Friday, May 23, 2003

Exoro Blog on Utah Politics The Exoro Group, which includes many political influentials in downtown Salt Lake City, now maintains its own weblog called "Talking Points" at UtahPolicy.com.  Catch up on the latest political events here.  The group includes consultants from both sides of the aisle, including former Governor Norm Bangerter, LaVarr Webb, and former Salt Lake commissioner Bart Barker. LaVarr, in particular, provides some interesting commentary on the Utah political scene. One shortcoming: there is no RSS feed for the weblog that I could find (they use Blogger). 4:25:48 PM    comment []

Blog Talk Bloggers from all over the world have converged on Austria for Blog Talk: A European Conference on Weblogs.  Some of my favorite bloggers like Jose Luis Orihuela, Dan Gillmor, and Phil Wolff are providing live coverage. 11:42:23 AM    comment []

Marketing eGov The Intergovernmental Advisory Board recently released a report entitled "High Payoff in Electronic Government: Measuring the Return on E-Government Investments."  The report states that to maximize eGov benefits, governments must market eGov programs broadly.  We have tried to do that within fairly restrictive budget constraints, but have used UTA busboard advertisements, radio ads, etc.  We have also had extensive media coverage which really helps.  Driving adoption upward of eGov services is a major goal this year.  Barbara Haven refers to this article in Information Week that further elaborates on the report. The Public Policy Institute also published a new report this month, "Network Government for the Digital Age."  According to PPI, "if we are to restore the public's confidence in an activist and progressive government, moving forward on a radical reinvention initiative to bring government into the Information Age needs to be a central task for progressives." 10:43:28 AM    comment []

Enterprise Security Dave McNamee said something VERY important the other day regarding security.  He referred to a Gartner study that says that the average employee has access to 15 to 17 applications during employment and that the same employee may still have access to about 10 of those applications after termination.  Obviously, this supports the positon of implementing security at the enterprise level where access can be linked to human resource information.  We have many critical pieces of that model in place with the Utah Master Directory. A recent series in the Washington Post points out how hackers in Russia are affecting businesses throughout the U.S. 9:16:26 AM    comment []

Web Services, eGov, and Portals Here are a couple of new eGov blogs: Dioecetes e government news John Gotze points out the latest draft of the W3C Web Services Architecture.  I haven't had time to digest it, perhaps this weekend, but it is something I need to share with a few key people including our semi-active XML working group.  The goals of the architecture standard are admirable: interoperability between Web services, integration with the World Wide Web, reliability of Web services, security of Web services, Scalability and extensibility of Web services, and Manageability of Web services. XML is the key: "One can imagine Web services that don't depend on the SOAP envelope framework or processing model, or that don't employ WSDL to describe the interaction between a service and its consumers, but XML is much more fundamental. It provides the extensibility and vendor, platform, and language neutrality that is the key to loosely-coupled, standards-based interoperability that are the essence of the Web services value proposition." And the debate continues over what web services integration means for the consulting industry. I am working to coordinate a Webex demo for next week of Forum Systems' XML security appliance.  It looks like an interesting product. Yesterday morning, Paul Taylor of the Center for Digital Government gave an interesting presentation to state and local representatives in Salt Lake City.  The presentation, entited The Portal as a Capitol Dome, was an interesting metaphor comparing state portals to capitol buildings as the center of government ac tivity and services.  He suggests that it needs the same kind of care and support as the state capitol.  Novell followed up with this presentation on portal solutions. 8:50:29 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 David Fletcher.