of a Services Portfolio Governance Committee that will report to the ARB and a central directory.
New Lone Peak Conservation Center website provides valuable resource for Utah firefighters.
Utah Fire Crews provide photo essays on Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/twinpeaksfirecrew/
Human Services introduces a new online Diversity Forum to support collaboration on diversity issues.
New mashup of highway rest area locations and information from UDOT
New Commuterlink.utah.gov with interactive maps, weather, real-time traffic incidents, and services
Commuterlink Mobile service goes live with great user interface for PDAs, cell phones and smartphones.

This Week on Utah.gov

2008-11-18T07:37:00.003-07:00

The Legislature now makes interim committee meetings available as podcasts. To subscribe to the feed, select any given committee from this list and then access the podcast at the bottom of the page.

A new website is supporting Utah's goal to end chronic homelessness by 2014.

Did you know there are 1364 licensed chiropractors in Utah? See them all or any other license professional in the state of Utah with Utah's Licensee Lookup and Verification system.

The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources started a new blog.

Utah Refugee Services is now providing online training for its Refugee Network using Moodle.

Utah's Trendlines published the November/December issue with some excellent features.

Thousands of new pages of searchable content were added to the domain this week.

This Week on Utah.gov

2008-11-10T15:57:00.002-07:00

This week, the Dept. of Corrections added a new service to their popular sex offender registry. You can now be notified by email when changes occur in your area on the registry. The service was covered in the media by the Salt Lake Tribune.

The Great Salt Lake Advisory Council published a new website this week. The Council is develop plans to protect and enhance the lake's resources.

The new State History Forums are beginning to see some activity.

The Judicial Conduct Commission now has its own website.

Elections are over, here are the 2008 Presidential Electors for Utah.

Lots of new data has been published to IBIS-PH this week including the Public Health Outcome Measures Report.

Multimedia Splash

2008-11-05T10:39:00.002-07:00

There is some really great content coming out in multimedia on the web related to this blog. I will not limit myself to the most recent ones for the first few weeks. After that, I will focus primarily on new multimedia content related to Utah.gov, eGov concepts and ideas, and global egov. If you're not already familiar with the UN E-Gov KB, check out that video. Korea does some really creative things in the way they present and market egov and their ambassador video just confirms that. I really liked a few of the techniques presented in "eGov Belgique. And the eGov at Work video has some good ideas for using egov in developing nations.

Technology and Government: Week 2

2008-11-04T14:57:00.002-07:00

I'm working on a number of projects currently. One is to look at cost cutting technology measures for the State of Utah. Another is to create a list of potential SAAS applications that could be used within government. There is certainly a degree of overlap between the two projects. I am creating the SAAS apps table in the Zoho Online Services database that I created last year.

Here are a few of the SAAS tools that I'm looking at:

Pingdom - A nice online tool for monitoring the status of your websites.
Policymap - This online GIS service lets you look at all kinds of national data from the census and other sources to help in policy decision making. Even the free product has a lot of value.
Huddle - An online collaborative project management tool

More later...

Oct 26 - Nov 1 on Utah.gov

2008-11-03T14:31:00.003-07:00

Wow, another busy week for the web team that supports Utah's state government online.

UDOT and its partners produced the new TravelWise website, focused on Transportation Demand Management strategies, that would reduce the number of travelers in single driver vehicles.

Did you know you can now register and manage trademarks with the state online?

The Commission on Volunteers is marketing its Power of Prevention conference online.

The Attorney General has been adding to his photo galleries.

There was a new issue published of the Utah State Bulletin with lots of revised administrative rules.

USTAR published a new technology outreach report.

Have you checked out the State's online bid system?

New data is available in the Online Oil and Gas Information System.

A new Government-to-Business service has been created that allows anyone registered as a "Commercial Registered Agent" to file and manage online their registered agent status. (A Commercial Registered Agent is an individual or a domestic or foreign entity that serves in this state as the agent for service of process of an entity.) The site also allows for improved management of commercial registered agents and the administrative functions completed by state officials.

Overall, there were over 19,000 new or updated pages on the domain.

Week in Global eGov

2008-11-03T09:20:00.003-07:00

It looks like I will be speaking at the Government Innovation Forum in Mexico City next week on the topic of digital government and government innovation. In doing so, I will have the opportunity to learn a little about egov in Mexico which I'm already somewhat familiar with. I spent a year in Guadalajara in 1988-89 learning about the Mexican government and some of the challenges that they faced at that time. I also took a few classes at the Universidad de Guadalajara on public administration.

