Phil Windley's Technometria

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June 30, 2002

Blogs for System Status Communications

My organization operates hundreds of servers in several data centers and a network that connects over 250 separate locations.  One of the problems we have is status communication to various interested parties.  Tonight I decided we should have a system status blog that uses categories with separate RSS feeds for various severity levels and systems.  For the low price of $40/year we could have: 

• One easy spot to post status announcements, which would be ordered in exactly the right way.
• A web-based record of status.
• Multiple RSS feeds of the various systems and severity levels.
• Easy integration into the personalization feature of our intranet;  RSS feeds would show up as gadget boxes for people who want them.
• The ability to easily subscribe to RSS feeds and digest them in various ways for people with special needs. 

How could you not like that? 

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IM in the Enterprise: Part II

A few weeks ago, I wrote:

While [free IM tools] suits my needs pretty well on base functionality, I'd hesitate before endorsing it as a corporate tool.  In addition to the need protect the contents of message with encryption, a coporate tool needs:

• the ability to use the company's LDAP directory for accounts and passwords
• better methods of finding who's available
• logging and monitoring of messages
• filtering capabilites for viruses

A recent article in ZD Net News, talks about the issues for corporations who want to use IM in the workplace and for IM providers like Yahoo! and AOL. 

I'd like our customer support (for internal IT customers) to offer IM as an alternative to the phone for people with support problems.  We'd need logging and monitoring capabilities for that to be viable.  And I'm not about to pay a $50/head licensing cost for a commercial IM solution---that's $1M.  An IM product is not worth $1M to us.   Looks like its time to spend some time playing with Jabber. 

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June 29, 2002

Wi-Fi Basics

PC Magazine has a pretty decent intro to setting up Wi-Fi networks, including links to some CaptivePortal sites.  Rick Gee and I were just discussing captive portals (although I admit I didn't know the term) on Friday in connection with planning wireless networks for the state. 

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Technology Growth and Commercialization

The other day Steve Fulling asked me "what ever happened to P2P?" My response was "its still there and interesting."  His view was that it was gone because he didn't see company announcements, new products, etc.  After some thought we came to the conclusion that in tough economic times, technology doesn't slow down as much as its commercialization.  My view is that P2P, Web Services, etc. are growing and thriving.  At some point someone is going to add some capital and, like an algae bloom, we're going to see another season of dramatic commercialization of information technologies.  

I think this is especially true for software.  Think of all the programmers out there experimenting with P2P, 802.11X, SOAP, WSIL, etc.  None of this costs very much and folks can develop all sorts of interesting ideas without much capital investment.  One day some capital or an intersecting idea comes along and "wham!" a company is born. 

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Broadband Changes Lives

A report from the PEW "Internet and American Life" project reports the following:

There are three major ways in which broadband users distinguish themselves from their dial-up counterparts. For high-speed home users, broadband lets them use the Internet to:

• become creators and managers of online content;
• satisfy a wide range of queries for information, and;
• engage in multiple Internet activities on a daily basis.

Home broadband users have a new proximity to information and a convenient tool for communication that changes the way they find, generate, and manipulate content. Some uses of the high-speed connection are of the everyday sort -- checking the time a movie is showing, finding a recipe, or settling a friendly argument about a factoid. Many are of greater weight, such as getting health care information off the Internet, taking an online course, or working at home. Home broadband users are typical early technology adopters -- that is, they are wealthy, educated, and male. Our research shows that even though these demographic characteristics are factors in the broadband difference, the high-speed connection matters most in spurring these online Americans to new levels of Internet use.

My earlier posting relates why I'm not convinced the capital markets will take care of rural (and even not so rural) Americans.  I can't imagine daily life without an always on (relatively) high-speed net connection. 

