Friday, January 10, 2003

Tech and the State Library I met this morning with Amy Owen, the State Librarian, and her excellent staff.  The State Library houses the largest collection of braille books in the world which supports 16 states and the Library of Congress.  Patrons can order books in braille or books on tape online through the KLAS catalog system for shipping or even download books for printing in braille at home. The Library does a great job of using technology to support its operation.  They scan books of local interest and publish them in braille and also have their own radio station.  These are the same people who have created RSS feeds for specialized training and offer an online RSS workshop.  They just added live help to their search utility so that you can chat with a reference librarian if you are unable to find what you are searching for.  They also support an RSS feed with local and national library news.  I expect you'll see even more innovation there in the future. 4:40:03 PM

Taking Care of the Small Things Rory Perry's got carpet, we've got cable.  The Division of Information Technology is clearing out all the old buss and tag cable in the subfloor of the State data center.  New racks are going in to support the enterprise operations of some new systems and with the change, it was time for the old cable to go.  Dedicated employees are helping the process to happen quickly and efficiently while maintaining all ongoing operations. Sal wires the new racks. Marsha surveys miles of old buss and tag Norm Johnson, the new operations manager checks out high speed printers 3:07:32 PM

Rhode Island moves to open-source eWeek reports on Rhode Island's use of open-source for the development of their online rules and regulations system.  Kudos to Rhode Island.  I imagine that there is probably a lot of open-source utilization by government that goes unreported. 9:07:17 AM

E-government in China So Dave Winer is going to Harvard as a fellow at the Berkman Center.  That is cool.  After checking out the latest edition of The Filter, I finally got around to looking at Zittrain and Edelman's study of internet filtering in China.  What a great piece of work!  I studied Chinese for years, including Chinese law while at the University of Washington, and haven't had time to spend on Chinese sites recently.  So, I took a quick visit to Taiwan's e-Government portal.  Now that was an interesting diversion.  I like the URL: www.gov.tw.  I think that would be a nice standard for national egov portals.  Interesting thing: many of the egov sites I visited in Taiwan play music.  They definitely don't have the official look and feel of US (EEUU) egov sites. While visiting the UW's Graduate School of Public Affairs, I noticed that Dael Wolfle recently died at 96 years of age.  He was a great public servant and proponent for the advancement of science within government.  8:38:10 AM

Show Me the Money Alan Mather refers to an article in the Guardian that asks the question, "Is e-government worthwhile?"  Are there economic reasons for pushing the egov agenda that can be clearly quantified or do its proponents have to make "a leap of faith" as suggested in the article.  The same question is asked regularly in our Utah product management council which spearheads the egov initiative for the State.  While we continue to push for new development, there is legitimate concern about solidifying and promoting the services which already exist.  Ten percent adoption of an online motor vehicle registration system doesn't fly in terms of $$ benefit because we're still providing the service the old way at significant cost.  At the same time, there are benefits that have not been fully defined in terms of convenience and service to citizens.  For example, what is the impact of 7,000 people a month not driving to a DMV office and standing in line?  We must do a better job of defining those impacts.  We are making progress however.  The Primary Care Network system had over 50% adoption in its first year.  In April, we will eliminate the printed edition of Utah's Administrative Rules and it will only be available electronically. 7:40:15 AM

© Copyright 2003 David Fletcher.