Some of the most important egov websites in Mexico:

Mexico (national portal)
Distrito Federal (Mexico City)
Guadalajara
Jalisco
Nuevo Leon - the portal was down each time that I tried to access, even though I could get to some agency sites.
Monterrey

I really like how this site portrays a very specific message to the citizens from their government: Construye Guadalajara .

In this interesting online service, the city government of Guadalajara, invites citizens to join as "monitores ciudadanos" or citizen monitors.

Here's a very interesting video about fighting corruption in government, supported by the Secretaria de la Funcion Publica.

Interesting to note that Foresee Results is doing the same kind of website surveys for Mexico that they are doing for the U.S. government.

In some ways, egovernment sites in Mexico are like those I am familiar with in the Orient, particularly in their use of bright colors and the use of buttons and banners. They make fairly good use of multimedia and are particularly good at presenting a message or vision. They have basic online services, generally not a lot and not quite as effective as, perhaps, they could be, but at least they have them. There are some, like this Mazatlan site, that are a little too cluttered. Even states like Oaxaca make better use of video than some of the websites that the Brookings rated near the top. Overall, Darrell West's study rated Mexico 20th, just below Tonga and above Cyprus. I can tell you, without a doubt, that Mexico's egovernment present is ahead of Tonga, and that's not a knock on Tonga.

Regulations in RSS

2008-10-29T17:23:00.002-06:00

I was in the middle of a post on multimedia when I was forced to crash Firefox. So that will come later. Lots of things happening today, but most recently I've been thinking about regulation and code. I used to access the Federal Register on a regular basis, but hadn't looked at it recently. It's amazing how many new rules the federal government can produce on a daily basis. Anyway, as I was looking it struck me again how much opportunity is lost by not keeping up with what's happening as shown in the pages of the FR. I checked Regulations.gov and found the RSS feed for the Federal Register. Now it will be a lot easier to do a quick scan in my google reader on iPhone while while I'm riding the bus.

Tech in Gov: Week One

2008-10-28T12:02:00.002-06:00

Lots of interesting noise on government technology issues in the social media space this week. A big issue for governments will be cloud computing, as well as green IT so with weekly announcements like Microsoft's announcement yesterday on Azure, governments will be trying to figure out what the government cloud looks like and how to take advantage of virtualization and other technologies to drive down costs and save energy.

Governments are finding new uses for Twitter such as these from Washington State.

If you haven't already seen it, don't forget to take USA.gov's survey on social media.

According to Foresee, the best government websites are making substantial improvements and customer satisfaction is improving. Average government websites are, however... well, still average.

The Smart21 Communities of 2009 will be announced tomorrow.

Seven major banks to receive half of the Treasury's expected bailout.

Here's a site I don't remember visiting before: InterGovWorld.com

I'm really excited about the new Google Earth app for iPhone. Seems like something government can leverage.

This Week on Utah.gov

2008-10-28T06:39:00.004-06:00

Monday was a big release. Utah.gov introduced our new Kid's Portal. Eleven percent of the visitors to Utah.gov are within the targeted elementary school age group. Up until now, there was no central kids' resource that was specifically designed for them, but rather a list of the various kids resources available throughout the Utah.gov domain. The new site is built in flash with custom animations and artwork.

Last week, we had a soft release of a new eLiens system which banks will be able to use to transfer vehicle titles electronically.

About 1,110 new pages of content were generated on Utah.gov during the past week. The most popular spots on the portal continue to be citizen services, followed by employment and career information.

Lots of new stuff related to USTAR this week, including new sites on Utah's activities related to Global Entrepreneurship Week, including the latest issue of Launch magazine.

More new content from Utah.gov:

The latest TV spots from the Care About Childcare campaign
A new online tool to search Agricultural licenses
The state's pronghorn herd management plan
Lots of new maps and descriptions for the hunter Walk-In Access Program like this one
a new Diversity website
Brine shrimp harvester update
New oil and gas data from the Online Oil & Gas Information System
Blog posts from the Division of Administrative Rules
The latest traffic volume maps from UDOT
more information on the Early College Program
and health news for Utah's ethnic communities

Well, that sort of gives you an idea of the breadth of new content on Utah.gov this week. There's actually a LOT more than that. It's a challenge to keep up with everything.

Daily Posts

2008-10-27T08:35:00.003-06:00

I'm going to try something out this week and see how it works. I'll have a regular reporting cycle for the blog where I try to cover issues on the topics that I have significant interest in and that are relevant to the communities that I participate in. For now, we'll try something like this:

Monday - Utah.gov Update, new ideas, websites, services and strategies related to our state portal and egov efforts
Tuesday - Tech in Government, more general coverage of how technology is being used in government or might be used in the future
Wednesday - Multimedia Splash, a look at relevant multimedia on the topics covered by this blog
Thursday - Looking Globally, The best of global egovernment, coverage of ideas and technologies in use in places like Spain, Korea, Sweden, Singapore... really, anywhere around the globe.

