Summaries for May 1, 2010

BASEBALL-LOVING JIM WILLIAMS CONTEMPLATES HIS NEXT AT-BAT
It's July 23, 2009 at Cellular Field in Chicago. Pitching ace Mark Buehrle, jersey #56, is just three outs from throwing the 18th perfect game in the history of baseball. Who is that a few rows behind the plate, but Jim Williams. Once, when I was in a hotel room in Indiana watching the American League playoffs on television, the camera was panning the crowd sitting close to the field at Boston's Fenway Park. And yes, that was Jim Williams. No Forrest Gump, Williams, who retired last month after more than 30 years of federal services, has also been a close-up witness to several of the most important IT initiatives of recent years.   -> Read More

TRANSPARENCY BECOMES MORE THAN CHECK-BOX EXERCISE
Government is not a glass house and likely never will be, but it is inching towards greater transparency, at least by its own standards. A milestone of sorts was reached late last month when agencies submitted, and received judgement on, their plans to apply technology to foster a culture of openness. That's how Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra put it.   -> Read More

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MOBILE APPS BECOME THE RAGE IN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
It's a movement: Mobile applications for people to access federal government services. Every agency should be thinking about "mobilizing" its online services. Mobility is starting to sprout in governments the world over, according to the U.N. E-Government Survey 2010.  -> Read More

U.N. REPORT GIVES SNAPSHOT OF WORLDWIDE E-GOVERNMENT
As the federal government works so hard to improve transparency, try out all of the social and collaborative media, and make everything from federal information to broadband access more universal, it's a good idea to step back for a little perspective. Perspective comes from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs' E-Government Survey 2010. It hasn't gotten a lot of publicity, but it shows that things in the U.S. aren't so bad.  -> Read More

• Baseball-loving Jim Williams Contemplates His Next At-Bat

  Jim Williams

  It's July 23, 2009 at Cellular Field in Chicago. Pitching ace Mark Buehrle, jersey #56, is just three outs from throwing the 18th perfect game in the history of baseball. Who is that a few rows behind the plate, but Jim Williams, in the midst of one of his annual boys-only baseball trips with a friend and their assorted sons. Williams had been reading a book on the trip: "Perfect" by Lew Paper, the story of Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 (yes, '56) World Series. Once, when I was in a hotel room in Indiana watching the American League playoffs on television, the camera was panning the crowd sitting close to the field at Boston's Fenway Park. And yes, that was Jim Williams that I spotted on the screen.

  Less than a month ago, visiting his daughter in Rome, Williams found himself in a receiving line so close to the Pope that he met Benedict XVI and kissed the Holy Father's ring. In an official Vatican photo taken a few moments later, you can see through the bubble of the Popemobile and spot a face looking right though it -- Jim Williams.

  No Forrest Gump, Williams, who retired last month after more than 30 years of federal services, has also been a close-up witness to several of the most important IT initiatives of recent years. More accurately, he has participated in and helped shape them. Some of these developments were far from smooth or lacking in controversy, yet Williams remains as high on public service as anyone you'll encounter.

  Williams plans to work somehow in the private sector, but he didn't take the standard route into a systems integrator or some 8(a) company. He wants to take his time, weigh options, and look for the right opportunity, something that would behoove a lot of people who leave government heavily credentialed.

  In a review of his career for FedInsider, Williams said that he considers his high point to have been his stint as program director for the U.S. VISIT program launched by the then-new Homeland Security Department. Still being expanded, it is the signature system for tracking visitors to the United States. "I loved the people, loved the mission," Williams said. "VISIT was unique. There was a sense of urgency, of people working together."

  Williams also headed, for a time, the IRS modernization program, which, he said, "was a tough one." The program had been started and failed a couple of times earlier and was under near-constant oversight from Congress. Still, for the good memories, Williams recalls the people, particularly the IRS commissioner at the time. "Charles Rosotti was one of the smartest, nicest men I ever knew," Williams said.

  For most of his career, Williams has in fact held acquisition posts, his final one being commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at the General Services Administration. Like many his age, plus or minus a few years, he had fond memories of the Reinventing Government/National Performance Review era headed by Vice President Al Gore during the Clinton administration. The stars were aligned then with Congress to overhaul federal procurement in a series of landmark pieces of legislation, including the Federal Acquisition Reform Act and the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act. These, coupled with efforts by the Clinton Office of Federal Procurement Policy, gave more discretion to federal managers and closer cooperation between government and industry.

  Now, Williams said, he fears a backlash might be taking place against contracting and contractors, but argues, "We need to have government-industry partnerships. We couldn't have gotten the year 2000 done," he said, referring to the massive effort to convert two-digit dates at the turn of the millennium.

