Newt's Call To Arms

Whoever came up with the phrase, "Love him or hate him," could very well have been talking about Newt Gingrich. Neutrality is not something the former Speaker of the House, architect of the Contract with America and current chairman of his own consulting firm, is known for. But one thing's for sure: Everyone knows where the guy stands. And these days, where he's standing is smack in the middle of the latest technology revolution. Of course, talking to Gingrich about his IT vision is a challenge in and of itself. He is quite the busy man, to say the least. The interview runs a bit late thanks to a previous photo shoot; he apologizes when conversations are paused for phone calls or to ask an assistant

for the federal budget numbers for the past five years; and when Gingrich finally does offer his undivided attention, he's all over the map--hopping from U.S. life expectancy to the global market to the Avian Flu--strewn throughout with anecdotes about historical figures like Henry Kissinger and Henry Ford, and analogies such as when he describes Washington as a person pushing a car with four flat tires.

But what can one expect? The man who moved from public to private sector--for now--certainly has some big ideas.

And he's calling on the channel to take a leadership role in helping to revolutionize government in critical areas, including health care, education and homeland security. Gingrich has high expectations for the private sector to deliver and help make his visions a reality. His mantra: Don't take no for an answer.

Gingrich On Health Care

If there's any one area that has Gingrich's attention, health care is it. And if preparedness is lacking from legacy technology and processes, the state of health-care IT is downright archaic.

As founder of the Center for Health Transformation, dedicated to creating a modern health-care system, Gingrich advocates a nationwide health-care network with 1 percent of all federal discretionary funds to help make it happen. The best way to spend the money, he says, would be for Medicaid and Medicare to pay doctors a dollar extra for every electronic health record transaction; the promised financial gain would encourage doctors to buy the equipment and software, and be up and running in a matter of days. But keep it simple, and make sure it's standardized, he says.

"We should've established a national standard of interoperability for electronic health records a long time ago. Lock all the technical people in a room, give them two weeks with three meals a day, a third week with two meals a day and a fourth week with one meal a day. Sometime in the third or fourth week, they'd figure it out." Gingrich might not be entirely serious--but he swears he's not entirely joking either. After all, he negotiated a tri-state water project as Speaker in less than 24 hours by locking all interested parties up in a room on a Saturday until 2:30 in the morning. "Henry Kissinger once told me that every major decision he's been involved in took 48 hours, tops; you never knew when the 48 hours started, but it never took more than that."

It seems that the 48 hours required to make Gingrich's health-care vision a reality may be just about to begin. In November, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded four contracts to develop prototypes for a nationwide health-information network architecture that enables the exchange of electronic health-care information among disparate systems (see "Health Care Moves Ahead").

With so much yet to be accomplished in terms of IT, health care holds the biggest potential for integrators.

"If you look at truly automating on-demand patient records, which would, in turn, make them available to any health-care professional, the opportunities then lie in the management software, the wireless technology, all of the security and encryption, and training," says Alan Bechara, president of Chantilly, Va.-based PC Mall Gov. "From a private-sector perspective, there are huge opportunities."

Gingrich On Education

Part of the reason Gingrich decided to focus on health care, he says, was because it's a heck of a lot easier to tackle than education. That's not to say, of course, that he doesn't have technology suggestions in that arena. Fifteen years ago, he proposed a program to give laptops to all K-12 schoolchildren--long before college campuses required them for incoming freshmen. He may have been onto something. More and more schools are either already issuing laptops to students or are working on acquiring them.

Today, as technology remains lacking in public education, Gingrich says, standards continue to drop. Perhaps the two are correlated; regardless, to him, the entire public-education system will have to be overhauled if the United States expects to remain a leading world power. "What you have in education is a castle of unionized obsolescence surrounded by a moat of bureaucratic credentials that make it very hard to change," Gingrich says. "But the moment it does change, it will change dramatically."

For that to actually happen, Gingrich stresses the need for improved math and science education, perhaps through some form of a real-time, always-accessible, online 24/7 center for learning. At a February 2005 press conference, he even suggested paying students that succeed in the sciences, saying, "we have fundraising for football, but funding for the sciences [is considered] weird."

But Gingrich's vision might be a little more difficult to make a reality. He believes the entire learning model needs to be reconceptualized, with technology as the driver. Until that happens, modern schools will continue to function less like institutes of learning and more like industrial factories.

Gingrich On Homeland Security

One key element Gingrich says will drive a wave of change in government is large-scale threats. Government failed to meet minimum standards of effectiveness during Hurricane Katrina, he says, because government systems haven't been modernized since the 1930s (when manual typewriters used carbon paper, he notes). Unless that changes, we are sitting ducks for disasters.

"The combination of natural and biological dangers could lead to a loss of life at a scale we have not seen in modern times," Gingrich says. The government simply hasn't kept up. "Back when [people] rode around in stagecoaches, [there was] a very slow evolution; they didn't have medicine, but they at least could see the plague coming over a long period of time. Now, we have the medicine, but [the plague] arrives on a jet plane."

Given that, government will be forced to metamorphose into what Gingrich describes as a 21st century intelligent, effective government that's led by "entrepreneurial public management." What exactly might that mean? According to Arpad Toth, chief technologist at Chantilly, Va.-based GTSI, it translates to government leadership supported by industry innovation.