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June 28, 2002

Metadata and RSS in Utah

The Shifted Librarian has this to say about the Metadata project that Utah's own state library division is working on:

Now this is an excellent resource! Put up by the Government Information Locator Service (GILS) folks in Utah, this one-page tutorial gives a brief overview of RSS, what it looks like, aggregators (they call them "viewers"), how to locate feeds, how to create your own feeds, how to validate your RSS, and more.

I'm not sure what impresses me the most - the link to Metabrowser (their "recommended tool for creating and editing UtahGILS and Dublin Core metadata"), their Metabrowser tutorial, the reminder about David Carter-Tod's Javascript code for embedding an RSS feed in a web page, that they're doing RSS with meta tags, or that it's the library folks doing it!

I r-e-a-l-l-y need to get these people to talk to the folks at the Illinois State Library so that they'll understand my vision of news aggregation for Illinois libraries.

This is cool!  The good folks at the Utah State Library have been using technology to accomplish their mission for some time now.  Hopefully we can make their life easier as we move to a content management system to manage utah.gov. 

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Public Sector Jobs

Ellen Perlman's "TechTalk" column in Governing magazine quotes me a few times on what its like to make the leap from the private sector to the public sector.  At some point in the interview, I'm pretty sure I said the word "gutwrenching."   She didn't use that quote. 

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Warchalking: Less is More

The warchalking site has a discussion going on about what form the warchalking icons should take.    One side, the "more is more" crowd, wants to create lots of icons that carry lots of information.  Frankly, most of it is information only a techie could love.    

My organization networks over 250 buildings for 22,000 employees. We're also in the planning phase of deploying Wi-Fi access points at places where cops hang out so they can connect to the net during their shift (they use CDPD for low bandwidth ops, but need a high bandwidth option sometimes). In this kind of environment, warchalking has some important uses beyond finding a free net. I'm hoping to use warchalking icons to alert employees to the existence of wireless nets in conference rooms and other places.  

Given all this, I have to come down in the less is more camp. The icons need to be kept simple and relatively few if we expect them to be used.

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June 27, 2002

Government Unprepared on Cybersecurity?

From CIO magazine:

A new survey conducted by the Business Software Alliance has found that almost half of all IT professionals believe that the government will be hit by a major cyber attack some time in the next year. Wait, it gets worse. One third of those who believe that a cyber attack is on the way also believe that such an attack is extremely likely, and almost three quarters think the government is unprepared.

I'm not sure how much I trust a survey done by BSA.  Seems like the results are pretty self serving.  What's even more ironic is that Microsoft is at the same time the largest supporter of BSA and the largest cause of security problems in government or out!

States will probably beat the Feds to security for several reasons:

1. Most state governments are much smaller than even small federal agencies.  Utah, for example, employs just 22,000 people. 
2. The Feds are "assisting us" with requirements like HIPPA that give us a monetary interest in security.  HIPPA will set a minimum security standard for the entire network.  
3. Some states (like Utah) have a statewide network with controlled access points to the Internet.  Having one group managing security for the entire network greatly increases the chances of doing effective intrusion detection, profiling, etc. 

I'm much more concerned about what is being done to protect "non-IT" assets from cybersecurity threats than the standard computer attack.  Many critical systems have embedded computer systems, but no IT oversight. (Can you say "Docutex"?  I knew you could.)  Until business managers (in government and out) start treating IT professionals as partners who can make important contributions to the business as a whole, we'll continue to be vulnerable. 

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June 26, 2002

Budget by Deliverables

Bob Woolley talks about budgeting by deliverables from Dean Meyer:

Budget-by-deliverables is simple in concept. A successful budget process requires crystal-clear definitions, across-the-board activity-based costing, and consistency across all groups in the organization. This might be an interesting way to look at IT budgeting in State government. See http://www.ndma.com/products/em/bbd.htm [Bob Woolley's Technology Weblog]

I read through this a while ago as well and it made great sense to me.  Dean says:

Budgets should be presented in a different way. The organization should total the rows, not the columns. This is termed "budget-by-deliverables," distinct from budgeting by cost factors.

