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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Identifying and agreeing on opportunities to innovate in the public sector is challenging but doable, because there are so many opportunities to innovate. The frustration for many public-sector organizations is that the procurement process in effect prevents the acquisition of anything that is remotely innovative. The need for competitive bidding and the belief that true competitive bidding requires the writer of a request for proposals to describe the solution that is being sought can create insurmountable barriers to innovation, because "new" approaches are too new to describe effectively. Our recent case study on the procurement process used by the Pension Transformation Programme at the Department for Work and Pensions in the U.K. illustrated that the public sector has processes available that do not inhibit innovation. Other governments have tried similar approaches successfully. However, these approaches require creative leadership and the recognition that there may be multiple ways to solve a problem. As a result, public-sector procurement organizations must progress beyond writing bidding specifications that require all bidders to offer the same approach.

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Yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with a journalist who was doing a piece about applying the open-source community "philosophy" to policy making. As many open-source software communities are able to self-manage and still deliver remarkably high-quality and complex products by applying something that looks like a democratic approach, the idea of using a similar approach to create policies and laws is intriguing.

Finding better ways to more directly engage citizens in policy making has been among the objectives of e-government programs for a long time. However, beyond a few experiments concerning e-consultation and the establishments of blogs and similar mechanism to gather constituents' inputs, very little has been done. While many may think this is due to the natural risk-averse attitude of governments, the reality is more complex. The way policies are established in most countries is through a complex process of internal and external consultation that engages governments, parliaments and a number of organizations representing different constituencies: political parties, unions, industry associations, consumer association, and so forth. An alternative process, based on direct engagement of individuals in some sort of policy-making community, raises a fundamental question about how it would relate to those representative organizations. What would the relative weights be? Would those organizations become irrelevant? What models would emerge to ensure that fairness and transparency is part of the process?

On the other hand, a community approach may be useful to improve internal and external collaboration among the current actors in the process. Rather than starting from a draft text that goes through a time-consuming consultation process involving different ministries and parliamentary commissions, a policy may be constructed with a "wiki" approach, with different departments contributing to different parts of the policy, using a consensus-building process following the same model as the one used in open-source communities. Although less visible and not as likely to attract media attention, such an approach could be extremely beneficial as a way to streamline policy making. Should this prove useful to support internal policy-making collaboration, it could be gradually extended to support collaboration with external representative organizations and — even further — to engage individuals.

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In light of the deadly shootings at Virginia Tech University, many college and universities are re-evaluating their mass notification technologies and procedures, as well as and associated campus security. Colleges and universities should form review teams composed of interested stakeholders to examine current methods on how best to communicate, not only with individuals, but also with individual campus buildings during emergencies. The Virginia Tech tragedy illustrates that different levels of emergency require different levels of notification. For example, a hostage situation in one campus building (indoor) in a distributed environment might require an interactive voice response technology to alert neighboring buildings and a cellular broadcast to all individuals (indoor and outdoor) to remain where they are or return to a specific location for further information. A multitude of technologies and systems are available for colleges and universities to implement mass notification systems. These technologies use various mediums, such as FM radio waves, interactive voice response systems, sirens equipped with audio messages, and hosted, multichannel systems (such as PDA and e-mail). College and university administrators must consider a layered approach that does not rely exclusively on a single technology or system.

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We have been publishing the Hype Cycle for Government during the last three years. This report used to include a selection of the most relevant technologies that affect clients in government in all geographies and most domains. However, the selection has always been a difficult one, since technologies tend to have a greater impact in certain sectors than in others. Good examples are case management — which is key in human services or justice but somewhat less crucial in other sectors — or certain metadata models, such as XBRL, with a great potential limited to a specific domain. Since the Hype Cycle shows to what extent technologies are mature and ready to deliver measurable benefits, another issue is that the same technology may have a different degree of maturity in different domains.

In 2007, we have decided to change the focus of our Hype Cycle, and address technologies that play a strong potential or actual role in supporting, enabling, driving and sustaining government transformation. Transformation refers to constituent service delivery as well as to internal business processes. We will concentrate on technologies that have a whole-of-government transformation potential as well as relevance in most if not all government domains.