  Aside from the obvious advance of technology, for Williams the biggest change in government service is the diversification of the work force. Said Williams, "It was much more white men back then. I once had a boss who told me he only promoted family men. Now what you see truly represents America. I'm a huge fan of diversity. It's the way you get a good project to A-plus."

  To those who know Williams, the hold on his nomination to be the administrator of GSA by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said more about some of the absurd practices of Congress than about Williams. But he expresses no bitterness in having had an acting appointment, joking that getting the confirmed job would have meant a pay cut. As he decides what to do professionally, Williams enjoys coffee in the mornings with his wife, Nancy, and planning a new round of baseball trips. He and the boys have taken in games in every major league ballpark, but now they are starting over. The friend's son is on a mission in Africa and returns the summer of 2012. For Williams' baseball group, the plans are already in the works for that summer: Mets, Twins, Cardinals, Reds.

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• Transparency Becomes More Than Check-Box Exercise

  Government is not a glass house and likely never will be, but it is inching towards greater transparency, at least by its own standards. A milestone of sorts was reached late last month when agencies submitted, and received judgement on, their plans to apply technology to foster a culture of openness. That's how Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra put it. Leading the scoring of the agency plans according to 30 criteria were Chopra and his CIO counterpart, Vivek Kundra. They talked about the results in the Open Gov blog hosted by the White House. The scores for 29 agencies show a touch of Lake Wobegon, with no one failing any part of the plans. Yet only Health and Human Services, NASA and Transportation got green marks for their plans overall.

  A different picture came from OpenTheGovernment, a coalition of several dozen good-government groups. It ranked the same agencies on a 1-60 numerical grade, and was a bit tougher. The lowest ranking plans, in its estimation, were  Defense, Energy, Justice, Treasury -- and the Office of Management and Budget itself. It gave its highest marks to NASA. Why? Mainly, OpenTheGovernment evaluators said, because of the level of detail about each program that NASA makes available online. The lowest ranked Justice Department was dinged because it promised a lot of generalities without specific deadlines, the group said.

  It might be tempting to think of the open government exercises as just that, another requirement coming down from yet another administration. Agency managers have been watching quarterly report cards for a long time now. But Chopra is urging them not to treat the directive as a check-box exercise.

  One new study supports the idea of really working at openness. From the Pew Internet and American Life Project comes the finding that most Americans accessing government web sites are looking for just the sort of information being fostered by data.gov and the Open Government Directive. Pew, in a big study of how people use federal information, reported that 40 percent of adult Internet users have gone online for data about government spending and activities. And 16 percent have visited sites such as data.gov. "Such as" is an important caveat, because the raw numbers for unique visitors to data.gov so far have been small in the grand scheme of things, maybe 50,000 per month according to one official. This implies people are still going in large numbers directly to the agencies where they think the information they seek may be housed.

  Although not addressed directly in the context of the Open Government Directive, the plans submitted by agencies also can give a hint as to whether they are open to an important constituency besides the public, namely other agencies. Usually this is expressed as information sharing -- but information sharing is really another way of saying horizontal openness. And information sharing was underscored this past week when terror suspect Faisal Shahzad almost got away after nearly bombing Times Square. Faster uptake of the No-Fly List and the airline's passenger manifest would have given law enforcement a bigger lead, avoiding the close call of having the FAA call the plane back to the gate. The case also shows the importance of public-private openness and the need for exploring where tighter coupling of private transactions and public safety is required. I'm thinking of the fact that, according to published reports, it was several hours before the United Arab Emirates airline notified the Transportation Security Administration that the suspect had used cash to purchase an international ticket for a Pakistan destination.

  When mistrust of government, whatever that may mean, is on the rise, Chopra is right that transparency is an important tool in maintaining and improving trust.

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• Mobile Apps Become The Rage In Federal Government

  It's a movement: Mobile applications for people to access federal government services. Every agency should be thinking about "mobilizing" its online services. The U.N. E-Government Survey 2010, described in Story #4 below, shows that the mobile phenomenon is taking hold worldwide. Some countries alert people via text messages on the status of applications for services or benefits, or when permits are due for renewal.

  Examples of full-fledged mobile applications are popping up in the federal government. The most famous at the moment is Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). It's received a lot of news coverage for its m.fema.gov mobile application, which can be viewed on a regular computer. It works not just on an iPhone but on any phone with a Web browser. An important function will let people register with the potential need for assistance, so that if all is lost in a disaster including personal credentials, an individual can still receive benefits and prove his or her identity. The Postal Service and Environmental Protection Agency have also launched light, mobile versions of their web sites.

  A Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has a request for proposals out to develop military and national security mobile apps, with a focus on iPhone and Android phones. This makes me wonder, would a ruggedized version of these devices ever be offered? I believe that's unlikely from Apple itself, knowing a little about the company. DARPA is not looking for apps per se right now, but rather for white papers on products including those that might already be in the commercial marketplace. Somewhat more expansive technically is the Army Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems' (PEO EIS) RFP for mobile phones and slate computers, including iPhone (and, now, presumably iPad), Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices. The Army is looking for field-deployable training applications.

