The Gartner Government research team is deeply involved with U.S. and global government agencies to help them navigate through the current economic turmoil, by advising on cost optimization, both within IT departments and leveraging IT systems to optimize overall program/department expenses. To further improve our ability to provide in-depth advice, we are conducting a brief survey that investigates strategic and tactical cost optimization actions that have been implemented (or are planned to be implemented) by federal, state and local government agencies, as well as what the results and major barriers have been so far in deploying those actions.

The survey can be found here, and takes 10-15 minutes to complete.

As a token of our appreciation, if you qualify for and complete the questionnaire, you will receive a copy of the final Research Study once it has been completed.

Please note that all information you provide will be used for research purposes only. None of your responses will be identified with your name or your organization's name without your permission.

Please also make sure you answer with reference only to budgets your office controls (e.g., statewide or specific department, agency, bureau, or office) not for non-IT departmental budgets controlled by line-of-business/program executives.

We look forward to your feedback!

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Gartner is receiving numerous inquiries from clients eager to know what type of technology priorities the new Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Janet Napolitano, will set for the Department. To answer this, we must look back at her record as Arizona Governor. However, as Governor she managed a budget of roughly between $9-10 billion USD and focused on the use of homeland security-related technologies to control immigration and streamline the criminal justice process. Now, as head of a Federal agency that spent over $61 billion in FY 2008 and is charged with nationwide homeland security threats, no one can really predict what she may or may not focus on at this early date.

However, as Governor she focused on counter-terrorism and as a result DHS helped co-sponsor the Arizona Counter-Terrorism Information Center, which is a fusion center designed to share various types of information (including intelligence) between and among differing domains and levels of government. In addition, her interests in implementing surveillance-type technologies, such as, aerial reconnaissance platforms and sensory devices to better detect illegal border crossings as well as champion license plate recognition technologies for the State Highway Patrol seems high. For example, she criticized the Federal government's building of a border fence with Mexico as a waste of time and money. She still maintains that governments should "incentivize" the private sector to develop more innovative technologies. However, she has never been specific with what she meant other than in the context of improved border detection and surveillance or guest-workers programs.

Rhetoric aside, look for her to focus on ways the private sector can better apply technology to better develop, classify and share various types of information for large programs such as US-VISIT, Secure Border Initiative, Transportation Workers Identity Credential.

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The newest Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, issued an executive order to report on the status of state and local intelligence sharing efforts. While it is welcome news that the Secretary recognizes that state and local law enforcement agencies must receive better information within and among all agencies, for doing so increases public safety, it is a concern if she does not recognize that information sharing is a defining principle for effective homeland security among all agencies. To help defend against terrorism and protect the lives of all Americans, all law enforcement organizations must be able to share data and exchange intelligence information across jurisdictional boundaries. In this review, DHS should ask these questions:

• How and why are state and local law enforcement information sharing systems being initiated
• What works and what does not work for these agencies
• How much do they cost
• What are the barriers to participation

Shifting the review away from a total DHS-centric or Federal government-centric viewpoint may reveal some revelations as to how state and local multi-jurisdictional information sharing systems operate both functionally and technically and how they are tied to specific policing functions.

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Gartner is conducting research into how governments and other public sector organizations (operators of critical infrastructure) are using and planning to use geographic information systems (GIS) and technologies. As a result, we are asking you to visit the following website to complete our GIS in Government online survey.

All of your survey entries will remain confidential and will not be attributed to you or to your organization. The information you provide will only be used in an aggregate form. Please complete the online survey form no later than March 1, 2009.

Thank you in advance for your help.

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In recent one-to-one conversations and roundtables with Italian, U.K. and U.S. local governments, Gartner discussed sharing and centralization of IT services. Especially when governments have little money to burn, the business case seems a no-brainer: consolidation generates economies of scale, which will increase productivity and ability to deliver standard quality of service - provided that you can make shared service governance happen (see "Shared Services in Government: Getting It Right").

But what about the ICT companies supplying services to the government? Centralization means - at least in the first phase - the insourcing of activities that separate government business units (now the shared service unit customers) might have previously sourced from external providers, and in the long-term it surely means more consolidated bargaining power that will squeeze suppliers' margins. Suddenly the CIO (or whoever is leading the shared service program) finds herself/himself trapped between the political mandate to reduce IT costs and the political mandate not to harm the economic health of the private sector. In an ideal world, politicians would have built a solid business case, by identifying a scenario where the political return generated by private sector economic development is much higher than the operational efficiency and constituent service gains (see "How to Measure the Public Value of IT"). In a less than ideal (and real) world, politicians often put pressure on CIOs for the wrong reasons, such as:

• Favorable attitudes towards outsourcing. Elected officials and executives might have a strong view about ICT not being the core business of government. They purport that by outsourcing ICT services to external contractors, more government resources could be redeployed to front-office tasks that directly add value to the citizens. Even assuming the external contractor has the government sector expertise necessary to deliver IT solutions that support the desired business outcomes, the argument may be weak from a strict economic point of view. If an ICT shared service or centralized unit is more efficient and effective than an external supplier, the lower cost of delivering the service will free up resources to be invested in better services for the citizens, whereas the outsourcing contract will waste them. A rational decision can only be made by comparing, on a case by case basis, the total cost of ownership and the quality of service.