We will complement our Hype Cycle with other models that highlight how and how rapidly these technologies contribute to creating public value.

We welcome thoughts and suggestions by our readers about which technologies they believe are key to transformation.

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During a recent client inquiry, I had an opportunity to discuss in a client inquiry what governments around the world are doing with wikis.

It goes without saying that blogs and wikis have been among the most widely debated subjects around Web 2.0, as they provide new ways to support internal collaboration and constituent engagements.

Wikis certainly have promise when it comes to internal collaboration. There are already numerous examples, such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is using a wikito coordinate its content development project, or Alaska's Department of Social Assistance, which has used wikis for more than a year to support collaboration and share best practices among local councils. In the intelligence community, Intellipedia has been widely publicized as a tool to improve collaboration between different agencies and to automate information collation.

Another area where the value of wikis has been discussed is public safety. The lack of coordination in preparing for Hurricane Katrina the inefficiency of relief efforts have raised the profile of wikis in the area of homeland security and public safety. My colleague Jeff Vining is about to produce research on this topic.

Both the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and its U.K. counterpart are considering a wiki approach to the patent-approval process.

Another area for wiki use is to support policy making and consultation. In this respect, last year U.K. Environment Secretary David Miliband started a wiki to develop an "environmental contract" with help from constituents. This wiki was soon targeted by people who provided fake inputs. Legislative branches of governments have started wikis to structure and support bills. A recent example is Utah's association with Politicopia. Client conversations and analysis so far show that the risks outweigh the benefits for governments venturing into external wikis, while internal use — limited to well-defined purposes and relatively controlled constituencies — can be beneficial as a collaboration tool. Areas where we expect a rapid development is support to the internal policy-making process (for example, to streamline interagency consultation) and as a means to improve knowledge management across agencies that share common goals — public safety, intelligence and justice) are good examples.

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In May 2005, President Bush signed into law the Real ID Act , establishing minimum standards for state-issued driver's licenses and identification cards (DL/ID).On 1 March 2007, The U.S.Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposed regulations and standards for states to meet the requirements of the REAL ID Act, including security features for DL/IDs, as well as the verification of identity and lawful status. States currently do not engage in state-to-state mandated exchanges to prohibit individuals from possessing multiple DL/IDs, and no system exists to check the status of cardholders from other states. As a result, the Real ID Act will now require building new systems. As a result, a more complex and time-consuming application issuance process will evolve, resulting in additional costs for the states and their citizens.

The DHS proposal recognizes the federal government will not own or manage any of the data systems used for interstate records checking. However, the individual states will continue to have the option to access federal systems to aid in the identity verification process. For example, a majority of states already query federal databases either directly or indirectly through a portal provided by the American Automobile Motor Vehicle Association, such as the Social Security Online Verification and the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system. However, no state-to-state mandated exchnage database currently exists. Thua, compliance is academic. Some systems appear to be working, while others are not. For example, verification of the lawful status of students seems not yet adequate; a connection between the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System is anticipated but not yet in place. In addition, states cannot verify principal residence accurately or verify passports or consular reports of birth abroad. In the absence of further congressional action, individual states will have to agree voluntarily to a workable application on controlling personally identifiable information. However, in the future, states will be required to independently verify all data fields printed on a DL/ID, such as full legal name, date of birth, gender,facial digital photograph and a driver's history (violations, suspensions and points). If a citizen is surrendering a DL/ID from another state, it is relatively simple to access that state's records; however, accessing records in more than 50 jurisdictions is not so simple. To do so will overwhelm existing networks. As a result, we believe national adoption will be slow in coming. States should carefully consider a governance architecture to accomplish this requirement to verify all data fields on a DL/ID. We offer some suggestions:


• States should use existing data exchanges that are focused on commercial driver's licensing and noncommercial license holders, such as the Commercial Driver's License Information System and the National Driver Register Problem Driver Pointer SystemThese systems collect limited information from each state to match against incoming inquiries.


• States should use commercial data brokers to verify various types of information on behalf of the issuing entity. Such a solution will require cooperation by numerous entitles


• States should use existing systems to recognize by automated means documents that are valid. This does notnecessarily mean verification, but more of a authentication approach that recognizes counterfeit or altered documents.

