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August 13, 2002
Reorganizing IT
Last week (before I went on vacation), Governor Leavitt announced a restructuring of IT in Utah State government. The change was covered by the local press (The SL Tribune covered it as well, but has a stupid policy of only allowing access to the last week's issues without paying a fee).
This change is designed to increase our capacity to create cross agency eGovernment applications as well as to strengthen the enterprise view of IT. My life has suddenly gotten a lot busier as I work to implement this plan. Its clear from the Governor's letter that he expects business line managers to be more conversant in IT and for IT to be more aligned with business.
Utah has long been recognized as a leader among the various states in the management of IT and its use of eGovernment. I believe that these changes and the direction they set will allow us to maintain that leadership in the face of some pretty stiff competition.
10:09 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Do It Yourself DSL
An article from Business 2.0 about a small town who got fed up waiting for the telcos to offer broadband in their community:
Oppedahl and about a dozen of his neighbors bought it last year for approximately $5,000. Then they scooped up cable modems, routers, and other equipment (usually for pennies on the dollar on eBay) and spent the past 10 months setting up the first subscriber-owned DSL co-op in America. While it all might seem unremarkable to outsiders -- it serves 12 homes at average DSL data speeds -- it does offer a compelling script for rural towns that don't want to wait until the next ice age to join the 21st century.
This isn't unlike the UTOPIA project in spirit, although UTOPIA is somewhat larger in scale (500,000 end users).
08:06 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Utah Wins EPA eGovernment Grant
Utah was amoung 44 states that got a grant (about $400K) to work with EPA in developing the National Environmental Information Exchange Network. The Exchange Network is a joint project for sharing environmental data between EPA, states, and other partners over the Internet. This is a component of the Federal eGovernment initiative. Utah has been a participant in a pilot project for the last year that showed the benefit and feasibility of this larger project.
07:52 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Utah.gov Blogroll Keeps on Rolling
Al Sherwood, on my staff, is keeping a blog and it looks like it will be interesting. One of the biggest questions in my mind is will this prove to be a valuable way for me to keep up with what my direct reports are working on and thinking about. I'm hoping it will.
04:05 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Enabling Web Services
I've completed a paper on Enabling Web Services which takes my earlier principles, cleans them up, and wraps some explaination around them along with pointers to other resources. This will appear in this month's Capitol Connections newsletter.
02:37 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Another Addition to the Utah.gov Blogroll
Wade Billings is the newest member of the Utah.gov blogroll.
01:49 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Network World Article on Blogging
I was interviewed for this article on blogging and using it in large organizations a few weeks ago. Most of the interest was generated by my offer to pay for blogging software for the first 100 State IT workers to start one.