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“Three clicks to service.” That’s the target for the current administration in Washington—that people heading to the federal government’s Web site, www.firstgov.gov, should be able to find information in three clicks of a mouse. Potential potholes and detours make it a difficult road that will have to be traveled to achieve that kind of simple online interaction with government. Government’s tangled array of agencies and departments makes it hard for a citizen to know just where to turn for answers, and governmental organizations, prizing their autonomy, haven’t historically been anxious to work together. Government will also have to overcome difficult questions about privacy and security. When, for example, the Social Security Administration granted people online access to their benefit and salary information in the late ’90s, the agency got caught in a heated, embarrassing debate over privacy and ultimately scrapped the plan. Still, President Bush has made e-government one of the five priorities in his push to make government more businesslike, accountable, and efficient. States and local governments need to make progress, too, if only to keep businesses from moving to places where it’s easier to deal with government. To figure out just how much progress has been made, and where we go from here, Context arranged a conversation between two of the leaders of the e-government movement: Mark Forman and Rock Regan. Last year, Forman was appointed as associate director for information technology and e-government in the federal Office of Management and Budget. Regan, the chief information officer for Connecticut, recently was elected head of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers. He is working to help states coordinate their information-technology efforts. In the conversation that follows, the two say federal, state, and local governments have all started moving in the right direction—though they still have work to do.
MARK FORMAN: Government faces some critical issues as it moves online. One is how to deal with a roughly 40-year-old organizational structure and a legacy of processes that have made individual agencies powerful. President Bush called for the government to be focused on citizens’ needs, not on agencies’ needs, because a lot of agencies act to serve the agency first, rather than their customers. We know that you can satisfy people much more successfully if you cut across operational islands and organize around certain needs of citizens or the business community, but making that switch will be hard. ROCK REGAN: States are concentrating on creating online initiatives organized from the citizen’s perspective—for instance, around life events. It is no longer important that people understand that the Department of Labor is the agency responsible for providing unemployment checks. People should be able to come online and say, “I just lost my job. What are the services available to me that I should be aware of?” People constantly compare the government to the commercial world and ask “If I can do business with Orbitz LLC [www.orbitz.com] or Amazon.com Inc. [www.amazon.com] online, why can’t I do the same with the government?” As a result, states and local governments are also looking at ways to allow people to get things done simply and easily. This might mean letting businesses renew all of their professional licenses online, or allowing people to reserve a campsite electronically, or giving access to information about whether their doctors have legal claims against them. FORMAN: At the federal level, we’re focused on four customer groups: citizens, businesses, states and local governments, and federal employees. We’re aiming to launch five to seven initiatives for each. The concept is to give people one place to go to get their needs met. As part of that, we’re constantly looking for ways to eliminate the hassle involved in working with the government. We have a federal law called the Government Paperwork Elimination Act that says that every type of government-related paperwork transaction—all 6,600 of them—has to be reviewed and either moved online or eliminated by the end of the next fiscal year [which concludes Sept. 30, 2003]. We still have a long way to go to help citizens. For example, after Sept. 11, we looked at the grants available to help mitigate the effects of the disaster. There were considerably more than 1,000 types of grants available, but, to get them, state and local governments would have had to deal with more than 250 bureaus. The assistance process would have taken four years. That was unacceptable. We’re now looking to institute metrics that will measure how successful we are at making things easier for our customers. People ought to be able to get the decisions they’re looking for in hours or days rather than the weeks or months it takes now. Besides, you shouldn’t need a lawyer or an accountant to figure out how to comply with government rules and regulations. In addition to focusing on our customers, we need to eliminate redundancy in the things we do. When I came into the federal government, I had to fill out about 15 personnel forms. About eight forms into it, I started looking at how much overlap there was. I could have filled out one form with maybe 30 data items on it, and that would have accomplished the same thing. Last fall, for the first time, we looked across all departments and agencies to see where their business processes were redundant and to understand where their major technology investments overlapped. We uncovered a lot of anomalies: One department might buy as many as 10 different types of financial-management or H.R.-management software. There were also 14 payroll processing centers each planning to buy the same type of software to upgrade their systems. REGAN: The good news is that the technology is there now to help us work together better, whereas, maybe four or five years ago, it wasn’t available. We’re getting aggressive about improving. In state governments, if we have too much redundancy and people who want to start a business in Connecticut get too bogged down in paperwork, they might well go elsewhere. For us, improving comes down to economics. We have to be competitive with other locations. FORMAN: One other thing we should talk about is the critical importance of security. As more and more operations migrate to the Internet, we must increase our focus on computer security. REGAN: You’re right. We can’t get this wrong. We hold critical information about people and their identities. If we put a service online and violate people’s trust, we’ll see a tremendous legislative backlash that will prevent us from providing online services. Besides, we live in a fishbowl. When security issues crop up in government, they are very public concerns. In the corporate world, there may be security breaches, and yet a lot of times people don’t find out about them. To make sure we get things done right, states are for the first time talking to each other specifically about what we’re doing. We’re asking: Who’s doing what? What’s working? What are the threats? How do we deal with the full range of technologies? Across all the states, we must have at least one piece of every technology that was ever invented still around. We could probably put together a pretty good museum. So it’s not as though we all face exactly the same technical issues. Still, communicating with each other is really helping to improve the security practices protecting our computers and data. FORMAN: Fraud is something else that people worry about when thinking about e-government, but I sometimes think that a lot of the comments about people being able to commit more fraud once things are online are a bit misplaced. The truth is, we have a much better record trail when things are done online. Fraud will continue to happen, but it’s so much easier to find and prosecute criminals if they leave a pretty clean electronic audit trail. We’re focusing a lot on authenticating people when they do transactions online with the government. In other words, we are providing a means to electronically validate someone has access to data or is authorized to perform a transaction. We have been doing this for years with ID cards needed to get into federal buildings. Electronic signatures are a big deal for us. Keeping track of people’s signatures is something commercial businesses have been doing for quite a while. I went to Sears the other day, and they had me sign a paper receipt because they keep an electronic copy of my signature to match up when I come into the store. Sears has been doing this for five years. We can do similar types of things in the government that validate people. We’re considering several things right now, including using special passwords that act as digital signatures or using biometric systems where the user is recognized by a fingerprint.Whatever we do, we need to communicate better about our plans, because there has been an important shift in people’s attitudes. A recent Harris poll found that citizens’ top priority on e-government, far and away, was accountability. Specifically, people wanted the government to advertise regulations and policies that were being considered. People wanted to have their comments considered when decisions were being made. That shows a fairly sophisticated populace. Way back when, people predicted that the Web would encourage greater participation in the democracy. And now people are saying that they do want to be more involved. That’s a big change from several years ago when all people wanted was to see what government information was available. REGAN: People are saying, “It’s no longer good enough to have an elected official represent me. I want to make sure my voice is heard.” That’s a startling revelation about where our democracy is going. It will be interesting to watch.
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