• The "next Silicon Valley" dream. Politicians often have a view that public procurement can provide enough market opportunity to prompt local entrepreneurs to start up ICT SMEs that will blossom into successful multinationals that they can champion in their next electoral campaign. With the exception of some domains, where public procurement is not a "big enough" market, but is the "only" market - such as defense, public safety or healthcare - governments are rarely the leading-edge buyers that can stimulate ICT innovation. And even in those rare cases, public procurement alone is not enough: it must be complemented by a lively academic research community, venture capital and low level of bureaucracy in order to establish and finance new ventures.

• Political agenda. In some cases, elected officials might not be able to understand the value of managerial efficiencies generated by shared services, because they are solely focused on their political vision. In other, less fortunate, but not less frequent cases, elected officials want to protect their political turf and gain electoral support from large companies and local associations of SMEs.

In the long-run, supply-side innovations such as cloud-based services, that are transforming the service consumption models and fee structures (see "Shared Services in Government: Obscured by the Cloud?"), or demand-side innovations such as social communities, that will prompt constituents to consume services from organizations outside of traditional public administration boundaries, will determine the destiny of what will be delivered by shared services units, or by external providers. But, as John Maynard Keynes used to say,"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." Insourcing or outsourcing won’t kill anyone, but might well shake government CIOs' careers!

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We have just started surveys and client discussions about the topics we need to cover for our government research in 2009. This is what we call our "Research Agenda," which we publish at the beginning of each year (take a look at the Government Agenda for 2008).

We are looking for specific areas of concern for government clients around the world, and we would like to ask both government clients and non-clients three simple questions:

* What are your top three technology issues for 2009?
* What are your top three IT management issues for 2009?
* What are the top three challenges for IT caused by the economic downturn and financial crisis?

You are welcome to either take our ON-LINE SURVEY or to respond to this post.

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In George Orwell's novel, 1984, the government attempts to control the speech and the thoughts of its citizens, cataloging incorrect thoughts as "thought crimes". While this story was first published in 1949 as fiction, now in 2008, in a world affected by terrorism, it may become prophetic. Predicting malicious intent from mere observations is becoming a government skill.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) already uses human agents and surveillance cameras to search airport passengers for their bodys' non-verbal clues to predict whether they intend harm to their fellow passengers. And the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is updating this skill using a mobile laboratory with its Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) program (formerly known as "Project Hostile Intent") to detect harmful intentions from its citizens.

The premise is to reconfigure large trailers to become mobile screening modules that can be set-up at major events, border crossings or even airports that consist of an array of sensors that can measure breathing patterns, pulse rates, facial expressions and skin temperatures as persons answer a series of controlled questions. These questions are akin to those asked by polygraph examiners, such as, "Are you attempting to detonate an explosive device in this airport today?"

The benefit of this approach is that unlike a polygraph examination there is no baseline questioning or wires connected to an individual, so it takes less time. It is being described by DHS and its technology partners as an, "X-ray for bad intentions". The system, known as "Malintent," uses multiple sensors - everything from cameras to infrared sensors to laser radars to collect and collate data to determine if people are displaying certain behavioral, biological or psychological markers that can be classified as malicious.

Recently, DHS tested its mobile screening truck on 144 unknowing volunteers. Twenty-three of these were accomplices who were told by DHS to be "disruptive" as they passed through an entrance way loaded with sensors that screened them - not for bad acts, but for bad intentions. When the sensors identified something as malicious, they transmitted warnings to analysts who then had to make a determination as to whether or not to flag these volunteers for additional questioning and screening for mood and intention.

DHS still has along way to go in regards to accuracy and privacy before you see these mobile screening modules at political conventions, schools, sporting events or even large shopping malls. For example, DHS will have to employ human analysts to assess the data collected and collated to determine if a secondary interview and screening is required. For now, DHS claims that any data collected is only to be used to determine bad intentions and if necessary apply more scrutiny to certain individuals. All data of such encounters is to be destroyed. Assuming this to be true, you cannot erase memories or even testimony of those involved.

The government sees this as a non-judgmental approach, by requiring technology and analysts to differentiate between bad and good intentions. This approach will be subjected to legal challenges. For example, these actions will invoke privacy implications as well as unwanted medical examinations. What about existing medical conditions (sleep deprivation) or reactions to legally prescribed medications (profuse sweating from certain antibiotics) or even illegal substances altering biological markers that are misread as maliciousness. What will a secondary and more probing interview reveal? More importantly how will this information be used against persons and in what context?

If a person is deemed full of bad intentions, is the government remedy to restrict them from otherwise permissible activities? In addition, once the privacy implications are addressed and perhaps somewhat resolved, look to see the addition of more sensors, such as biological and radiological, which if activated would require even more expanded and serious government action and the need for more record-keeping.

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Gartner recently spoke with a regional government that plans to push information to tourists' mobile devices. This could become a more valuable service than not-so-popular government-run tourist portals.

Governments have all sorts of customers to serve: citizens, pupils, patients, businesses - and tourists. Tourists are an attractive clientele, especially for regional and local governments, because they generate direct revenue from taxes and prices paid for public cultural attractions, and indirect revenue from the growing turnover of local businesses. They also cost little, because they do not ask for long-term assistance, such as social or education services, and guarantee some political glow too to the most visited destinations.