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At our Symposium in San Francisco in April, we’re doing a presentation called "Radical Government: Managing Innovation Can Turn the Scapegoat Into the Hero." This presentation came about because, more than any other position in government, it is likely to be the CIO who introduces innovation into government, and the one most likely to be the scapegoat when a project fails. Most government agencies and their related processes have existed for generations. IT has come along and automated many of the processes in recent years. But, the capability of technology to truly transform how government delivers its information and services has barely been touched. As IT vendors and IT leaders introduce new technologies, clever people in government can find ways to put them to good use. However, unless these transformative projects are led by the program leaders and senior executives within government — those with the authority, ability and aptitude to lead their agencies through the organizational and cultural changes that will be necessary for success — the project will fail, no matter how good the technology or the CIO. To avoid becoming the scapegoat for these failures, CIOs must recognize the components of the organization, its processes, and it stakeholders that are affected by a project, and make certain that before signing up for a new initiative, those who own those components are playing the leadership role that is required.

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I had the pleasure to moderate a panel hosted by the city of Barcelona on the topic, "America, Asia and Europe: Comparing Strategies for Transforming Government." Panelists were from the European Commission, the University of Hull in the U.K., the city of Buenos Aires and Microsoft. Each presentation gave a different regional spin and a unique perspective (political, academic, user, vendor), offering a good mix of information for an audience that was primarily composed of European city IT managers — policy makers as well as technologists.

Two themes emerged from the discussion. The first one was that there is no single recipe that can be used across different geographies to ensure technology's impact on government transformation and better service delivery. The second one was how the value of e-government should be articulated, looking at a variety of drivers and impact areas. It was particularly interesting to observe how changing political and economic conditions in a city or region can turn the e-government approach on its head, from pursuing efficiency to creating and preserving jobs. By and large, most of the points discussed by the panel and raised by the audience during the Q&A session were the same we have heard during the past several years concerning the critical success factors and risk areas of e-government: strong political will, the need to make e-government an integral (or even better, a functional) part of the overall government strategy, and the struggle to organize effective and sustainable interagency governance mechanisms.

Most experiences seem to confirm that, despite increasing globalization, e-government must be addressed at the local level. Different jurisdictions have different political priorities, and technology investment plans must be tailored to meet each individual environment, rather than mimic what has been successful elsewhere.

In this respect, valuable good-practice initiatives led by the European Commission must do a better job in spelling out which practices are appropriate for specific conditions.

Technology vendors must increase their efforts to align their offerings to specific priorities rather than adopting instantly reusable frameworks and solutions: This has certainly improved the past few years, but not enough. As a consequence, several users start looking for alternatives (such as open-source or community-source solutions) that they feel can be more easily tailored to specific needs and over which they can retain a greater degree of control.

Last, but not least, technology decision makers in government organizations must become more fluent in articulating and prioritizing their technology priorities against strategic and political objectives.

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The Government 2020 blog has been a useful means to engage our clients as well as other interested parties in a dialogue about how technology will shape the future of government. Now, almost one year into our blog, we feel the need to engage them on a broader set of topics, and let both them and the Gartner analyst community to discuss the role of technology in government outside the boundaries of our 2020 scenarios.

Government IT organizations face numerous technology investment decisions today that will have a short- and long-term impact on government operations and service delivery, as well as on political issues. Some of the most widely discussed (and hyped) technologies today are creating both opportunities and challenges to traditionally risk-averse government organizations. xamples include Web 2.0, the impact of consumer devices in the enterprise, the advent of digital natives as citizens and government employees, the new social interaction and business models pioneered by virtual world, the virtualization of infrastructure, the blossoming of open and community source, and many others.

As we all know, government is an inherently complex sector, covering a diversity of domains, tiers and geographies. However one common thread that can be found in almost any single government agency is the struggle to innovate. Of course, there are different drivers for innovation: a visionary leader, the need to make a quantum leap in efficiency, and an overwhelming demand for better services by citizens. Technology is perceived as an enabler for innovation, but government organizations are more constrained in its adoption by regulations, procedures and — above all — accountability issue that often delay technology adoption or fail to realize the innovation potential.
We look forward to hosting a debate about technologies, projects, experiences, future or futuristic scenarios that show in concrete terms how technology can really change the way governments operate.