Seems simple enough, but I think it requires a cultural change in the whole organization to make it fly. 

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War Chalking

Black Belt Jones has a web site devoted to warchalking--drawing icons to indicate wireless network status in particular areas.  As we deploy wireless networks in the state, maybe we should use these icons to indicate to people where the access points are and how they work.  We've even been talking about establishing access points in places where police congregate on breaks (fill in the obvious joke here) so that they can get network access.   These symbols would help with that.   

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Fighting Spam

An article in the New York Times technology section talks about fighting spam.  I recently started using SpamAssassin on my personal POP server.  So far, I'm quite pleased with the results.  The program uses rules to score mail as SPAM.  Right now, I'm just redirecting it to a different mailbox and reading it to make sure it works and doesn't throw out too many things I'd really like to see.  So far, nothing I can't live without. 

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Living in Utopia

The problems of WorldComm and the collapse of Adelphia lead one to believe that the capital markets for broadband are going to be out of sorts for some time.  What's a techie living outside the current broadband footprint to do? 

One answer may be projects like the Utopia project being undertaken by a number of Utah cities and towns.  Utopia is an interlocal agency (a government agency in Utah formed by the member governments and governed by an MOU) that is undertaking the infrastructure piece of the broadband puzzle and hoping to attract companies to provide services (like ISP services, video on demand, and even mundane things like meter reading) on the infrastructure they create. 

The fact of the matter is that even when the capital markets improve, there will be more attractive places to build out broadband infrastructure than small (and even mid-sized) towns in Utah.  Utopia is an answer to that problem.

I'm sure some will object that government ought not to be doing this.  Certainly some will say "if it doesn't make sense for private industry, why should government do it?"  I have a few responses:

1. Government has access to different sources of capital than private industry and in many cases, something can make sense, from a capital standpoint, for government that doesn't make sense for a private business.  The required rates of return can be much lower, for example. 
2. Government has different motivations than private business do.  Governments are about managing a society, not tuning a profit, and so public policy issues may make this a valid project for government to tackle.
3. Governments have been in the infrastructure business for a long time. 

Utopia certainly has a long way to go before the dream is reality, but I'm happy and grateful to see someone trying. 

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WSIL: Finding Web Services

One of the facets of web services that has always seemed like "the emporer's new clothes" to me is UDDI.  I've never understood how I'd use it in real life (at least until such time that there are significant web services that function as commodities).  Tarak Modi, in a recent article on the difference between UDDI and WSIL says:

Let's say that your company needs to wire significant amounts of money from one place to another on a regular basis and you wanted to automate this process by utilizing a readily available Web Service. To do so, assume that you did a search in a UDDI registry and three such services showed up. Based on the discussion above, two of the three entries will probably be invalid. The next question is, do you even know or trust the vendor that is publishing the third entry? How can you be sure that this is a legitimate company? Even if you know and trust the vendor, you will probably not be able to or even want to use the service without entering into a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the vendor.

WSIL is an alternative (and perhaps compliment) to UDDI that allows web service vendors to advertise the offer on their own site.  The standard insists that the WSIL document be placed in a file called inspection.wsil in the web root of the site.  After that, it would be a simple matter for Google to pick these up and categorize them .  Viola, instant web services directory.   

Seems like the way to go to me. 

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June 25, 2002

XSpaces

So I just found out about XSpaces reading Jon Udell's blog.  XSpaces are free, public key-value pair stores that you read and write using SOAP.  Pretty cool.  They could be used as publically acccessible blackboards (remember blackboard architectures from your AI class?) for sharing information between programs.  Kind of like Internet dead drops. 

The next logical question, at least to me, is: if a SOAP accessible hash table is a good idea, why not other data structures as well?  Could we use a similar stack space, queue space, etc.?  If not, why?  The second question I have is: now that we have reinvented shared memory on an Internet scale, shouldn't we have a companion semaphore service? 

