Friday, May 30, 2003

Enterprise IT the Topic at Governing conference This is from this week's Managing Technology conference, as covered by Governing Magazine: Utah Sen. David Steele, co-chair of the state’s Information Technology Commission, sees the current situation not so much as an opportunity but as “a must.” Things are not necessarily “broken” in Utah, he said, but they’re “underutilized, not connected, in silos, not interacting.” Utah CIO Val Oveson said ERP systems, cross-boundary integration and enterprise computing are part of an agenda that has been around forever but that has now come to the forefront, forced there by the emergence of the Internet and the burst of the dot-com bubble. Government is moving to an e-government agenda but lagging behind the private sector, Oveson said. “We have to deliver on expectations and not drop the ball on that.” Virginia and Utah are considered two of the more advanced states on technology, and yet even they have far to go, perhaps an intimidating scenario for other states. “We’re in great shape relative to the past, in terrible shape in what we need to do,” said Oveson. “The nature of this business is never being finished.” Next week the Utah Technology Commission will be discussing models for the delivery of centralized IT services.  Dave Steele chairs the commission. 5:45:22 PM    comment []

Iowa Consolidates I have had several calls from people in Iowa asking how our Department (Utah Department of Administrative Services) is organized and what the benefits have been.  They have finally announced the consolidation of their departments of General Services, Personnel, Information Technology, and Revenue and Finance.  This is a good move. 5:33:37 PM    comment []

Politics by Email I received this email this morning: Political campaigns are becoming increasingly sophisticated.  This email capitalizes on the Bush taxcut with information targeted directly at the recipient.  The email cites the impact of the taxcut for citizens specifically in the recipient's home state.  Very effective.   At about the same time, I received this email from the Democrats attacking the cut: Their database must be a little messed up since my name isn't Walter. Messing up peoples' names could be a big problem. I wonder where they harvested their information. 8:09:05 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 David Fletcher.