As you may have noticed, this weblog has been silent for quite a while. Part of the problem was giving it the priority needed and part was a question of relevance. As you know Dave Fletcher's weblog has been simply doing a fantastic job of doing a daily survey of the status of e-Government Services both in Utah and around the globe. The breadth of coverage has really fullfilled a communication need that was sadly lacking in our e-gov efforts in the past. Because of this coverage I found myself much more interested in reviewing Dave's BLOG as opposed to writing in this one. Over the last month I have been thinking about that focus and have decided to take a different direction and wanted to take a moment to explain why.
Digital government has evolved beyond the days of dot.com boom and bust. In the beginning we were attempting to move from static websites to ones where the public and businesses had a greater opportunity to actually do business with the government over the Internet. We spent the first several years picking the low hanging fruit from getting your hunting and fishing license online to renewing a motor vehicle registration.
However, since 9-11 post dom.com bust budgets have dramatically shrunk and so has some of the funding for IT projects. It doesn't mean people aren't doing IT projects. According to information gained from the Product Management Council, 55 e-government services are either online this year or scheduled to be. Through our contract with Utah Interactive, we can pretty well count on 20+ applications annually or nearly two new applications per month in addition to many new website designs and updates and maintenance to 80+ existing online applications.
Although this has been excellent progress, the work has just gotten harder and the time it takes to build some of our newer enterprise applications are increasing as are complexity of applications like OneStop Business Registration. Our decisions on what to bring online and when ought to be more data driven. I will be talking more about this later.
As a kick off to this new direction I will be talking about some of the knowledge gained from the National Conference on Digital Government Research May 18-21 in Boston as well as other research areas.
5:34:15 AM 
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