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SAML First Blush

I've been reading some on SAML, the XML language for passing authentication information around the net.  SAML, as one would expect from an XML based language doesn't do authentication, it is merely a standard for passing authentication information and user attributes from place to place. 

There's a pretty good article from Sun that gives some actual code examples (always a welcome addition) as well as the standard itself. 

I'm still not entirely clear on how this all relates to other initiatives such as MS Passport and the Liberty Alliance.  It is clear that SAML is not at odds with those projects. 

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Fed Authentication Gateway

The Federal government's CIO website has a PDF document describing the goals and high-level design of their authentication engine.  One part of me is sad to see that they don't envision its use beyond federal agencies.  The other part of me is relieved.  

The part of me that is sad is sad because I envision a future web where I can get government services without worrying about which agency or even which level of government offers the component pieces.  SSO (single sign on) is critical to that happening and if the feds don't share their authentication engine with the states and local governments, its harder to do. 

The problem can be solved, of course, with protocols like SAML.  No word from the feds on whether they're going to support it or not. 

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June 24, 2002

More on IDs

In Infoweek this morning:

The sheer volume of enterprise user accounts and distributed applications creates an inescapable "vortex," forcing customers to seek ways to cut costs while automating security and efficiency, said Pete Lindstrom, senior security strategies analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based Hurwitz Group.

Automating the extended processes surrounding ID management and account provisioning can reap immediate rewards, from freeing up critical help-desk support to increased employee productivity and ROI, Lindstrom said.

This article was talking specifically about web services, but I think its true even without a web services deployment.  If you're ready now, using SAML and other web services single sign-on protocols will be easy. 

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Identity, Authentication, and Authorization

We're about to move to a single directory structure where I work.  By July we should have unique IDs for all 22,000 workers and be able to access them from a single directory tree.  No small accomplishment, but one that is too long coming.  (We're using Novell's NDS and DirXML, for the curious.) 

The real challenge will be to ensure that new applications are written to take advantage of this new structure and prioritizing which old applications need to be rewritten.  Oh, and did I mention educating the workers? 

I have a hard time believing that there are IT professionals out there who don't see the value in this, but they're there.  In this age of connectedness and data sharing, I take it as an article of faith that identity, authentication, and authorization should be managed once and the results useful across the enterprise.  The advantages are there to be sure, but its the disadvantages that drive this issue. 

Chief among the disadvantages are security and privacy concerns.  When someone leaves a job their access to sensative data should terminate as well and that doesn't happen reliably when identity and authorization are handled on  an ad hoc basis.   Just as Y2K issues forced IT to clean up a variety of problems (and gave them the excuse they needed to convince the boss), HIPPA is driving this issue for government and the health care industry. 

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June 20, 2002

Rate and Cost Structure Transparency

In a recent article in CIO Magazine Mohanbir Sawhney writes:

Transparency is a good thing for customers, but it seems to threaten suppliers. One of my favorite questions for executives is: If your customers knew everything about your products, your costs, your prices and your competitors' offerings, would you be better off? Judging from the uncomfortable silences I usually encounter in response, most executives believe that transparency is an enemy of profit.

While I think this is an interesting question for companies, as a whole, I think it also has a special meaning for CIOs who run IT service organizations that charge internal customers for their service. 

One might wonder why this question even needs to be asked.  It would seem that within a single company or organization, rate and cost transparency is a no brainer.  But we're all familiar with corporate politics and this process is subject to the same pulls and tugs that other corporate decisions are. 

The problem is more accute internally because internal customers have an expectation of openness.  They resent not knowing and will come up with their own explainations of costs if they don't get good information. What they make up is almost always more damaging to the IT organization that the truth. 

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June 19, 2002

Collaboration Tools in the Workplace

There's a lot of interest in collaboration tools in the workplace.  Groupware, of course, is the granddaddy collaboration tool and provides some important features (scheduling being at the top of the list) all on an email platform.  Recently other, richer collaboration tools such as Groove have made a splash. 