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During the Gartner Research offsite last week, a group of analysts discussed the topic of what Web 2.0 will mean for governments and the public sector in general. While there is no single Gartner definition of Web 2.0 (see "Web 2.0: Structuring the Discussion"), it can be looked at from three different viewpoints: as 1) a set of technologies with 2) community and social dimensions that enable 3) new business models.

From a technology standpoint, Web 2.0 implies the development of the Web-oriented architecture (a subset of service-oriented architecture; SOA), which provides a globally linked, decentralized model that is network-centric (vs. device-centric) and extensible. Relevant technologies here include Ajax, Web services, plain old XML (POX) and representational state transfer (REST). From a government perspective, one interesting spin is the impact that these next-generation application programming interfaces will have on government interoperability standards: The use of REST and POX leads to the development of more-generic, more-reusable services (that is, components), moving the complexity from code into data. Today's government interoperability frameworks have been developed with Web 1.0 in mind, and the way SOA is being deployed tends to favor the development of large numbers of relatively specific services with rich and complex interfaces that have a lower reuse potential.

From the community and social perspective, technologies like blogs, wikis, user-defined content tagging and others will clearly change the way constituents interact with governments. The most frequently used example is participation in policymaking, where community blogs or even policy wikis could be used to more directly engage people in proposing and shaping policies and laws. However, while these new forms of constituent participation and quasi-direct democracy will take a relatively long time to have a real impact (as they may require constitutional changes), there are areas where their impact can be felt quite rapidly. Today, customers' ratings play a major role in influencing online buying behaviors. Equally, citizens and other constituents could use ratings as well as blogs to provide feedback on service levels and even influence their design. In cases where online intermediaries compete to deliver online government services, constituent feedback can be a powerful influencer and actually shape this market. However, all this will be influenced by social and political factors

This leads to the business dimension. The use of mashups to achieve finer-grained integration between government and private-sector services and data can give rise to completely new services. Examples include the integration of location-based services with land, building or vehicle registers to streamline revenue collection, incident reporting and human service delivery; integration of financial management applications with tax e-filing and payment; integration of online travel services with immigration, revenue and health systems to provide clients with a seamless travel booking experience; and so on. The breadth and depth of integration will be influenced by several market, regulatory and political factors.

Scenario planning can be very useful in understanding how deeply Web 2.0 will impact government. We discussed whether the same axis used for Government 2020 (that is, citizen attitude toward privacy and government intervention in the economy) would be appropriate. While they certainly remain candidates and one can see quite easily how our four existing scenarios would lead to interesting conclusions, we felt that it may be more appropriate to 1) ask ourselves a more-specific question than just "how will Web 2.0 impact government?", 2) establish a list of driving forces that shape the answer to that question and 3) make sure that we can draw conclusions that are relevant in different timeframes, since Web 2.0 is going to have both a medium- and a long-term impact on government.

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I found an interesting news about what would be the first fully digital city, currently under development in South Korea at Songdo City. According to news reports, houses will be fully wired, wireless access will be ubiquitous, citizens will have a single access card for all sorts of services, and radio frequency identification will be used quite extensively.

Looking at the report, this suggests an early realization of one of our Government 2020 scenarios, the Good "Big Brother". Of course, how "good" this particular Big Brother will be is open to speculation: As always, ubiquitous access, location based services and a single identification scheme give rise to all sorts of debates about the possible invasion of privacy.

Besides the peculiarities of this particular case, reading the article raised a question about what governments around the world are doing with their earlier digital city projects. In the early days of e-government and the digital society, several local governments around the world took action to subsidize the development of broadband infrastructure, disseminate information kiosks, issue citizen cards, and so forth. There is no direct evidence that government investments in digital infrastructure of this sort always influence the scope and speed of Internet adoption.