"Right now, the Department of Homeland Security can't truly project an image to citizens that says, 'Yes, you live in a safe and secure society.' There's a major disconnect. We need to focus on homeland-security protection techniques with solutions and services standardized by government and efficiently maintained by industry," Toth says.

This 21st century government Gingrich speaks of will be influenced by industry leaders such as Federal Express, Wal-Mart and Travelocity--companies that continuously stay on top of technological innovation and incorporate that into how they do business.

Similarly, for citizens to be kept secure at home, government has to use technology to stay one step ahead of potential threats, rather than trying to react once they arrive. "It's physically impossible for contemporary bureaucracies to keep up with the world around it," Gingrich says. "They literally move at a pace that's [too slow]."

Gingrich on the Holdup

All areas in government stand to benefit enormously from technology and, simultaneously, the expertise of the private sector. And yet, Gingrich will tell you that most are way behind and that a few things need to change if government stands any chance of catching up to industry.

For one, he says, government should be bound less by existing legislation and business processes. With limited authority for any one person to do anything, little gets accomplished. "Part of the problem with Washington is that when you have a $2.4 trillion system, everything is cumbersome and slow," Gingrich says. "And when you have an adversarial relationship between Congress and the president, everything gets compounded."

His analogy of Washington as a person pushing a car with four flat tires illustrates that unproductiveness. "The car is in park, and they spend an enormous amount of energy shoving it six or 10 feet. When you [ask], 'Why did you only get six feet yesterday?' they say, 'Well, you don't understand how bad these laws are.'"

What Gingrich describes as "institutional problems" get in the way--from the civil-service laws written by Congress to the way procurement operates. "By its very nature, government is ineffective and inefficient," says Alan Webber, senior analyst of government at Forrester Research. "Could it do better? Yes. And I think technology is a big part of that. We have to pressure government to be less change-adverse."

With a major problem in government being laws that hamper innovation, one might find it strange to hear that improvement lies in more policy. But the main reason why government agencies frequently operate in stovepipe environments, Gingrich says, is a lack of standardization.

But when do standards stop being productive and start to hamper innovation? Tough to say, but Gingrich often points to ATMs as the perfect balance: "They're always available, but passive," in the sense that people certainly may opt to not use them. "Government needs to unobtrusively wrap itself around citizens, rather than expect citizens to inconvenience themselves for government, he says."

And there are areas where government is succeeding in striking that balance. The Lines of Business from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), for example, establish a form of standards for management, including case, financial, grants, human-resources, as well as federal-health architecture and IT security.

The Lines of Business initiatives encourage common processes across agencies, while also leaving it up to the agencies themselves to determine how best to go about implementation.

"Progress is being made with the Lines of Business initiatives, and it's becoming real," says David Kriegman, executive vice president and COO of Fairfax, Va.-based SRA International. "The OMB is very sensitive to emphasize the initiatives in a way that is both centralized and decentralized. Everything is not dictated, which is smart."

Kriegman recalls a lecture with the late computer pioneer and Navy veteran Grace Hopper in the 1980s. "She said that in the future, the network would be the computer. I didn't know what she meant at the time, but since then it's become so real. Standardization is all about sharing data in the right way, and the more government thinks in terms of enterprisewide solutions, the more standardization will happen without having to legislate."

Gingrich on the Channel

So, with effective standards led by the use of integrated technology, it stands to reason that Gingrich expects change in government to be driven by the private sector and of course, the channel. Work together with industry to benchmark a best-of-class standard, he says, and drive solutions that leverage that standard.Just as integrators drive standards in industry that can be adopted in government, the growing trend toward performance-based contracting provides integrators more influence over how technology is implemented within agencies.

A new trend toward due-diligence sessions--one-on-one meetings between contracting officers and potential bidders--is also helping increase influence. "In the past, whenever a contractor would ask questions, it would be in public during a bidding conference," Kriegman says. "No one would ask anything...while the competition's in the room."

Of course, getting in front of government with solutions is still a challenge. But Gingrich says it's all in the approach. Show them a crisis that can be avoided or an opportunity that can be exploited to bring huge results. For instance, he recently read about long-distance trucking companies using on-board hydrolysis systems to turn water into hydrogen that then is added to fuel for 20 percent better mileage. If that is adaptable to school-bus fleets, imagine what 20 percent more mileage would amount to in a single year.

"I would say to [the contractors] out there that if you think you've got a better way of doing something, then you have an absolute obligation to explain that to your elected officials," he says.

Olathe, Kan.-based NIC, for example, developed an online business-registration system for Utah that integrates registration requirements of the IRS, five state agencies and several of Utah's largest local municipalities. The solution saves constituents an average of 23 hours per registration.

"The private sector can bring to the table advocacy, expertise and patient discipline," says Chris Neff, director of integrated marketing at NIC. "It's a matter of saying, 'We're willing to wait this out, but we're also going to continue pushing in this direction.'"

That's just what Gingrich tells industry: Bring to the government integrated solutions that improve processes and offer tangible benefits, and be relentless--the government needs help.