We did an experiment a few months back with a tool from a company called Bluestep.  Bluestep started out as a non-profit vertical ASP called MyAssociation.com and built a pretty good, centrally hosted collaboration tool---something their vertical was crying out for.  The software is well done and has a good feature set.  We wanted to see what these richer collaboration tools would do for us so we started a pilot and used them for several months in some different settings.  Here's what we found out:

The only place the tool really caught on and gained traction was in groups that couldn't meet face to face regularly.  So, for virtual groups spread out all over the state, it was a win and people learned to use it.  For closely knit offices the tool languished despite heavy executive buy-in and what I consider to be an honest attempt to make the tool work.

The bottom line is that while everyone agreed that there would be benefits from using the collaboration tool, the product didn't "hit a nerve." 

I don't think this bodes well for people expecting tools like Groove and Weblogs to take the enterprise by storm.  Indeed, using the Bluestep tool couldn't have been easier (nothing to install or manage) and yet people wouldn't take the time to click on a link each day and participate---at least not if they could still walk across the hall instead.   Groupwise may be as much as we're ready for right now.   

 

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June 18, 2002

RSS Feeds at NewsIsFree

You can find category feeds of RSS information at NewsIsFree as well. 

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RSS: An Update

It turns out that you can use moreover.com itself to aggregate, filter, and remove redundency from a category of news and then get an RSS feed of the results. 

First, go to the moreover.com categories page.  Select a category or do a search.  Somewhere in the URL that lists the results, you'll see an o=portal.  Change it to o=rss and subscribe to that feed.  (Thanks to Amphetadesk). 

Still, I'd like to be able to do it myself. 

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RSS on Steroids

RSS is a great thing and I've quickly become adicted to the aggregated newsfeed that I get inside Radio.  Still, I'm looking for something more.  In fact, what I'm looking for is a commercial service one can buy from Moveover.com. 

Admittedly, I'm not an RSS expert, but I've looked around a bit and it seems that its missing some critical pieces, like filtering, redundency elimination, etc.  The technical architecture of moreover.com shows some of those features. 

As an example, I'd like to put a gadget on my weblog (like the Google box) that is an aggregation of RSS feeds from various technical news sources (like ZDNet, Inforweek, etc.) filtered by keyword.  Doesn't seem like building a filter for RSS feeds would be a huge job.  Maybe its time to break out my toolbox and code a little. 

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June 17, 2002

Book Review

IT Organization: Building A Worldclass Infrastructure
by Harris Kern, Stuart Galup, Guy Nemiro

Supporting business needs and aligning IT with business strategy are important issues that seem to be at the top of every CIO's agenda.  One of the ways to do this is to have a world class IT infrastructure. 

Kern, who at one time was the CIO at Sun Microsystems, defines infrastructure as everything used in IT to support the business including the people, processes, and organization.  While he was CIO at Sun, Kern was ordered to "get rid of the mainframes" and replace them with Sun gear.  That experience set him on the road of discovering what it takes to build reliabile, highly available client-server systems.  Good information for anyone building web services as well. 

The book is more than just Kern's musings; its built on top of site evaulations to over 40 Fortune-1000 companies.  The advice is based on the results of those vists and the problems that those organizations have in common.   

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Understanding XML

In The Right SOAP, Daniel F. Savarese says:

Whether you like it or not, Web services are here to stay. The fog has lifted and the structure of Web services has been revealed: XML in, XML out. Not very complicated. So why are so many programmers having a hard time getting their arms around Web services?

Having taught over 130 students an enteprise computing course over the last three years, and having had quite a bit of experience using XML in large projects, I can think of a few reasons:

• Most of the computing literature on XML, SOAP, and web services in general fails to relate these technologies back to standard CS theory that any computer scientist should know (more on this in a minute).
• The writings on these technologies is full of hype and consequently makes them seem more complicated than they are.
• Most programmers aren't familiar with RPC or messaging to any great extent and so generalizations of these techniques are even more obtuse. 