A few government agencies followed the chimera of tourist Web portals throughout the e-government era. They had the ambition to provide all information, from tips on what museum to visit, to restaurants and hotel search and booking functionalities. And, while Expedia, lastminute.com, and airlines and railways booking Web sites thrived, government tourist portals lagged behind with few hits. Furthermore, tourists nowadays use more advice from peers, through Web 2.0 communities, such as TripAdvisor, or even more-niche sites dedicated to special themes, such as mountaineering, cycle-touring or Slow Food to select places to visit as well as the best restaurants to dine at. However, there is one type of information that tourists cannot access through those channels - real-time handy tips once they are onsite, such as touring Paris' hundreds of museums, or sailing through the Greek Archipelago, or hiking up a peak in the Rocky Mountains. They will need a map, weather forecasts, directions for a tour that encompasses multiple landmarks, last-minute changes to museums' opening hours, and even a list of nearby pizzerias. That information is typically printed on brochures that can be picked up at the local tourist office, or distributed by the same office through hotels, hostels, campsites, bed and breakfasts (B&Bs), and so on. Proactively pushing that information through Short Message Service or Multimedia Messaging Service could provide a better, more personalized service to tourists. Why would I want to read a 100-page brochure about Amsterdam that includes a 4-by-4 meter (un)foldable map, and information about the Van Gogh museum, classical music concerts and Indian restaurants, when all I care about is the Heineken Brouwerij, steakhouses and funk-rock concerts?

To provide such value-added information, governments do not necessarily need to build ad hoc $10 million portals, which would have few accesses anyhow, because few tourists travel with their laptops. Nor will they have to deploy networks, because, in some cases, they already have agreements with mobile phone operators; for example, to push messages in case of emergencies. Hopefully, they will use those services very rarely, so why not leverage contractual agreements to text tourists with messages that are easier to handle, as they have less-stringent requirements in terms of security and network prioritization. Local governments do not even need to provide all the content; they can mash up and link the information they own with information typically provided by private businesses, such as publishers of tourist maps and guides, or of yellow pages. And they can still collaborate with hotels, hostels, B&B and campsites to channel information; instead of handing out brochures, hotel receptionists will provide phone numbers that by texting keywords will return the desired personalized content.

To implement such a service, local governments will have to build a set of skills that include the ability to segment tourists and design personalized services, the capability to set up and manage partnerships with private-sector content providers and network operators with a sustainable financing model, and technical competencies that lean more toward maintaining and updating their own content and mashing it with private sector partners, rather than deploying new platforms and syndicating content from a hundred different sources. If governments manage to do this, they can make tourists happier, and most likely spend less than if they tried to build fancy tourist portals.

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In 2004, the U.S. Congress enacted the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which was designed to reform the intelligence community, as well as address border protection, immigration and visa matters. As a result, the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) was created to strengthen all border crossings located in the Western Hemisphere by requiring vetted ID cards validating citizenship and identity. Affected travelers will be those from Bermuda, Canada, Central and South Mexico and the Caribbean. Obstacles have slowed government adoption of the WHTI. For example, many Western Hemisphere travelers are accustomed to presenting a driver's license to declare their citizenship, along with supporting documentation such as a birth certificate to be allowed entry/exit. Since January 2007, citizens of these countries (including the U.S.) have had to present a valid passport, Air Nexus card or U.S. Coast Guard Merchant Mariner document, and in January 2008, U.S. Customs and Border Protection terminated accepting verbal declarations of citizenship from Western Hemisphere citizens.

In March 2008, the U.S. federal government announced that the WHTI final regulations would go into effect in July 2009. Once these requirements are in place, verification requirements will vary depending on country. For example, the following types of documents will become the only acceptable documents for border crossings and ports of entry.
• U.S. citizens must present a valid passport, passport card, enhanced driver's license or a trusted traveler program card (Nexus, Fast or SENTRI), Merchant Mariner card or valid U.S. military ID card. For merchant marines as well as military personnel these ID cards will only be accepted if you can demonstrate you are on official and not personal business.
• U.S. permanent residents will be required to present their resident cards.
• Canadian citizens will be required to present a valid passport, enhanced driver's license or a trusted-traveler-equivalent program card (Fast or Nexus).
• Mexican nationals will be required to present a valid passport and visa, a government sanctioned Border Crossing Card, or a valid SENTRI card
• Members of U.S. and Canadian Indian tribes will be required to present Indian identification cards.

Thus, unless new rules pre-empt existing ones, WHTI seems to be still allowing a variety of other documents. In addition, the U.S. government is now offering citizens a new wallet-size passport card for both land and sea travel to and from Western Hemisphere countries. This new card uses a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that allows the U.S. Customs and Border officers to access photographs and other biographical information before the traveler reaches the inspection booth. However, this new passport card is not ICAO-compliant but only WHTI-compliant - meaning this passport card cannot be used for any international travel outside the Western Hemisphere. The cost of the card is $45 for adults and $35 for children. Current U.S. passport holders can apply for only $20; the same information and process required for a traditional passport book will be used for this card. The question remains whether this card is worth the effort and for what other purposes can it be used?