  Agencies seem to be getting mobility right. Nothing is more frustrating than the proverbial attempt to get 10 pounds of potatoes in a 5-pound sack. Overly graphic mobile Web sites waste bandwidth, time and memory when what people want, or need, is speed and simplicity on tiny screens.

  A good test for these principles is found in still another RFP, that of the General Services Administration to build a successor to the E-Gov Travel Services Program. It's badly in need of updating. The RFP states GSA will hold a May 12 pre-solicitation conference on this complex procurement, the performance length of which is potentially 15 years. Jason Miller of Federal News Radio dug in and found that deployment to mobile devices is part of the RFP. This makes sense, given that nearly every detail of travel is doable on mobile devices nowadays, even the receipt of boarding passes.

  Beyond all of these is the apps.gov store that is undergoing revision and will include mobile apps, if Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has his way. He's hoping developers will build applications on the offerings at data.gov that are suitable for downloading via apps.gov.

  All applications are potentially candidates for re-architecting as mobile. Many agencies are looking into virtualizing the desktop environments that now exist -- inefficiently, expensively and insecurely -- on tens of thousands of individual machines. Done right, virtual desktops can be device-independent, and used on whatever device a user happens to be carrying.

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• U.N. Report Gives Snapshot of Worldwide E-Government

  As the federal government works so hard to improve transparency, try out all of the social and collaborative media, and make everything from federal information to broadband access more universal, it's a good idea to step back for a little perspective.

  Perspective comes from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs' E-Government Survey 2010. It hasn't gotten a lot of publicity, perhaps because it is something of a somewhat stultifying document that requires fortitude to dig out the nuggets. But it shows that things in the U.S. aren't so bad. In fact, they're pretty good.

  The survey itself, the latest in a series of five, has much for its readers to be skeptical about; this is a U.N. effort, after all. For better or worse, references to openness, transparency, e-government, and competence are applied as much to countries, like our own, that are serious about trying to achieve these qualities as they are to U.N. member states Cuba, Iran, Myanmar and North Korea. To its credit, the U.N. committee putting together the survey was guided by e-government experts from the U.S., U.K, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, India and Canada.

  The report takes as its theme the relationship between e-government and economic development during the financial crisis from which countries seem to be emerging. It notes that the major economic powers as a group committed $2.6 trillion to economic stimulus, including the stimulus bill passed during the early months of the Obama administration. Transparency in how that money was used is something other countries joined the U.S. in trying to achieve, the report points out. For example, Australia also has a web site for citizens to track its economic stimulus spending, complete with interactive maps just like recovery.gov. (Note that the U.N. cites recovery.gov as evidence that "most geographic information systems applied by state and local governments are not the same, frequently incompatible and based on proprietary standards.") Of the 30 crisis response web sites set up throughout the world, recovery.gov gets the most checkmarks for the objectives it is trying to reach and the tools it employs.

  The U.N. has also created indices for the degree of e-ness of governments around the world, with 1.0 being theoretically perfect. The U.S. and Canada are pretty close, with about a 0.85 index, versus a world average of 0.44.

  The indices of general readiness for e-government, show that places like and including the United States have a rich infrastructure -- in our case largely privately financed. Even during a recessionary year, for example, the broadband providers in the U.S. spent more than $30 billion in capital investment.

  Here are some of the stats:

  E-government development index, the U.S. ranks second with that 0.85 score, second to the Republic of Korea with 0.875. Niger is the lowest, 0.11.

  Online service index, again U.S. with 0.94 is a shade below Korea, which got a perfect 1.0. Dozens of countries have virtually no online service.

  For telecommunications infrastructure, the U.S. ranks 11th with an index of 0.64, based on 74 internet users per 100 people, 51 telephone land lines, 86 mobile subscribers, 78 PCs, but only 25 fixed broadband connections per 100 people. Switzerland rates the highest telecom index, 0.77. Myanmar is lowest -- almost no one has a phone of any sort there.

  The human capital index, derived from the adult literacy rate and combined enrollment in school K-12, puts the U.S. in 20th place, with an index of 0.97 (a 99 percent adult literacy rate and 92 percent school enrollment.) Oddly, Cuba's index of 0.99 comes from 99.8 percent adult literacy rate and 100 school enrollment, if you believe what Cuba reports.

  There's much more in the report, such as the insight that mobile devices, much more than conventional computers, are shaping up to be the way that the digital divide among citizens is bridged. Indeed, several federal agencies are launching mobile applications (see related story).

  I recommend reading this U.S. report. Bring a little skepticism, but be prepared to find some good ideas from around the world and a load of comparative data.

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