When I ask my students what they know about XML, I get parroted hype from some and honest admissions of confusion from the others.  I find that I can generally clear both up with a few simple statements:

• XML is a way of describing context free grammers.
• A DTD is a BNF for a particular grammer.
• XML parsers are interpreted versions of LEX/YACC. 
• Use XML and technologies based on it when you can justify the parsing and rendering cost of the more general representation that XML buys you.

These statements allow anyone with a little CS theory to separate fact from hype and make some pretty good decisions about where to deploy XML based technologies. 

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June 13, 2002

Code as Your First Impression

Jon Udell makes and interesting statement on his weblog:

Here's the best take-away from the talk. Now that we have largely replaced human touchpoints (sales clerks, travel agents, etc.) with software, it is the behavior of software, not human employees, that projects the corporate brand. So every business is now in the software business, and the quality of the software's behavior is a crucial success factor. Amen to that. However we get there, high-quality software behavior is a goal on which we can all agree.

This is an intriguing idea.  There's a relatively famous case study (from Harvard, I think) about Sears during one of their turn arounds.  As part of the changes they made, they made a concerted effort to change the attitude and vision of the sales clerks on the floor since that was the only interaction most customers had with the company.  I know Wal-Mart makes significant efforts here as well (my Dad is a door greater!). 

For many companies, the software comment is very true and not just for Amazon and eBay either.  While citizens will certainly have many different interactions with the State of Utah, we touch thousands of them every day at www.utah.gov.  The quality of that interaction is our brand. 

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Digital Dashboards

Jon Robb talks about using RSS to build digital dashboards:

The concept is simple.  In addition to getting new posts from news sites and other weblogs, RSS feeds can contain data from corporate systems.  Sales data, financial data, supply data, data from partner systems, etc.  Using this method, employees could get up to the minute data from multiple applications on a single webpage -- a personal digital dashboard.

I think this is a great concept, but I have a few thoughts:

• First, the idea of using RSS (or something like it--I might want more structure) for dashboards is great.   I'd love to see constantly updated dashboards with all the relevant informaiton that a manager needs and, of course, this would be different for every manager.  I once heard someone describe the perfect content of the dashboard as the answers to the 10 questions that manager asks every morning to do their job.

• Why wouldn't I just use a portal tool like the Novell portal product to aggregate the the data on a personalized basis for people.  I'm all for experimentation and weblogs and all, but the fact is that in an enterprise you want things to be simple, straightforward, and not cause too many support calls.  Having everyone use Radio just for the new aggregator wouldn't be a good move.  Now, if there was a reason to have them all doing weblogs as well (and I'm sure that there are) then that's a different story.  Still not sure I'd pick a desktop based product over a server based product though. 

• To be useful for this purpose (and many others) I also want to be able to control more easily the layout of the news that gets aggregated.  For example, I don't want the daily sales figures getting all mixed in with the NYT technology page list.  I want is in a box in the upper left hand corner that turns RED when the figure is below target. 

Still, I'm intrigued by the possible uses of RSS, etc. in the enterprise. 

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June 12, 2002

Book Review

Decentralization: Fantasies, Failings, and Fundamentals
by N. Dean Meyer

When I first read this book, I couldn't believe that someone had captured the essence of my organizational frustrations so succinctly. 

The first part of the book talks about the good reasons organizations decentralize.  The second part of the book talks about the huge costs of decentralization.  These reasons and the associated costs lead to a pendulum effect of an organization centralizing to save money and then decentralizing to get good customer service.  

The last part of the book takes on this very issue and discusses how to stop the pendulum: a healthy central services organization and how to build it.   

I was impressed enough with the content of the book that I contacted Dean and hired him to come out for a day and talk to our IT Directors and the management of our central services shop. 