This new passport card eliminates the need for travelers to carry multiple documents, and this card can verify identification and citizenship through a unique government identifier that gives government agents access to government databases that the passport book cannot. Thus, when compared to a traditional passport book, RFID-enabled (if working properly) wallet cards could speed up the inspection process. However, these cards will have to be protected by some form of sleeve to block them from being read by other RFID scanners when not used for border crossings. A traditional passport book holder must ask the question, "Is this wallet-size card worth the additional time and money for what is in essence a minor convenience?" This question must be answered on an individual basis. However, collectively, this passport card seems to be another avenue for RFID-enabled chips to be used in ID cards. If recent history is an indicator, the U.S. government is determined in the long term to use RFID-enabled chips in various identity card schemes. For example, when the Department of Homeland Security developed implementation regulations to support the Real ID Act, it considered but dropped the idea of requiring each state to include RFID-enabled chips. However, if the passport card is successful, then look for more government-specific uses for the RFID-enabled chips, such as for workplace or other government-issued IDs.

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As social networking continues to grow, it is characterized by little governance and self-organization, especially for the residents of the Gulf Coast states as Hurricane Gustav approached. The long-lasting devastation and lack of credible information that are part of Hurricane Katrina's legacy permeated the minds of many regular citizens with an awareness of the web. With the help of the free social networking site ning.com, they volunteered to support a Web site to alert people of Gustav's path, providing critical information such as the location of emergency shelters. All this work was done in one day - 31 August 2008.

How did this happen? It all began a few years ago when ning.com and others began an experiment in harnessing the power of social networking for creating structured social interactions. Ning's online service enables building and using social Web applications supporting hundreds of applications, video sharing, photos, tagging, blogs, wikis, map mashups that can be used to create multiple mini Web sites that are all hosted and managed by ning.com. For example, as Gustav approached, Ning created a hosted wiki. Within 24 hours, volunteers copied useful emergency management information, such as links and feeds from Katrina Web sites, and updated them. These citizens also provided neighborhood and regional updates. This site can work even without computer access or Internet connections as it can be accessed and updated using Twitter and an iPhone or another mobile device. This volunteer-supported site is best understood as a platform that aggregates content from a variety of social media sources, such as Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, allowing ordinary citizens to post and link to a variety of information and content.

Governments should look at this recent exercise in Web flexibility and get busy retrofitting wikis, blogs and social-networking sites to deliver similar capability. Learn from ordinary citizens that new capabilities are only a mouse-click away in harnessing a form of Web-based community activism that providers for a more-flexible self-service approach to government-to-citizen interaction and are less dependent on government's more-general information broadcasts.

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In a recent research note (see "Government and IT Modernization"), we highlighted the fact that government agencies need to modernize their IT paradigm to cope with new business requirements and to tackle issues that directly challenge the sustainability and manageability of IT systems, and operations. Legacy application modernization is one of the most impacted areas. Two of the driving factors for application modernization mentioned in our note were:

• Elected officials and program executives need to have levers they can pull to quickly adapt the way government operations are run. This need for flexibility is exacerbated in times of budget constraints.
• Existing government IT systems are the result of proliferation of fragmented developments and updates, thus, they require significant amounts of time and money for changes, upgrades, and maintenance. In addition, the people with the skills to manage those systems are retiring.
The state of California's government payroll system is the quintessential example. As the state continued to operate without a budget 36 days into the fiscal year, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently announced a plan to issue minimum-wage checks to 200,000 state workers to preserve cash during the following two months.

But Democrat State Controller John Chiang replied that it would take at least six months - and not one as requested by the governor — to reconfigure the state's legacy payroll system to issue blanket checks at the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour. In essence, an outdated software application, managed with skills that are becoming scarce, dictates what elected officials and government executives can do, instead of providing services that flexibly align to the business strategy.
California must find a quick fix — and most likely a rather expensive one — such as hiring freelance consultants to rush system changes, rehiring retired personnel with COBOL skills, or outsourcing the whole payroll process to a BPO vendor for the next couple of months. But the real message of this story is that a bell is ringing for government agencies that still rely on 30-year-old applications. Budget constraints will not permit a "big bang" approach or the use of substitute mainframe systems with the latest commercial off-the-shelf software.

Besides, this is not the only possible approach to acquiring new applications (see "When to Use Custom, Proprietary, Open-Source or Community-Source Software"), and certainly, it cannot be done in one month. The state of California's CIO, finance department, controller and HR department - and stakeholders in other jurisdictions with similar legacy modernization challenges - will need to sit around a table and define a long-term application strategy by identifying gaps in the existing architecture as well as what needs to be done to align with the business requirements. That application strategy will form the basis of a modernization program that will include both technology sourcing and implementation, as well as business changes. Once the strategy is set, selling the business case to the governor to draw the appropriate amount of money will be the easiest task.

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We all understand the need for nations to secure their borders from illegal aliens or terrorist infiltrations, or from unwanted or illegal contraband. To this end, the U.S. government has long recognized a doctrine known as "border search exception," which permits federal agents to search travelers and their property at international borders and American ports of entry without probable cause. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is mainly responsible for conducting these types of searches and they permit their agents to randomly search the belongings of any traveler of any nationality entering or exiting the U.S. This practice is distinguishable from conducting searches of a traveler's body, which requires more justification. While this process is somewhat time-consuming, most travelers grudgingly submit to this invasive procedure as a reasonable measure by government to protect its sovereignty. However, recent developments are calling into question the reasonableness of certain U.S. security measures.