Today, there are many discussions about whether local governments should play an active role in building or funding a wireless infrastructure. Besides the technical uncertainties (for example, should they venture into WiMAX?), the real issues are defining the extent that government action can be subsidiary to well-founded private-sector investments, as well as determining the relationship between government-funded infrastructure and private-sector content. After all, wasn't this a question that policymakers should have asked themselves a decade ago when they decided to invest in fixed broadband infrastructure? What is different today?

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In early November, the U.S. Congress approved the Conference Report for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill. This bill decreases the total funding for three major state and local law enforcement assistance programs: the State Homeland Security Grant program (SHSG), the Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention Program (LETPP) and the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI). For example, SHSG's funding is down 4.5%; LETPP's is down 6.5% and UASI will be awarded $770 million - slightly more than the fiscal year 2006 level of $765 million. Combined, these three primary assistance programs will receive $45 million less than the year before, continuing the downward trend of the past several years. These funding levels represent a reduction of nearly 45% from three years ago. In addition, this bill overhauls the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to make it a more-independent agency within the DHS organizational framework by handing control of both disaster response and emergency preparedness back to FEMA, which had been removed from FEMA as part of DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff's Second Stage Review. This bill also directs SHSG, LETPP and possibly UASI funding to be administered by FEMA - not DHS. Gartner will follow this legislation and the resulting changes within DHS. We will publish several notes on FEMA's new control over federal assistance grants by FEMA to provide actionable advice for state and local law enforcement clients on how to best position themselves for this change.

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One topic we did not touch during our Government 2020 analysis is how consumerization will impact each of the scenarios. By 2020, consumerization will be a well-established reality, and seamless integration between professional and consumer devices will need to take place - although at different speeds in different scenarios. Moreover, the impact of consumer devices carried by government employees will be different in each scenario.
In the Good "Big Brother" scenario, government is likely to retain strong control over the devices that employees will use in the workplace, and will regulate their characteristics and uses of these devices to be compatible with job functions. In some instances, government regulations will affect the consumer market itself, by setting requirements (in terms of safety, location services, accessibility and so forth) for marketing these devices within the jurisdiction. Therefore, although consumerization will demand for greater flexibility in IT infrastructure management, it will not have a disruptive effect.

In Governing Phantoms, employees will be wary of using personal devices for their work, as this may enable government to exercise greater, undesired control over employees' leisure activities. However, it is likely that devices available in 2020 will support a fine-grained control of multiple professional and personal spaces, providing reasonable assurance that users can retain control and protect their privacy. The challenge for government - not dissimilar from what happens today in the workplace - will be to ensure that employees perform their duties. This will require the deployment of tools to evaluate individual performances, as well as spot possible illegal activities.

Personal devices will be the norm in both Status Quo Development and Free-Enterprise Government, where government organizations will give employees much more freedom in choosing devices, provided these devices meet the conditions of specific policies. Especially in Free-Enterprise Government, where a substantial number of services will be delivered by private-sector providers and intermediaries and their employees, infrastructure will have to be sufficiently flexible and secure to accommodate a great diversity of devices.

The bottom line is that, regardless of which scenario will unfold, government organizations will not be able to retain complete control of the devices that their employees will carry into the workplace.

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In May 2005, President George W. Bush signed into law the Real ID Act, which is a unfunded federal directive that mandates the states to take steps to prevent illegal aliens and potential terrorists from obtaining driver's licenses. As currently written, the states have until May 2008 to require documentation that goes beyond what most states currently ask license applicants to produce, such as photo identity, breeder documentation, proof of Social Security number and documentation of an applicant's name and address of primary residence. In addition, the act also requires each state to develop tamper-proof, machine-readable licenses manufactured in secure areas by security-cleared personnel.

The Real ID Act will require states to run cross-checks against other state motor vehicle departments (DMVs) prevent no forum shopping; this will require additional resources and personnel to secure the license-making process. The law also requires federal agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, to develop standards for machine-readable and tamper-resistant cards. Currently, these standards are still in the development process, leaving many state DMVs in limbo with their legislatures regarding the extent of budget requests. For example, several state DMV directors have made budget requests that cite potential expenditures if and when standards are established. The Real ID Act will affect more than 240 million driver's licenses, yet with the compliance date less than two years away, technical standards are still not ready. Some states are upgrading their DMV systems in the hope that they will be compatible with the future requirements of the Real ID Act. In addition, states need federal guidance to avoid compatibility challenges, if not the result will be 50 incompatible systems. In the coming months, Gartner will publish research on this topic to advise DMV administrators.