Government Technology Features on the Digital State

2008-10-21T09:28:00.002-06:00

Government Technology TV just produced this video reviewing Utah's selection as the #1 digital state in 2008.

Paul Taylor of the Center also did a quick review of the top 10 with this "Top 10 Digital State Roadtrip"

eGov and Stuff

2008-10-08T15:35:00.003-06:00

I'm feeling guilty because Ari Herzog is suggesting that a blog should be treated as a child and not neglected or abandoned. That can be very challenging to do, especially with the proliferation of microblogging and other social media. It is certainly much easier to Twitter than to blog, at least it is for me at the current time.

Regardless, much has happened since my previous blog post to be sure.

4-Day Work Weeks
We are now two months into an experiment by the state of Utah with a 4-day work week. Overall, it has been a positive experience, although there are challenges for both employees and citizens. I started to commute by express bus when the state began the experiment, partly just to make sure I understood what other employees might be facing a little better. I have to catch the earliest bus of the day, leaving home at 5:15 am and then come home on the last express bus which leaves Salt Lake City at 6:05 pm. That makes for a fairly long day. The problem is when one misses the bus, connections add an extra 1 1/2 hours so I don't get home when that happens until 8:30 pm. Obviously, having Friday off is a plus, but there is always so much to do on Friday that I can no longer accomplish on other days.

I have been tracking the utilization of our website on Fridays to see what differences we might see when state offices are closed. What we did see in August, was that although there was not a major increase in visits to Utah.gov on Friday, there was a much higher utilization of online services, something we absolutely wanted to see. One service was up as much as 80% in August over the previous month.

Just yesterday, the State of Hawaii announced that some agencies would participate in a pilot of a 4-day week.

Twitter
We continue to see interest in our use of Twitter. There was even coverage in USA Today. And we have added a new Utah Calendar twitter with current events.

Green IT Blogging
It's good to see Paul Taylor blogging again. I have always enjoyed Paul's comments and presentations on egovernment. A couple of weeks ago, Paul posted on the "Greening of the Public CIO". Although we have implemented many green-related IT initiatives here, we haven't fully measured the impact of the existing and future initiatives. This will continue to be a major issue in 2009.

More New Services
Utah agencies continue to produce new online services making our total state online services somewhere around 875. Some of the recent ones include:

just to name a few. The Public Meeting Notice Website also is required use by all public entities in Utah as of October 1st. It includes all kinds of new functionality and you can subscribe to any public entity's RSS feed to get meeting updates from any of about 3,000 entities.

Other
Last week, Cathilea Robinett came to town to present Governor Huntsman with the 2008 Digital State award. The Center does a great service to states by spurring these competitions which urge state government to go beyond what they would normally do. And Utah is very honored to receive this award with some of the great things that other states are doing.

I just noticed that Idaho State University partered with the Utah Education Network for access to Internet 2 and National Lambda Rail.

It's interesting to note the success of Utah's charter schools in meeting NCLB performance standards.

We're continuing to add multimedia channels to Utah GovCast as it grows into the start of its second year. Hopefully, we can find resources to continue to enhance it.

What can we learn from today's report on Homeland Security's next generation information sharing system?

EPA's new website certainly looks more green and 2.0 than it did before.

NASCIO 2008

2008-09-22T12:41:00.002-06:00

I'm here in Milwaukee at the 2008 Annual NASCIO Conference. It's been a good opportunity see how other states are doing and plan to do. We were very pleased to receive the Digital State award last night from the Center for Digital Government which has been a tremendous influence in driving the states to excel in both public sector IT and egovernment by creating friendly competition between the states. It actually helps us to develop goals which we know will drive change and improvement in everything we are doing technology-wise. When I get back to Utah, we will put together a long list of what we need to do over the next two years to ensure continuous egov improvement, and develop the draft egov plan for 2009-10 which will be presented to the CIO and state stakeholders. It's going to be a busy fall for sure.

Galveston, Texas

2008-09-16T08:21:00.005-06:00

Pretty major damage to this city on the Gulf Coast from Hurricane Ike. This slide show is an interesting look at what makes this city.

News of the recovery.

Galveson City website

It seems like the city is a little stressed and not able to leverage the internet as well as it might.

