Friday, December 10, 2004

2006 Budget Recommendations Governor Walker shared her 2006 budget recommendations today.  The budget includes some key recommendations including support for ongoing maintenance and connectivity of the Utah Wireless Integrated Network voice interoperability service which provides interoperability between UCAN's 800 MHz network, the National Guard, the State's VHF networks in rural Utah, and others, including a smartphone interface.  The UWIN technology subcommittee met this morning in Provo.  The team reviewed narrowband migration, mesh networking, and the implementation of the mobile data network.  Utah is the first state to begin implementation of a statewide 700 MHz data network.  Initial testing here in the Salt Lake Valley shows strong signal strength throughout our projected footprint. The budget proposal is the next step to get any kind of initiative off the ground.  The Huntsman team has already said they are looking to cut another 1%.  That could go in many directions, and then the Legislature will put their imprint on it, but it's great to see the economy turning around here and the proposed budget reflects that.  Here's the press release. 4:29:43 PM    comment []

Spains National ID Card Spain expects to implement a new intelligent ID card system by the end of 2007 Carlos Guadian of Spain has developed an excellent e-government weblog.  Carlos, who has some association with the University of Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, has an interesting, academic approach to egov. In a recent post, Carlos discusses Spain's recent initative to develop a new, intelligent national ID card which will facilitate a wide variety of personal and business transactions online.  Budgeted at $100 million Euros, the project is due for completion at the end of 2007.  The project is being directed by Spain's Interior Ministry which has had a national ID card in place for many years.  Now the card will have added intelligence and functionality.  Although many see the card as facilitative, there are many others who call it intrusive. Spanish card manufacturer Kalysis has a grand vision for the use of its technology. 10:28:14 AM    comment []

Portal Architectures We have an interesting dilemma in the area of portal development.  We own several portal products and have also experimented in the use of open source portal development with products like Liferay and PHP Website.  I am trying to fully understand the up-front costs as well as the ongoing costs of service integration and portability.  I want a portal architecture that is flexible, that doesn't require a lot of effort to plug in new services and functionality.  We have some experience in ITS with IBM's Websphere and Novell's Extend.  In the Division of Finance, we have developed employees services using SAP's NetWeaver.  We also have a lot of customized applications in Oracle, so perhaps Oracle's 9iAS Portal should be of interest.  It's time to analyze which of these will integrate the best and provide the best return on investment and then move forward. 9:39:54 AM    comment []

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