In U.S. v. Arnold, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the argument that the search of a traveler's' laptop computer files invaded his personal dignity and privacy interests, and was the equivalent of a body search. Instead, the court ruled that searches of electronic materials are legally equivalent to searches of property. This means that the government can search electronic devices such as digital cameras, laptops mobile devices, iPods, DVDs and other digital information — even vacation photos. The most logical question here is, "What type of limitations are placed on those with the authority to conduct these types of exceptional searches?"

Currently, CBP and Department of Homeland Security officials claim they follow strict guidelines to safeguard confidential and personal information. However well-meaning this belief is, let's examine who has the authority to conduct such searches. The powers of border search exception extend to CBP officers, border patrol agents, air and marine agents, internal affairs officers and any other authorized official. In theory, an Israeli lawyer living and working in Tel Aviv can be retained by a U.S. firm in New York City to provide services. The attorney develops work product, stores it on his laptop's hard drive and schedules a business meeting with a client in New York. On arrival in the U.S., the laptop and digital files can be copied and shared with other authorized officials that CBP designates. For example, if these files are transcribed in Hebrew, more government agents from outside are authorized to translate the files. The translation could invoke the issue of attorney-client privileges, in which case the local U.S. Attorney's Office would make a determination. The only legal limitations to this scenario are to avoid causing exceptional damage to the laptop's hard drive and to conduct the search and investigation in an inoffensive manner. This means that digital information can be downloaded by government agents, never returned or destroyed. In school, kids attempt to excuse their lack of preparation or diligence by telling the teacher that their dog ate their homework, but now the proverbial dog might be the U.S. government and it might no longer be a kid's fairy tale.

Most business travelers have a laptop that contains personal and professional communications, in some cases, corporate secrets, banking information, family photos and confidential business communications — all of which can now be copied over to government computers and used however the government decides. These types of searches give all business and individual travelers' reason to pause about how they travel or transact business. We expect to see more and more business travelers and companies that transact with U.S. firms to encrypt their laptop hard drives and elect to leave the login and passwords with company officials in their host country, to be given once they request them; or to use VPN and the Internet to transfer files.

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Alternative service delivery options (see "Alternative Delivery Models: The First Taxonomy") provided by high-tech vendors in the areas of software as a service (SaaS) and business process outsourcing (BPO), intertwine with shared services to offer small local councils new options to manage their applications.

In fact, during recent conversations with U.S., Australian and European cities and townships of less than 20,000 residents, a common challenge was highlighted by Gartner clients: The authority must provide a minimum set of services, such as code enforcement, parks and recreation, utility billing, tax assessment, and, in some cases, fire, police and court services, but can rarely count on more than 200 employees, which usually means less than 10 IT staff. As a result, managing all horizontal back-office and industry-specific applications on the premises can become ineffective from two points of view. First, the IT staff might not have the time, budget and skills to support all applications maintenance and upgrades, or the underlying infrastructure. On top of that, the few line-of-business employees, rarely dedicated full-time to a single task, do not have the time to acquire complete knowledge of the applications; thus, they cannot not leverage them to their utmost potential, making the return on investment even harder to achieve. Local small authorities are thinking outside the box to solve these challenges.

Alternative delivery of applications through application hosting or SaaS are being considered to reduce the burden on resource-constrained IT departments; however, the business users need to consider thoroughly the implications in terms of organizational and process change, as, especially in the case of SaaS, there is limited ability to customize features and functions to specific requirements (see "Getting ERP into Small Governments and School Districts"). Furthermore, market offerings are not always mature in terms of breadth and depth of functionalities, such as fund control and grants management. As a result, local governments are considering these options for fairly standardized processes, such as accounting and billing.

Purely outsourcing the application, though, does not solve the other side of the challenge: the lack of critical mass and focus of business users. BPO can help counter that. In fact, instead of dedicating one or two line-of-business full-time equivalents to standardized tasks, such as property tax collection, utility billing, payroll, and accounts payable management, local councils can buy the service at a fraction of the cost from external providers. In this case, careful analysis must be done on how much control of performance levels, relationship with constituents, and privacy of data is desirable to give away; or on determining the cost of acquiring skills to manage the relationship with the vendor so that the loss of control does not materialize.

Last, but not least, shared services can help tackle the whole critical mass issue, by creating an organization jointly owned by multiple small authorities. The unit can dedicate line-of-business and IT resources to the specific task, increasing productivity, effectiveness and innovation while ensuring that councils have direct control over performance, constituent relations and privacy. Unfortunately, a lack of political commitment, poor governance and weak project, change and risk management skills often hamper the success of shared services.

In essence, because application sourcing is not a tactical matter for small local governments, a clear strategy must be formulated that considers total cost of ownership, availability of IT and business skills, political attitude toward outsourcing, contract management and collaboration across agencies.

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Web 2.0 and the "social Internet" are very powerful technologies and ideas that governments should certainly be exploiting. However, in the headlong rush to act, all sorts of stray ideas risk being "caught up in the fishing net." The truth is that most governments have a large backlog of potential high-value projects that could work by simply exposing great information databases to businesses and private citizens the old way. Governments should do this by using plain old-fashioned "Web 1" because it is well-understood, cost-effective and low risk. For example, making food safety inspector reports about restaurants available to public access is a relatively simple e-government portal service addition. However, because people think of online restaurant review Web sites as "social," a nice, simple government B2C idea can easily get confused and conflated with Web 2.0 thinking. Of course, it would be technically feasible to offer the food safety inspector reviews as a published Web service for people to do Google Map-based "mashups" — but how much additional citizen value would this deliver for the associated risk? There are new technologies here, unforeseen outcomes and increased difficulties with technology planning — for example, predicting server loads.