The city's resources are "stretched to the max," and it could be a month before electricity is restored. The cleanup will be massive, he said, and the city is "unsafe." see CNN

State of Texas Hurricane Relief Page

California seems a little more adept at using the web as an emergency response tool, such as they did during the San Diego and L.A. fires.

Testing Google Chrome

2008-09-02T17:55:00.002-06:00

I began testing the Chrome browser shortly after it was released today. The first site that I brought up was Utah.gov, very fast and smooth. Then got a tweet from West Virginia and tested their site, also looked very good. I checked a few apps, personal and business. Our state payroll SAP-based system only works with earlier versions of IE, not with IE 7 or Firefox. It didn't work with Chrome either. Anyway, I expect that most of our stuff will work very well with Chrome, at least as well as with any of the other browsers. The big problem I had was RSS, our feeds don't work right with Chrome (not unique to our feeds, most of the others I tested didn't work well either. I'll check stats on browser usage by the end of the week to see how many of our users are testing out Chrome. By the way, this is my first blog post using Chrome.

Comparing Global eGov 2008

2008-08-26T12:01:00.005-06:00

Important information in Darrel West's new report on egov entitled "Improving Technology Utilization in Electronic Government around the World, 2008" comparing egov in 198 nations:

The most unusual feature was found at the Luxembourg Central Bank, (http://www.bcl.lu/en/bcl/index.html), where a tsunami relief request actually linked visitors to a Wikipedia site for the Star Trek television character "Worf” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worf). However, the link was taken down soon after it appeared.

I thought this comment was a little odd (listed under novel and innovative features on government websites):

The National Endowment for Arts has an application where visitors can share the page via Facebook, MySpace and Stumble, for example.

The comment refers to the "add this" button that is easily added to a site in minutes (we use it on Utah.gov) and is included on thousands of websites (doesn't seem that innovative).

The report meticulously identifies places where national websites advertise private services.

The U.S. comes in third place in the 2008 report, listed behind South Korea and Taiwan (actually, look at this for Taiwan). Both of these countries are among the top ten or so reference egov sites that I look at when exploring egov innovation.

Spain is listed as 14th, up from 21 last year. Congratulations to my Spanish readers. Spain really is a leader in egov.

Three big surprises; West lists Ghana as #13 (up from 75), Monaco at #12 (up from 68), and Tonga at #19 (up from 189). According to Wikipedia, this is Tonga's official government portal. Wow, that's all I can say. Actually, it appears to be this Drupal-based site. When I follow their link to "online services", I get a few news articles instead. When I try to access podcasts on the Ghana site, I end up with a site not found error. There is a current RSS feed though. Not to argue, but it seems a shame that someone like Denmark (#62) and Sweden (#72), who have invested so much effort into creating a quality web presence would be rated so much lower in a study of this level of importance.

Utah to Pilot first test of new Electronic Health Records

2008-08-13T14:20:00.003-06:00

The CMS will begin its third pilot program to test which online personal health records vendors meet the needs of Medicare beneficiaries. The program will begin pilot in Utah and Arizona beginning January 2009. Good opportunity for the State to continue to stay ahead in the area of eHealth. So I added the CMS RSS feed to my reader, but its not very active.

Pioneer, the State's online library has added a great new online service in conjunction with Overdrive.com. Library patrons can check out digital books. This works on iPhones as well. Today's most downloaded book is New Moon by Stephenie Meyer.

I'm still looking for more participation with the Utah Data Group on Swivel.

Florida has a great application for setting appointments with their DMV online.

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff has started a blog. That is in addition to his Twitter feed. His new website was recently awarded a "Waggie" award as the best overall website at the Conference of Western Attorney Generals.

South Carolina Facebook Site

2008-07-28T14:01:00.002-06:00

I have been wondering about South Carolina's Facebook site and what they are trying to accomplish with it. The State of Utah blocks some social media sites at work, including Facebook and MySpace. It looks like the Facebook site is well done and is just another venue to try to pull people into SC.gov from a venue that citizens are already comfortable. Nothing really groundbreaking, just links back into the state's services and agency information pages.

We looked at a few national level egov sites to see what innovation we could find, sites like Korea, Taiwan, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Singapore... those that we consider to be among the best. We found a few things we can glean and learn from. We are planning to put together a proposal for 2008-09 shortly that will include some ideas perhaps not found anywhere else as well.

A Greener Work Week?

2008-07-18T15:21:00.003-06:00

ABC interviews the Governor on the 4 day work week initiative. We need to continue to add services to make this even better. There are a lot planned for the next 12 months.