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I had a very interesting discussion with a client from a Canadian federal agency after the Government 2020 session in Orlando. He challenged our position concerning the relevance of a single government-managed identification scheme to support authentication needs related to information access and service delivery. In our scenario analysis, only in the Good "Big Brother" scenario does government succeed in promoting a single identification and authentication scheme (such as a smart card or a token) for any type of interaction with citizens. In all other scenarios, there will be proliferation of identification schemes, with some issued by the public sector and others coming from government clusters such as social security and healthcare.

A look at some of the early smart ID card programs in countries such as Finland, Belgium and Italy shows that the move toward a single scheme has lost momentum. It is clear that requirements vary for different categories of services and t the way in which private and public service and channels will interact and integrate in the future will play a great role in who will manage identity credentials.
However, our client made an excellent point about who ultimately will be responsible for resolving identity issues in cases of fraud or other criminal activities. This leads to further reflection: If identity management became somewhat "deregulated," what would the government's role be? Will new regulations emerge that cover the federation of identities, as well as the right and the ability of individuals to possess multiple identities? What will be the role of technology to support regulatory compliance, and how will that affect data protection and privacy rights?

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An interesting question asked at our Government 2020 session in Orlando concerned the sort of workforce that government will need in the future. There are trends that clearly apply to any of our Government 2020 scenarios: Examples include the retirement of baby boomers or the clash between "digital natives" (the current generation of teenagers that has grown up immersed in technology) and "digital immigrants" (most of the current workers who are adapting to new technologies but whose education and development has not been heavily influenced by technology).
However, the type of workforce required will differ according to scenario (see Government in 2020: Taking the Long View"). In "Status Quo Development" and "Free-Enterprise Government", workers will have to be mostly engaged in policymaking, compliance and oversight activities. Most of the skills required in service delivery or citizen relationship management will be left to intermediaries and external service providers, with relatively few exceptions. In Good "Big Brother," service delivery will be greatly automated and self-service will become a primary channel, which will require fewer skills in service delivery and relationship management. Only in Governing Phantoms will government require a broad variety of skills, from policymaking to operations.

An interesting picture emerges when trends such as retirement and generational change are matched against the various scenarios. In Governing Phantoms, organizational boundaries and processes do not change much: There are still silos dealing with different aspects of citizen service and data. Information will not flow without friction, which will create issues for workers who are digital natives. Although they understand the value of citizen privacy, they are bothered by the arcane processes and boundaries that are still in place. Turnover is high, as there are limited opportunities to innovate. In Good "Big Brother," the workplace is more exciting: Technology skills and the ability to leverage those skills to drive service improvement and transformation will be rewarded. In the remaining scenarios, deeper and richer relationships with a broad variety of intermediaries and service providers will be essential.

The bottom line is that, despite the generational change, what makes a civil servant successful will remain a mix of interpersonal and process skills. Will digital natives possess more or less of these skills?

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On Tuesday, 10 October, I will present "Government in 2020: Shaping Tomorrow's Legacy" at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando. This presentation puts Government 2020 in context by emphasizing how most systems and applications that government agencies use today — which often support mission-critical systems — were conceived, developed and deployed more than 15 years ago, and sometimes are as old as 30 years. Therefore, investment decisions that are being made today will shape the legacy systems of tomorrow. I had a preliminary discussion about this topic with some of our clients in Canada, and we agreed that government agencies do very little to consider the long-term impact of those decisions. One of the observations made was that technology changes at a much faster pace today. However, public procurement processes are likely to remain cumbersome and slow for a long time, which means that the replacement of systems may not be able to keep pace with these changes. At the same time, today's investments in "services" (from a service-oriented-architecture perspective) are meant to last longer, as they include provisions for reusability. Therefore I can't see a reason why we should not have legacy systems developed today that can operate well beyond 2020.

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