So, yes, by all means start performing Web 2.0 experiments, but please take care to separate your risk categories. And when you do seek real Web 2.0 ideas, remember they center on genuinely two-way or multiway mass contribution for their new value. For example, a government that encouraged keen restaurant goers to ask for a kitchen visit, take a couple of mobile phone photos and post them up to a central site would be doing something truly second wave and revolutionary. Recruiting socially active citizens as media support to the food safety inspection process could be helpful on many levels. It's the same basic principle of leveraging volunteer support that governments already apply through engaging with charity organizations or operating a "special constable" part-time police force (see www.policespecials.com).

The particular promise of the social Internet for governments is that it allows "microcontibutions" from citizens to help meet different objectives — some of which have previously been inaccessible to citizen involvement because of the overheads. Spending 10 minutes with a camera to record the state of a restaurant kitchen as a citizen contributor or a few hours as a special police constable walking the beat are basically the same concept using different media, involvement level of granularity. Think a little more deeply about e-government 2.0 before acting.

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While governments around the world start asking themselves about the future of their channel strategies vis-ΰ-vis changing online behaviors and the growth of social networks, some of them hold steady to the strategy of further developing their existing portals. One of the latest cases is Australia (see www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,23777194-16123,00.html), but more will follow suit.

Recently I had a discussion with a large central agency in Europe that considered how Web 2.0 could change their existing Web presence. A leading service provider is helping the agency select which technologies would be worthwhile to add to the agency's enhanced portal. It was surprising to note how the best the provider could come up with was the suggestion to host blogs and forums on the portal. The provider also suggested the use of mashups, meaning that the government portal could mash up maps and similar information from other sources to improve the general look and feel. There had been no reflection about the benefits and risks of blogs and forums, nor had any thought been given to how mashups could be used to make government information more easily accessible (through third parties that could help convey information more effectively to citizens).

While government officials may not be completely at ease with exploring disruptive scenarios such as those illustrated in my previous post, vendors bear a great responsibility in helping them articulate the business case for Web 2.0 technologies. For the past 10 years, vendors have reinforced the view that governments should strive to provide the same Web experience as banks, e-tailers, lead search engines, and so forth, as if they were competing with others. The reality is that, while an effective and efficient Web presence is important, the actual quality of services is more important to people than a nice interface, especially when no one but the government can provide these services. What has been a competition for the best Web site or portal should become a deeper reflection on how architectures should be changed to support multiple channels, many of which will not be under government's control. It is no longer time for bells and whistles, but for taking a pause, understanding how online behaviors and expectations are changing, and moving very prudently toward a more-open approach. This implies smaller steps and smaller contracts. Vendors are understandably less interested in pursuing this path, especially at times when government can help counterbalance declining revenue in other sectors.

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I have been meeting clients in several countries during the past two months, and the discussions about the future of citizen-centric services and e-government in general have been remarkably similar. Whether in Australia or Oman, Singapore or Quebec, Belgium or Ohio, the role and value of portals, the need to better leverage the goldmine of public information that governments sit on, and the constant pressure toward consolidation and rationalization of infrastructure and applications are common themes everywhere.

On several occasions I had the pleasure to give our new presentation, "The Future of Government Is No Government", which was first unveiled at the Gartner Spring Symposium in Barcelona. At every session since then, I have had the most attentive crowd ever, and very enlightening discussions afterward.

The main assumption in the presentation is that by 2013, more than 70% of citizen-centric (or e-government or transformational) government strategies will fail. Several examples already point to how traditional approaches to e-government are failing, including the retirement of some high-profile portals and the uneven nature of e-service uptake figures, as well as the emergence of social networks that rate government services in areas like healthcare, education and human services. In a little animation that opens the presentation, we show the "blurring boundary" phenomenon that I mentioned in a previous post, illustrating the role of social networks in replacing government online channels as well as influencing policy-making processes, the emergence of shared IT services to replace individual agency IT services, the role of external data stores for citizen information (such as Google Health or Microsoft HealthVault), the emergence of cloud-based services (such as storage and e-mail), which compete with agency-owned or government-wide shared services.

Two questions keep recurring. The first concerns data protection and privacy issues and whether governments should even consider external intermediaries to have any sort of access to its services, as this may require personal data to be transferred beyond the boundaries of government. While this is a valid point, it misses an important change of perspective: People will be willing to have more-direct control of their own data by selecting who will manage it. Recent data loss cases in the U.K. and U.S., as well as taxpayer data publication in Italy, suggest that citizen are likely to trust other entities more than government when it comes to their own data. Banks would be a suitable alternative, as would insurance companies and a variety of new "personal data vault" services that vendors and communities will make available.

The second question concerns whether or not intermediation and integration of government services and information with others may change and indeed increase liability. A client observed that, if a choice of a particular government service (for example, a child care option or a specific medical practice for a treatment) were to be influenced by a social network by means of peer exchange and service rating, government would most certainly be sued, should anything go wrong with child care or treatment. This risk varies according to the relevant legal system in the jurisdiction and to the attitude toward litigation. However, I would argue that limiting the government role of providing up-to-date, accessible and easily integrated information, as well as granular, self-contained and easily composed services should contain rather than increase such risk.