Web 2.0 Calculators

2008-07-11T11:05:00.003-06:00

Thanks to ITS Insider, I stumbled across Google Calculator this morning. It captured my attention immediately. It has always been inefficient when I need to calculate something to access my start menu and find the windows calculator and then calculate something. Google now lets me do it right from the search box in my toolbar and the results are immediate. It will even do things like currency and metric conversions or Roman numerals. I then discovered several other web 2.0 calculators such as Instacalc which have some potential interesting business uses. For example, you could automatically embed a calculator like this on your intranet travel site to help people calculate certain travel costs and options:

Four Day Work Week

2008-07-02T10:10:00.003-06:00

Last Thursday, Governor Huntsman announced a mandatory 4-day work week for most state employees. The new schedule will feature longer hours on Monday-Thursday, with offices generally open from 7am to 6pm.

"As we go forward with this initiative, we will conserve energy, save money, improve our air quality, and enhance customer service." Governor Huntsman said. "We live in a dynamic, ever-changing environment, and it's crucial that we take a serious look at how we can adapt and maintain our state's unparalleled quality of life."

The Governor presented the initiative during his monthly KUED press conference.

The announcement has received a lot of attention nationally. Here are a few...

USA Today - "Most state workers in Utah shifting to 4-day week"
Kansas City Infozine
finding Dulcinea, Librarian of the Internet

Dulcinea mentions a few other interesting sources including this September 2007 post on The Oil Drum outlining "Sixteen Reasons Why This Might Be an Idea Whose Time Has Come". This piece discusses some potential reasons I hadn't thought of.

In the AP article in the Seattle PI the Governor discusses online services as an alternative:

"... but then the services that are provided online, I mean, I think this is going to allow people to really look at the convenience and the flexibility of the online services we provide, which I'm not sure a lot of people are thinking about."
More than 800 state services are offered online.

A look at some new top ranked country portals

2008-06-25T09:24:00.002-06:00

A new study coming out of Switzerland apparently ranks Singapore, Argentina, and Costa Rica as the world's most professional country portals. Take a look:

Singapore, Singapore Infomap (this one is interesting)
Argentina, Gobierno Electronico, Buenos Aires (this has some very cool stuff)
Costa Rica, Visit Costa Rica

Though not a part of the rankings, I really like some of the innovation presented on the Buenos Aires' site. It uses SMS, weblogs, localization services, and multimedia in some interesting ways and really packs a lot of content onto one page.

Localizing Green IT

2008-06-24T17:14:00.003-06:00

I'm taking some time to review where we are at with green IT initiatives. Governor Huntsman has declared clean energy as a top priority in Utah to improve efficiency and enhance environment. He issued an executive order in May 2006 to increase statewide energy efficiency 20% by 2015 and called for state government to lead by example. There are many things that we can do and have been doing that support this initiative. For now, I'll refer to several other references:

The Green Grid Initiative
Simply Green (Center for Digital Government)
Climate Savers (smart computing)

From a local perspective;

OnTheMap

2008-06-11T09:46:00.006-06:00

I learned of the Census' OnTheMap service which lets you analyze employment at a local level from an area workforce report. Although the service is not quite as intuitive as many Google Maps or Microsoft Live maps, it does provide some useful data. You have a variety of options for report generation. For example, you can create a set of concentric circles, such as this map of Logan, Utah with 1, 2, and 3-mile radius around the city center.

Then you can generate a report for employment data within each of the circles, like this:

The load times are long, but you can export the data to a variety of formats for reuse. Seventeen states are listed as participating partners. Utah is not one of those.

A Virtual 3D Experience

2008-06-05T15:31:00.005-06:00

Have you explored Google Earth recently? I have a hard time leaving a browser for other applications, but it is getting more compelling. Take a look at this view of Salt Lake City.
Those green dots are real-time traffic points communicating current freeway speeds. You also have temperature reports in real-time from around the city. The blue dots are images. You can add an incredible amount of other data, even YouTube videos or Twitter posts from locations around the city. Another layer will pull up relevent Wikipedia information found on the 3-D map. There are innumerable additional layers such as NY Times and Google News that associate any news from those sources with points on the map. I met with some people from the Center for Active Sensing and Imaging at USU this morning who have a new LIDAR system for 3-D imaging that will automate the creation of 3-D aerial and ground imagery, doing some very cool stuff that will contribute to the full enablement of the 3-D virtual world. This is one of the new USTAR teams that you will find on innovationutah.com.

Now, take a look at Monster Milk Truck. Google lets you drive the truck anywhere you want to go in the terrain. It won't be long before your avatar will be able to wander the virtual earth at will. Then, we can integrate key functions between the real and virtual worlds, letting your avatar control specific real world functionality. How about that?

