Friday, August 27, 2004

State Fuel Network helps cities manage expenses One of my first assignments at the State was to direct the development of the state fuel network.  Here's an article in The Daily Herald that shows how the network is aiding Utah County cities to better manage their expenses. 4:12:23 PM    comment []

OMB Report on Producing Results The latest report from OMB, The Federal Government is Results-Oriented, A Report to Federal Employees, includes an update of the egov progress report.  It shows that EPA continues to demonstrate progress and is now classified as green.  It's amazing what you can accomplish when the chief executive of an organization fully supports the agenda.  The report also outlines how agency use of effective portfolio management processes have yielded significant improvements in their ability to produce results.  The last piece that I was interested in was the effectiveness in using the Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART). 3:53:08 PM    comment []

Busy Week for IT The Region 41 700MHz Regional Planning Committee meets today,August 27 at the Weber County Sheriff's Office, 10:00 am.  The address is 721 West 12th South in Ogden.  We took the Utah's IT directors on a quick flight down to Richfield yesterday to tour the alternate state data center.  CIO Val Oveson stated his support for making proper use of the facility and ensuring that systems build adequate business continuity plans when developing new critical systems.  I shared this presentation (very large file - do not download on a slow connection) on GIS in Utah with them, the objective being to increase GIS use and data sharing between state agencies as well as the federal and local partners that we are heavily involved with. Speaking of GIS, I met earlier this week with the Office of Education in an educational technology meeting.  I was impressed with State Superintendent Patti Harrington's desire to really focus the use of technology on supporting the teacher and the classroom.  They are using Cognos to analyze test data at the state and local level.  I suggested that GIS would be an extremely powerful tool to enhance this analysis and make it much more readable for the non-technical user.  They could easily spot and demonstrate trends at the zip code and neighborhood level.  I also invited them to share more of their news and success stories through the Utah.gov portal. Gov. Schwarzenegger of California is making a big deal of a huge surplus "garage sale".  I used to be the director of the Utah Division of General Services and we would have this kind of sale periodically as well as regular auctions.  If you don't, the surplus property that comes from such a large organization will quickly build up and become unwieldy.  It looks like we're still selling some items through our online auction service, but the bidding looks a little slow right now.  Other property is sold through eBay and eSurplusAuctions. 6:39:30 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 David Fletcher.