While the jury is still out about how fast and to what extent the "blurring boundary" effect will influence government operations and IT, it is important to start exploring the emergence of social networks in each jurisdiction and domain, and critically reviewing current interoperability frameworks and enterprise architectures in view of the need to interoperate with a diverse set of intermediaries and service providers in the not-so-distant future.

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With money tight and time tighter, Gartner is pleased to introduce a new one-day, highly efficient agenda that addresses critical needs for government IT executives: Gartner InFocus Day: Government, June 4 in Washington, DC, at the Gaylord National Resort.

Increasingly, government CIOs are being asked to respond to and drive changes at the enterprise level. The new IT agenda is focused on achieving cost efficiencies, leveraging mission impact from the combination of new Web technologies, balancing programs and portfolios of IT-intensive investment projects, and tightly coupling line-of-business priorities with IT capabilities. The scale and complexity of these demands require clear recipes for success. In this Government InFocus event, you'll learn critical elements for positioning IT for a successful enterprise change. The agenda's highly focused single track covers four topical sessions:
Enterprise Change - Making IT Happen
Five Mutually Reinforcing Web Trends Impacting Enterprise IT
PMOs that Make a Difference
Sorting Through Enterprise IT Governance.

Guest Speakers:
• Scott Studham, CIO, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Dan Mintz, CIO, U.S. Department of Transportation

At this event, relationship building is made easy - network with the best leading Gartner analysts, industry experts, vendors and peers in an informal, highly interactive environment, and share best practices in workshop-style discussions and concentrate on your specific issues at the Analyst Wrap-up Roundtable to help you focus on critical next steps necessary to leverage successful enterprise IT change management.

Take advantage of our SPECIAL OFFERS:

• Call 1 866 405 2511 to register for InFocus Day: Government by May 28 using priority code IFGOVSAVE, and you'll receive $50 off the standard registration price ($795).

• Join us for the first two days of the Gartner IT Security Summit, June 2-3, and attend InFocus Day: Government, June 4, and we'll provide you with the multimedia content from the IT Security Summit FREE of charge - a $495 savings! You'll get live recordings of the conference sessions synchronized to the slides - perfect if you miss a session, want to share with your colleagues back in the office or simply desire to listen again. To take advantage of this special offer, please register for both events by visiting their Web sites.

Check out the Government InFocussite and take a closer look at our agenda.

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In the last two weeks, headlines about two large and hugely important government IT-intensive projects have raised concerns about significant cost overruns, missed deadlines and the potential for scaled-back functionality that formed the basis for the spending decisions. One is the IT modernization work being done to support the 2010 U.S. Census. A $600 million contract to deploy more than 500,000 handheld computing devices to field agents (this is referred to in government circles as the Field Data Collection Automation or FDCA contract) is reported to be in serious trouble because the devices may not work as planned. More disturbing is lack of reliable cost estimates, as well as the possibility that the project may not meet expected deliverable timeframes for the next Census count (even if new requirements are set and more money is made available). The other initiative is the Customs and Border Protection (part of the Department of Homeland Security [DHS]) project known as the Secure Border Initiative Network (SBInet). It involves building a 28-mile "virtual fence" along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border that would include cameras, sensors, towers and software. Last week, DHS accepted a $21 million "prototype" system developed under contract by Boeing that lacked full operational capabilities. According to recent reports, this could result in as much as a three-year delay in putting surveillance technology along the first 100-mile stretch of the border. Serious technical performance problems may also necessitate a strategy shift away from the originally planned network of tower-mounted sensors and surveillance gear.

Mind-boggling, isn't it? Maybe this lends credence to the famous 1960s quote attributed to Sen. Everett Dirksen about government budgeting: "A billion dollars here; a billion dollars there — pretty soon we are talking about real money!" So how is it that after more than a decade of legislative and executive branch IT management reforms (requiring business cases, senior and executive management controls, enterprise architecture alignment, strong project management practices, and so on) that these kinds of "red light" problems and results arise with greater transparency toward the end of a project life cycle?

The short answer may be politics (with a small "p"). Many times agencies rush to project initiation because of the political pressure “to do something” about a problem, even in the absence of a clear understanding of realistic timeframes, complexities, costs and specific program or process improvement benefits (see "Why IT Projects Fail in Government" and "Lack of Goals and Specifications Doom FBIs Virtual Case Management System"). Another reason may lie in execution deficiencies: You have to actually follow good IT management practices (rather than just create the policies and guidance) for them to be effective. A third revolves around the quality of the data and information being used to justify and manage projects (completeness, quality, reliability, timeliness and broad access). A fourth, and perhaps most important considering the highly decentralized environment typical of government, is the lack of effective and workable IT governance structures (involving PMOs, investment review committees, ARBs, executive councils, and so on) with properly defined authorities and accountabilities. IT governance must scrutinize agency business demands, requirements, and priorities and diligently monitor project progress and performance (business value impact and technical soundness) from concept through deployment. Two conditions tremendously affect the success of governance at operational, tactical, and strategic levels: the degree of transparency in project condition realities (cost, schedule, risk and benefit realization) and agile, proactive and criteria-based decisions/actions. As "battle-tested" PPM approaches clearly illustrate, you have to "see" what’s going on with your IT investments and take action as required — either maintain the existing course, accelerate, stop, kill (not wound), delay or refocus. In government, herein may lie some of the biggest challenges with effective project and portfolio management (PPM). For more views, see my upcoming survey of government PPM technology providers.