Governing Technology 2008

2008-06-04T09:14:00.004-06:00

I was able to attend the Governing Technology conference in Seattle where I gave the presentation on "Building a Better Website" along with Michigan CIO, Ken Theis. Ken gave an excellent presentation on what Michigan is doing to generate traffic. The discussion was moderated by Mark Stencel of Governing Magazine. Mark has a great vision for where things are or should be headed. I recommend his futurist blog.

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Join the Utah Data Group on Swivel

2008-05-23T17:05:00.001-06:00

Here's one of the latest charts, showing weekly prices of gasoline since 1989...

Chronicles of Narnia

2008-05-14T16:06:00.000-06:00

I'm planning to take the kids to the movie this weekend.

Thoughts on Innovation

2008-04-24T13:29:00.004-06:00

I meant to do a lengthy post today outlining a plan for creating a comprehensive technology and innovation strategy, but seem to always get consumed in the day to day requirements for support and implementation. I won't get to that.

I ran across this report from Brookings that was published last week that recommends the creation of a "National Innovation Foundation." I certainly agree with three foundational statements:

Innovation Is Key to Raising Productivity and the American Standard of Living
Innovation Presents a Growing Challenge to the United States
Government Must Act to Improve the Innovation Process

In the 1970's, we viewed the 21st century as a space age with incredible progress in the areas of transportation, energy, and communications. We've come the farthest in the area of communication, but our progress has also created some complications. It has also diverted us in many ways. Sometimes we spend more time looking at how cool a technology is than actually applying it in real practical ways that enhance quality of life. And we're still a substantial distance from the kind of pervasive global communications that I might have imagined for 2010 even though the technologies exist to make it a reality. I mean, when you still have large office buildings relying on T1 connections, that's not there.

Our failure to progress in the area of transportation and energy is still our biggest failure and our inability to act sooner may have serious implications for the future. Even with big discoveries in places like Brazil, we will eventually run out of oil. Most peak oil projections show production peaking within the next ten years. Space travel seems to have been on the slide for quite a while now.

So, the question is, will we continue to promote more of the same, small innovations within existing paradigms or something that rocks the world like the internet in the early 90's? The innovation agency proposed by Brookings sounds a little like the USTAR initiative in Utah, a way to work creative ideas and research into business.

The Brookings report says that states have now taken the lead in innovation policy:

"The design of a more robust federal innovation policy must consider, respect, and complement the plethora of energetic state and local initiatives now underway. While the federal government has taken only very limited steps to promote innovation, state governments and state- and metropolitan level organizations have done much more. They have partially filled the gap left by federal inaction. Yet, these entities could do even more, and their current efforts could be made more effective. Federal assistance is needed to help state and regional innovation efforts reach the proper scale and achieve their full potential."

If this is the case, there is a need to more effectively coordinate the spend of taxpayer dollars and reduce duplication. I see that everywhere, within states, between states, and between state and federal. There is a real opportunity to utilize web 2.0 and semantic web collaboration and integration concepts and tools to make this happen.

Europe issued a new communication last week reorienting its i2010 initiative at the midway point. The report stresses the importance of the internet as an essential tool for economies and for peoples daily lives. Key 2008 actions include:

Develop a broadband performance index and invite Member States to set national targets for high-speed Internet usage to reach a 30% penetration rate among the EU population by 2010;
Help prepare the information society for the future Internet economy by issuing a Communication on the future of networks and Internet;
Facilitate the transition to new networks by issuing a recommendation on Next Generation Access;
Promote the Internet of Things through a Recommendation on RFID, focusing on privacy and security issues;
Propose measures to ensure a high level of resilience of critical communication networks and information infrastructure (like the Internet) and to guarantee continuity of services;
Propose a set of actions to facilitate the transition to IPv6.

The report goes on to list legislative and other actions that will be taken beginning this year to reach the 2010 goals, including of course eHealth and the promotion of the public sector as a buyer of innovation services. It is impressive to see that the percent of internet broadband users has almost doubled in two years. Locally, I think we have seen a similar trend. Dialup is just not an option for most internet users anymore.

Today's Tech Read

2008-04-22T08:14:00.003-06:00

News of the Day

Will Oracle locate in Cache Valley?

Analysis of the Day

Dion Hinchcliffe's report on Enterprise 2.0

Event of the Day

Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco

New Service to Look At

Yahoo Fire Eagle

Today's Municipal Controversy

How will Provo deal with the iProvo shortfall?