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Apache Configuration

About 9 months ago, while I was teaching my class on enterprise computing, I had the idea that I'd rather store my EJB configurations in an LDAP server than in property files.  They'd be easier to manage and I could put all the configurations in a single (redundant) place that was network accessible.  It didn't take me long to realize that the same kind of LDAP based configuration server would be a big win for places that run a lot of web servers (or any other server for that matter) as well.  Server configuration used to eat up gobs of time at Excite\@Home.  Seems that Covalent Technologies had the same idea (at least when it came to Apache). 

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Enterprise IM

AOL is apparently working on putting encryption in their AIM instant messaging product.  This is a good thing.  I've used AIM now to communicate with friends, family, and co-workers for a couple of years.  There are times when IM is better than the phone or email--conveying an added sense of immediacy without requiring your undivided attention as a phone conversation does.

While the current product suits my needs pretty well on base functionality, I'd hesitate before endorsing it as a corporate tool.  In addition to the need protect the contents of message with encryption, a coporate tool needs:

• the ability to use the company's LDAP directory for accounts and passwords
• better methods of finding who's available
• logging and monitoring of messages
• filtering capabilites for viruses

Given these features, I think IM would be a useful addition to our enterprise and I'd endorse it.  For now, it will remain experimental. 

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June 11, 2002

Service Level Agreements

I just got around to looking at the Spring 2002 issue of the Journal of Computer Resource Management (unfortunately, there's no online version, but its published by the Computer Measurement Group).  There's a nice article by Chris Overton called "On the Threory and Practice of Internet SLA's."  Chris works for Keynote Systems and does a lot of this kind of analysis.  This is probably one of the most comprehensive analyses on service level agreements that you'll find anywhere.  Worth a trip to the library if that's what you have to do to read it.  Baseline magazine had a related article (that references Chris's article) in their March issue.   

I just received a note from Chris and he's made the article available at Keynote for download.  Eventually (sometime next week?) there will be a spreadsheet tool that accompanies the article. 

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eGovernment on the Ropes?

Tom Davies has an article in the June issue of Governing Magazine entitled "Throw eGovernment a Lifeline."   He contends:

You don’t have to believe e-gov is dead to conclude that it has seen better days. One state chief information officer recently banned the use of the term “e-gov” in discussions with him. In this year’s gubernatorial state-of-the-state messages, e-gov was invoked rarely — a distinct contrast to the past few years when the term was sprinkled throughout major speeches.

I'd agree that there's been times when its been the focus of more hype, but from my perspective its still as exciting as it was two years ago.  I know that I can still get people excited with the vision of government that's more responsive and more transparent.  And that really is my major beef with the article.  Tom says:

Also, the term transformation is used so loosely that it is losing its meaning. Too frequently it’s not clear what the word means in a government context. For example, what degree of improvement is needed to qualify for transformational status? Is allowing citizens to register their vehicles or pay parking tickets over the Web really transformational? Associating e-gov with transformation, just to gain support for additional spending on technology, does more harm than good.

I, for one, still believe that eGovernment is transformational.  I'll define what I mean by "transformational:"  the power of networking technologies to hide the structure of government from those needing service.  In everything from starting a business to getting help with a dibilitating disease, government requires myriad things from us; eGovernment has the power to aggregate those experiences into a meaniful interaction instead of the multiple, disjointed, often repetitive interactions that happen today.  More of my thoughts on this are available in a white paper on eGovernment Maturity. 

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June 10, 2002

Seriously Bored

The latest issue of CIO Magazine has an article on Life Among the Seriously Bored.  The article makes the case that fundamental changes in how IT is done has taken the excitement and challenge out of being a CIO.  Among the changes are vanilla implementaions of things like CRM and ERP systems.  The other problem, say the author, is that good CIOs solve the problems (or run up against the barriers put in place to keep someone from solving the problems) and then are bored.  There's some truth to this. 

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