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We have just published an entire spotlight on government and Web 2.0. Through our research positions throughout the year, we have constantly tried to shift our clients' perception of Web 2.0 from its most visible (and somewhat hyped) social and participative dimension to its business impact, in terms of mashups and composite applications.

We have been trying to collapse the multidimensional impact of Web 2.0 into a single, powerful statement, and the closest we have come up with is "Web 2.0 will blur all government boundaries."

Today, governments mostly look at how Web 2.0 can help them better engage their constituents in policymaking, so they are indeed exploring how the existing boundaries between governments, citizens and established stakeholders in policymaking (such as political parties, associations, unions and so forth) get blurred. In fact, it is not the individual citizen's opinion expressed through an e-participation tool or a blog that makes the difference. It is the collective opinion of a group of people, some of whom are also represented by business or consumer associations, parties or other nonprofit organizations, who get together into a transient, virtual community gathering similar opinions about a particular subject. This raises a fundamental question about how loud the voice of such a community would or should be with respect to established stakeholders. Policymaking processes offer multiple opportunities for blurring boundaries, such as using wikis to collaboratively create a draft policy across different minister cabinets or even different tiers of government, to engage virtual communities in the earliest stage of policy design.

However, we believe that the most interesting area of Web 2.0 impact will be service delivery. User feedback and service rating, user-tagged or user-created content, and user-driven service design can have a formidable impact on both improving service delivery and triggering a genuine and sustainable interest in being engaged. The use of mashups and composite applications to allow government services to be accessed (and improved) through nongovernment channels will be very important. If one reflects on the deepest implications, assumptions about which data governments should own or manage and which processes they should really be responsible for get challenged. What if constituents could choose where to store their own personal data, possibly with a service provider that grants them fine-grained control of who can access their data and under which conditions? What if all the discussions about where governments should source their data were challenged by citizens claiming the right of making that choice? In another research note, "The Real Future of E-Government: From Joined-Up to Mashed-Up," we explore how deep the consequences of mashups could be.

This opens a new set of "blurring boundaries" scenarios, between identities managed by government and personal data stored somewhere else, between legal requirements to access data and the right of citizens to retain control, and between the use of data to perform government transactions and the ability of external service providers in different industry sectors to add value to their clients by mashing up that data. Indeed, many claim that privacy laws may make any of these scenarios hardly possible: On the other hand, if one looks closely at what data protection laws really say, many of the constraints that have made data exchange so hard even inside government are a matter of restrictive interpretation and - even more - often an excuse to defend existing turf and boundaries.

Another very interesting area where boundaries will be blurred is within the government workforce. The way case workers will process and solve cases in areas as diverse as human services, taxes and justice will be very different from how it is done today. Social networks inside and outside government will become one of the most important knowledge sources for government workers to process their cases. The boundaries between employees in different departments and - even more - those between employees and the citizens they serve will gradually disappear, and communities holding critical expertise about how to solve cases in different areas will take a leading role in how those cases get processed.

We are completing a survey about the use of Web 2.0 in government to better understand how deeply government organizations are reflecting about the use of Web 2.0.

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The recent wildfires in Southern California overwhelmed traditional modes of communication, such as radio and television, due to the many transmitters located in the path of the raging fires. The Associated Press reported that more than 500,000 citizens had evacuated their homes and that the fires had consumed more than 373,000 acres of land — roughly the size of New York City. Many distressed citizens and homeowners turned to their mobile phones to stay in touch — so much so that San Diego authorities instituted a ban on all cellular communications because these conversations were taking up to much bandwidth, preventing first responders from communicating with one another.

As a result, many turned to Web 2.0 technologies to spread and share information. Differing media outlets and private citizens used blogs/podcasts, wikis and mashups to provide a collective, location-aware intelligence and support for updating users on evacuation routes and centers; which neighborhoods and homes were either under threat, already destroyed, or saved; or when safe return was permitted back into these neighborhoods and homes. Some of the more visible sites were Flickr and YouTube, where users posted photos. Media outlets used Google mashups with clickable icons on the various fires locations, as well details on fire size, containment efforts, fatality and injury status, and structural damage estimates. In the San Diego area, Twitter (a mobile-centric social-networking application) allowed media outlets to update users using Short Message Service text messaging.

However, it appears that the emergency management and first-responder community focused on citizen-centric Web 2.0 technology dissemination. For example, daily damage assessment and situational reports were at times completed on paper to include geographic estimates of damage to an area, a list of damaged facilities, injury/fatality estimates and estimates as to what kinds of resources (equipment) would be required. To improve this process, emergency managers should consider using blogs and wikis to better share information to assist in disaster management relief efforts. Blogs are more suitable for presenting multiple-agency perspectives in chronological order, while wikis are — rather than e-mail - should be used for information synthesis and as organizational tools than. They will work only where a form of "Web democracy" exists that can foster rapid and easy collaboration in a particular community of interest. Blogs and wikis are appropriate where there is joint responsibility and an incentive to contribute, and when the process involves ongoing discussion and change.

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