Energy Report

Utah explores geothermal potential

Transportation

Utah still accepting public input on the EW Connector through Lehi

A Comparison of various State Services

2008-04-06T12:36:00.002-06:00

Here is an interesting look at four different services offered through Utah.gov.

Login.utah.gov is the single sign-on service using the Utah Master Directory.
Email.state.ut.us is the web client for the State's employee email service.
Le.utah.gov is the Legislature's website.

Congress Discusses Virtual Worlds

2008-04-01T13:49:00.003-06:00

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce today held a hearing on "Online Virtual Worlds: Applications and Avatars in a User-Generated Medium." I'll be interesting to hear their comments and summary. The video will be available here.

Laurence Johnson of The New Media Consortium suggests the following:
we need a range of action informed by vision and clarity of purpose. What is needed most are these five things:
programs that will spur the technical development of the 3D Internet;
programs that add capacity to the woeful state of our information infrastructure and bring it to the communities and neighborhoods that currently have no or very poor access to broadband services;
policies that require data and cellular networks to deliver the bandwidths and speeds needed to easily access these technologies;
programs to ensure that educational institutions and students at all levels have the resources required to take full advantage of the potential of the 3D web; and
programs and policies to encourage entrepreneurs to develop effective business models for this new frontier.
Beyond those vitally important actions, what is further needed is for government to engage the technology, to model effective uses of virtual worlds, and to promote programs and services that truly tap its potential to bring people together.
Audio is also here.

NMC's Horizon Report of Emerging Technologies

2008 Federal eGov Report

2008-03-27T17:17:00.003-06:00

Although it was released a week ago, the 2008 Federal report on eGovernment just caught up with me, all 402 pages of it. I'm interested in the new DAIP portal that will go live in December 2008. This new clearinghouse is a central portal from which...

disaster victims may obtain information regarding Federal disaster assistance, State and local government programs, and private sector sources for disaster assistance.

Looks like something I should add to the state's egov collaboration plan / web 2.0 strategy. Here is a list of the service partners. This report is also a great update on the progress of the key egov initiatives.

Top 10 Issues of Concern for 2008

2008-03-27T08:30:00.003-06:00

Yesterday, the Utah Foundation published a list of 10 issues of concern for the State of Utah in 2008. A new site, UtahPriorities.net has been established by the Foundation to share information on these issues. The site includes a forum for discussing the issues. Governor Huntsman spoke at the meeting where the issues were presented. With over 2.6 million pages of content, Utah.gov provides lots of plans, data, and other information on each of these issues.

Utah Foundation poll's top 10 issues of concern for '08

1. Energy issues, including utilities and gas prices

Governor's Energy Policy, Gov. on Energy Security, Hydropower Wave of Utah's Energy Future, Future of the Utah Coal Industry, Utah Energy Efficiency Strategy, Geothermal Resources in Utah, Wind Energy
Lots of energy resources are available, including maps and data of untapped mineral, wind, and geothermal sources. We should provide this data in formats that can be reused to add value, including kml.

2. K-12 education

K-12 Future Challenges, Designing the 21st Century Classroom, Weber School District Strategic Plan
UEN provides a common forum for school districts and will soon upgrade the network backbone to 10gig. New strategies for learning should be promoted. I understand that Utah's Electronic High School has some new innovations planned. I hope these include use of more advance collaboration tools and resources.

3. Taxes and government spending

Last month, the Legislature passed a bill that requires the state to make its financial records available to the public in a higher degree of detail.

4. Health care

Virtual Healthcare Interactive, Pandemic Flu Preparedness, eHealth Initiative, Evolution of Public Health Systems: Enterprise Approaches
Utah should continue its quest to be a leader in eHealth. I think that Doctor Sundwald has a good vision here.

5. Immigration

Immigration Overview, Senator Hatch on Immigration-related Crime, Immigration Is Us

6. Crime and security

BCI Crime Stats, Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice
Utah is sharing data through CrimeReports.com. This mashup provides a real-time glance at criminal activity. Over 35 local government agencies are participating.

7. Water supply and quality

Water Supply and Reservoir Storage, Utah Water Science Center, Utah State Water Plan
We must remember that we live in a desert. Our water agencies have done a great job at real-time monitoring of water resources. An example is the Sevier River Water Users Association. Eventually, we will be forced to conserve.

8. Environmental issues, including air quality and pollution

2007 Report on the Environment, Stegner Center

9. Transportation and traffic

Transportation Systems Planning and Programming, Traffic Volume Maps, St. George City Traffic Information Exchange
We should continue to improve real-time traffic monitoring systems and get somehow get ahead of the transportation planning cycle.

