Monday, February 16, 2004

President's Day News and Notes The U.S. Postal Service wants you to buy more magazines.  For Valentines Day, they advertised MagMall.  Keep that mail flowing... The Arizona Dept. of Environmental Quality has a new website.  Very nice header design... The Arizona Procurement Office has a new eProcurement system called Spirit.  I wanted to try their online demo, but after going through several links, you learn that it isn't yet available. RDF and OWL approved by W3C. Minnesota reports on its success with reverse online auctions.  The State of Washington is auctioning off some interesting abandoned property. Hmm, Cache County communities are trying to solve their communications problems.  We need a little outreach from UWIN.  Smithfield firefighters are also buying new radios. The City of Marlborough, MA did not even have a website until recently.  Now they have a robust site with a nice portfolio of online services. "Hermit" reports on his experience with Utah's Tax Express service: This year, as I was browsing utah.gov, I stumbled across Utah’s TaxExpress Online Filing, a free tax filing service provided by our very own state government. If you meet the rather generous requirements (AGI less than $100,000 and took the standard deduction on your federal taxes, to name a few) you can do your state tax return through Utah’s web site. Mine took about 10 minutes. I asked for a check in the mail, and it was delivered within a week. The revolving door for state CIOs continues. Merced, California (I used to live there) has now grown to over 67,000 residents.  Why do they still have a ten-year old website?  And I'm not sure how much Merced County is impressing anyone with their Flash intro. OMB wants more money for e-Government - and they want to use surplus fees from a federal internal service fund to get it. The GAO just published this report covering a forum on high-performing organizations.  The report recommends that government create a culture that moves from: outputs to results, stovepipes to matrixes, hierarchical to flatter and more horizontal structures, an inward to an external focus on clients, customers, partners, and other stakeholders, micro-management to employee empowerment, reactive behavior to proactive approaches, avoiding new technologies to embracing and leveraging them, hoarding knowledge to sharing knowledge, avoiding risk to managing risk, protecting "turf" to forming partnerships, and adversarial to constructive labor/management relations. These are all good suggestions for me to focus on in our ITS management meetings - oh, I think I already have.  Now to ensure that they actually become engrained in the culture. More online voting commentary 7:30:56 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 David Fletcher.