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October 29, 2002
Pictures from NASCIO Conference
Here are some pictures I took around the conference at break this afternoon.
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Clockwise from the upper left are
- Mark Foreman from the Whitehouse who spoke this morning.
- Rock Regan, the current president of NASCIO and CIO from CT.
- Rich Varn (CIO,, IA), Tom Davies (Governing Magazine), Rebecca Heidepriem (CIO, WI), and Mary Barber Reynolds (CIO, IL).
- Michaela Mezo from Enterasys and Al Cabraloff from Microsoft.
02:28 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Innovative Funding, Total Cost of Ownership and ROI
Moderator: Bob Feingold, Chief Information Officer, Governor's Office of Innovation and Technology, State of Colorado
Panelists: Craig L. Johnson, Associate Professor of Public Finance and Policy Analysis, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University
Pat O'Donnell, Vice President-Sales and Marketing, Anexsys
Richard Varn, Chief Information Officer, State of Iowa
Pat O'Donnell is talking about various ROI models. She cites the following issues that make calculating ROI in the public sector less straightforward than it might be in the private sector:
- agencies must serve all constiuents
- agencies must abide by specific legislation and rules
- eGovernment initiative deliver on both tanglible and intangible policy goals
She is talking about the following methods:
- Net present value model; chief benefit: simple, chief drawback: doesn't account for soft benefits
- Benefit cost analysis: chief benefit: takes into account soft benefits;
- Cost-effectiveness model: CEA=Total Benefit/Net Total Cost
Net present value is not appropriate if the answers to these questions is "no":
- Are benefits and costs predominantly private and social?
- Are the benefits tangible or intangible?
- Can intangible benefits be quantified and agreed upon?
Craig Johnson is speaking on public sector finance models. Net benefit or consumer surplus is the difference between the cost and what someone would pay. Apparently is a fairly well understood model of public sector finance. Consumer surplus can be used to set prices, particularly in G2B solutions. Craig apparently believe pretty strongly that fees are appropriate in many cases.
Richard Varn of Iowa has strong ROI program. Rich makes a few interesting points:
- Technology is about reducing the amount of labor directed at certain activities.
- Many people end up in jobs they have little preparation for (i.e. training is important)
- If you want savings, you have to change behavior.
- Richard thinks there are eight primary areas of government and seven operational responsibilities (wish I had a link here).
12:12 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Roman Goddess
NASCIO, in addition to being an organization of state CIOs is the name of one of the Roman goddesses of birth.
11:47 AM | Recommend This | Print This
In Honor of the GIS Panel
In honor of the GIS panel that I just listened to, I note that the location of this NASCIO conference (Hyatt Regency Station) is N 38 degrees 37.770' W090 degrees 12.556' and 578 feet above sea level. Here's a map (which I found by typing the hotel's phone number into google; the easiest way I know of to turn a phone number into a geographic information.)
11:19 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Schema Controlled XML Editing
Reading Jon Udell's weblog, I ran across the Xopos XML editor. I clicked on the demo and within minutes was editing XML inside my browser. I haven't played with it extensively, but what I did do was pretty neat. The editor is fairly comprehensive; you can edit the content of cells and move them around (subject to the schema) without ever seeing the XML or even knowing what XML is. It was smart enough to warn me when I left the page with unsaved changed (something I've fussed with in other browser based editors). If you've got data you want entered or edited in an XML structure, this may be a good tool to look at.
09:59 AM | Recommend This | Print This
GIS and a National Map
I'm in the GIS breakout session. Kari J. Craun, who is Chief, Mid-Continent Mapping Center, US Geological Survey, and a cartographer by trade is speaking about a national map. The topological maps that we all know and love are apparently 25 years out of date. The USGS has a project to produce a "national map" that would be a seamless, continuously updated set of geospatial information built from orthorectified imagery, land cover, elevation, geographic names as well as vector layers for transportation, hydrography, structures, and boundaries.
One of the drivers is, not surprisingly, homeland security. Someone who trains on a map in one area (and remember this many not be a piece of paper) and then gets moved to another area to respond to an emergency ought to be able to pick up the map in that area and have it be the same in terms of meta data. I think homeland security will be the interstate highway system of the new century. Much will be done under the auspices of homeland security which will ultimately have many other benefits to citizens. You may not remember, but Eisenhower proposed the interstate highway system as a defense logistics system during the cold war. Clearly its use and benefits has far surpassed that initial goal.
09:49 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Federal Enterprise Architecture and eGovernment
Mark Forman, Associate Director for Information Technology and E-Government, U.S. Office of Management and Budget is speaking about the use of enterprise architecture in the federal government. Mark has been very good about working with the states and recognizing that there is a great asset and huge constituency in the state CIO offices.
One of the tings I like about the federal eGovernment vision is that its not just about 24x7 availability, but also says that it will deliver decision in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. I like it for two reasons:
- It focuses on what citizens really want: quick service, not just availability.
- It drives business process re-engineering.
I think that overall we've been pretty good in Utah at understanding this issue, but I don't see it explicitly stated anywhere.
Mark is making the point that we do eGovernment because we live in a world of interdependencies. This is a good point. eGovernment is a much deeper concept than just putting a web page up to conduct transactions with citizens: its about the interdependencies. This is the basic fact that drives the move to cross agency, citizen centric applications. Mark brings up the example of homeland security. Homeland security is about interoperability, not just for voice, but for data. That goes well beyond sending email from first responder to first responder. It implies getting the right information to the right person at the right time. Our first responder portal project is right in line with this.
Some slogans:
- Buy once, use many
- Collect once, use many
- When eGovernment is broken, its visible to everybody
Project SAFECOM is a new mobile data interoperability project that includes voice, but not as a the primary driver. Mark says that he's gone through several program managers looking for someone who understands the issues. He says he had to get away from the voice people because they didn't get data, but data people see voice as just another kind of data. He also had to find a program manager who understood that consensus didn't include lobbyists. You can only imagine the pressure from companies who see controlling this project as the key to sales to thousands of public safety departments around the country.
Forman talks about their governance process and how he manages agency IT. Each agency is evaluated on the following criteria as part of the budget process:
- Modernization blueprint -- enterprise architecture
- Business cases -- Capital planning and investment control done against blueprint
- IT program management
- IT security
Mark's staff is charged with helping each agency get to green on these areas. His deputy manages this process. Laggards in security, for example, won't get funds released until the fix is part of the plan and the capital planning process. The results of the quarterly evaluations against these areas are reported to the Cabinet by the President. Each agency has a CIO who has to report, by law, to their agency heads. Part of their overall process is about building cross agency teams since the lines of business that cut across agency lines. Because there are multiple agencies per line of business, the chief operating officer of the enterprise has to take responsibility for deciding who is to take ownership for fixing a line of business. Man, does this all sound familiar!