10. Dealing with Utah's growth

Envision Utah, Quality Growth Commission

Real Estate Activity in Utah

2008-03-24T15:47:00.005-06:00

Heidi Rodeback points out this report from Commerce CRG summarizing real estate activity in Utah. The report has dozens of interesting indicators such as this chart showing the decline of retail vacancies over the previous 5 years. This kind of data is critical to city and state planners as well as industry. We should be doing a much better job of consolidating the information that we have and making it available in usable formats that would really help businesses in planning. Something that is still severely lacking in our business portal. Maps, social networking and other tools, when combined with such data could dramatically improve the whole process. Commerce CRG also has a database of commercial properties available in the state.

NGA has published a new issue paper outlining state strategies to promote angel investment for economic growth.

Foresee Results not Encouraging

2008-03-21T08:15:00.004-06:00

According to survey company Foresee Results, satisfaction with E-Government (as measured against US federal government sites), is waning - at its lowest level in three years. It does seem, however, that citizens are still anxious to interact with government as measured by an increase in satisfaction with the e-commerce aspect of Federal websites. Internet user are experiencing a lot of new capabilities available through the internet and expect the same improvements to be available on government websites.

A survey of Federal CIO's from FederalTimes.com shares the following info:

"...only 9 percent of CIOs surveyed said they’ve been in their jobs longer than four years, compared with 29 percent last year."

"The number of CIOs reporting to a secretary or bureau head dropped from 55 percent to about 42 percent between 2006 and 2007. At the same time, the number of CIOs reporting to chief financial officers increased to about 24 percent, up from about 5 percent in 2006."

I have NO idea why you would want your CIO reporting to a CFO as opposed to the agency head. Doesn't make any sense to me.

Utah Attorney General broadcasts on UStream about Open Government

2008-03-20T09:33:00.003-06:00

Utah Attorney General, Mark Shurtleff now has a UStream Channel. Here is yesterday's press conference on open government:

Dave Fletcher's Government and Technology Weblog, v. 2.0

Setting the Agenda for 2012 and Beyond

Best of Digital Government in Utah 2011

Connecting the Data Dots

Another Great Mobile App

Working Toward CloudPlan 2.0

SCR & QR Codes

Road Map for the Digital City

Immerse Yourself in Utah.gov 2011

The best and worst states at providing broadband

Project Prologue Documents Early Years of Egovernment in Utah

The Shuttering of America.gov

Community Broadband Networks

Administrative Control of Utah.gov

Best of 2010 for Digital Government / IT in Utah

Preparing for the next five years: checklist

Flipboard

OPTIC Pushes Forward the Digital Agenda in Dominican Republic

Digital Disruption: Lessons for Government

Federal CTO Discusses Government's Use of New Technologies

irekia - the most open of governments

The Herriman Fire: Another Example of Social Media in an Emergency

Innovating in 2010

NIST on Innovation

eGov Site of the Day

Mexico's Bicentennial

eGov Site of the Day

How My Information Handling has Changed

Sitemapping provides you with new partners

Best of 2009 for Digital Government / IT in Utah

From Nebraska to Singapore

Layar and Augmented Reality

Creating Utah's Hybrid Cloud

Government as a Platform

Twitter Outage

Thinking about ROI on a State Website

Absorbing comments on the new Utah.gov

Images of Utah's State Capitol

New Utah Travelwise Videos

Utah.gov Acknowledgements

Paul Taylor: Utah.gov: This is the Portal you've been waiting for

Ines Mergel

Ari Herzog

Jaimy Marie

Paul Canning

New Utah.gov

Google Squared

Transparent.Utah.gov

Swine Flu Map

Government Offices in Utah

Word Cloud of this Blog

Presentation of Web 2 Aggregation Tests

Test Widget for Surplus Property

Slideshare

Random Comments

Digital Government Controversy

Demo Air Quality Widget

Creating Widgets for Government

Governor Huntsman Delivers State of the State address

Budget Cuts

Time to Prepare for Level 5 in the eGov Maturity Model

Goodbye to 2008

Sharing Data, If it could all be so effective as this

Top 10 for Utah.gov in 2008

Recent news and info from the World of eGov

Tech in Gov

This Week on Utah.gov

More Utah Videos on YouTube

This Week on Utah.gov

This Week on Utah.gov

Multimedia Splash

Technology and Government: Week 2

Oct 26 - Nov 1 on Utah.gov

Week in Global eGov

Regulations in RSS

Tech in Gov: Week One

This Week on Utah.gov

Daily Posts

Government Technology Features on the Digital State

eGov and Stuff