E-Government Yet To Realize Potential

Despite high hopes for e-government, federal, state and local agencies are discouraged by slow progress with initiatives, according to a panel of IT officials at the Gartner Government Conference (G-Con) Wednesday. For real benefits to be realized, solution providers need to instill upon government an enterprise approach to IT, and legislators need to show more tangible support for initiatives.

Many agencies haven fallen into a "trough of disillusionment" in terms of e-government, said John Kost, managing vice president at Gartner.

"A lot of expectations were set, but we didn't achieve the return on investment. We suddenly realized that you can't do everything on the Web. All sorts of things will go into moving out that trough toward enlightenment and productivity."

That's not to say that e-government is a complete failure. Fairfax County, Va., for example, incorporated a citizen Web portal, multimedia kiosks, integrated voice-response systems, mobile access, text-based alerting and a government Cable TV Channel. How did the county pull it off?

"We started 12 years ago," before the term e-government was even coined widespread, said David Molchany, deputy county executive at Fairfax County. "We developed a program that had a strong foundation and have since built upon those initial applications."

Furthermore, Molchany was elevated to decision-maker -- responsible for the management of all aspects of information and technology for the county.

Unfortunately, many IT officers at all levels of government don't have such authority, nor do they have the executive commitment necessary for legislative and financial backing.

"Appropriations committees [allocate] dollars vertically, but e-government [by design] saves money horizontally," said Tim Young, deputy e-government administrator at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). "E-government is good government, but the conversation takes a lot of time." As a result, nine agencies earned unsatisfactory marks by the OMB in their progress of e-government initiatives in the second quarter of 2006.

Similarly, with no legislative oversight of its own budget, the Office of the CIO in New York State struggles to make the potential of e-government understood.

"IT is treated as a standalone discipline," said Michael Mittleman, New York State's CIO. "[Officials] look at how IT is applied at a particular agency, but not across the enterprise. There's no fundamental understanding of [what e-government offers]."

Beyond funding, CIOs are met with significant pushback by people within agencies who are reluctant to change. And that's where the channel can help, educating individual agencies about the benefits posed by e-government, and providing solutions that are the least disruptive to engrained processes. Regardless, there's a way to go before the full potential is realized.

"E-Government has much promise and always did, but [the IT] model and actual execution are pretty disparate," Mittleman said. "We have some islands of excellence, but performance is very uneven. My job is to look across the enterprise, and so far it's not the magic bullet. If there's a trough, I'm at the bottom."