Technology choices matter

Technology choices affect the present and the future

 

Key Points Technology choices... • affect the present and the future • depend on processes, users, and infrastructure •can improve customer service and streamline administration • can help attack complex problems

Today, more than ever before, government managers are realizing that certain technologies can help them do their jobs. These tools can reduce the complexity of accessing, viewing, and managing the vast sums of information collected and disseminated by government agencies.

Putting information, transactions, and services on the Web can improve government's responsiveness to citizens. Data repositories and data mining tools can help program managers view and evaluate information in ways that were impossible 10 years ago.

But implementing a new technology is not simple. Successful implementation depends on good planning and foresight, a thorough understanding of how the technology will be used, and a solid infrastructure. In other words, technology choices are choices about the present and the future. They are about business and work processes as well as software and processors. And they can have implications about the long-term direction of the organization.

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Technology choices have long-term impact
Whatever technology is chosen will have powerful long-term implications throughout your organization. It will undoubtedly influence almost every aspect of an organization, including:

Once implemented, technology has a way of cementing into place. It becomes embedded in virtually every aspect of the organization, affecting the way people work. New technology comes with new business rules, practices, and processes that are very hard to change. That's why it is vitally important to be careful to pick an approach you can live with every day. And if you can't live with any of the options available to you, the best choice may be no new technology at all. Changes in process or policy may be more useful.

 

Mapping business processes
Technology plays a significant role in the way government does business. Adding new technology changes the way people work. It is important, therefore, to understand how people currently work and why they do the things they do.

Mapping out business processes allows you to identify how current technologies are being used to support those processes. It may also tell you how your current technologies are impeding your business processes. Before committing to a new technology, it is vitally important to first understand whether and how it will support or enable improvements to the current business processes. Will it provide significant or only moderate process improvement? Will the process need to be modified to fit the technology? Can the organization handle the necessary organizational changes that will be required? A resource that may be helpful in mapping out business processes is the Business Process Reengineering Assessment Guide.

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Understanding user needs
No matter how large or small the technology initiative is, users must be an integral part of problem definition, planning, decision making, and testing. Wherever possible users should be made full and equal partners in the project team. Gone are the days when projects were initiated and designed by IT professionals on behalf of users. Today, projects must grow from user demand and be crafted on the comprehensive understanding of user needs. Users must be at the table when tough decisions are made about what to focus on first and what must wait. Recent cases in the news have illustrated that dissatisfied users can derail even the most expensive technology projects—even after investments have been made and systems implemented.

For example, the US Department of Education recently created Access America for Students, a pilot Web site for student financial aid applications. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the project was ended because college administrators, as important users of the application, did not participate in the design and were reluctant to participate in the second phase of the project.

We have learned over the years that understanding user needs and responding accordingly generate more commitment to the project. If users know their concerns are being incorporated into the plan, they are far more likely to be open to the technology's potential value, and more likely to take ownership of it. Perhaps more important, the system is more likely to fit well with the real work of the organization. This article, Human Error: The Defense Logistics Agency, from CIO Magazine discusses some of the risks involved in the human side of projects.

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Infrastructure requirements
Technology initiatives often must recognize and account for enormous diversity in organizational environments and infrastructures. This is true for modest application development or major projects driven by legislative priorities or executive vision.

There are various levels of staff expertise and resources throughout government agencies. Some have more technology resources and staff expertise than others. Just as some have high-end technology tools, others are still using processors they got in the early 90's. Staff skills and experience form an important part of the infrastructure as well. There may be large gaps between what staff can do and what a new technology requires of them.

The status of the technology infrastructure is a critical factor in decisions about which technology to choose for a particular project. An agency with a cutting-edge IT department and a seemingly unlimited IT budget, for example, will have one set of questions to answer with different choices to make in picking new technologies. Agencies facing a shortage of desktop equipment and few staff resources or time for necessary training will have an entirely different set of questions to answer and technologies to consider.

It is important to note also that having a modest infrastructure at the beginning of a well-funded technology project can be a great advantage. These conditions often allow the organization to leap forward because it does not have to deal with a substantial existing, often aging, infrastructure.

The following resources may be helpful in fitting a technology initiative into current conditions.

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Capabilities grow with technologies
Advances in technology have increased the capacity of government to use information effectively and to share it across agency and program boundaries. It is becoming easier to connect people to information they need to do their jobs better. Whether you are considering a new Web site, financial management system, or a new database, technology can significantly improve the way government workers communicate with colleagues and citizens to do their jobs.

The issues that arise from deciding to implement any of these technologies, however, are many and varied. Providing access to information 24 hours a day, seven days a week over the Internet or an intranet, for example, requires that you pay particular attention to many critical factors of design, including:

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Improved customer service
Putting information and services on the Internet, for example, can boost service to citizens. But there is more to the decision to go online than simply putting printed documents into HTML (Hypertext Marked up Language) and publishing them on the Web.

The shift from the actual 9-to-5 workday to a virtual 24-by-7 mode of operation may require significant changes to agency work processes. For example, an e-mail from a citizen at 1 A.M. will most likely have to wait until 9 A.M. to be read. If real 24-by-7 response is expected, working hours, work load and work processes will have to be shifted to accommodate electronic transactions that take place after the traditional workday.

Consideration must be given to where information will be housed and what rules and technologies will govern access in and out of a site. Users will vary in their capacity to access the Internet. For example, some businesses will have faster connections than most residential connections. Project teams need to consider who will use the site and how they will connect to it.

Providing public access to information must also be carefully considered. The network providing that access must be able to accommodate the expected number of users, while providing the necessary security to protect the integrity of the site and its users. Consideration must also be paid to the bandwidth, firewalls, security, and redundancy that affect the accessibility and reliability of the Web site.

At the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), researchers are using new Web-based tools that let researchers and citizens seamlessly access, integrate, analyze, and display government information right from their desktops. The article, Putting Government Information at Citizens' Fingertips, presents detailed information about this first-ever Digital Government Information Integration Testbed.

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Streamlined administration
Intranet systems and connections to the Internet can allow people in different agencies and departments to easily communicate and work with each other. Web sites can be designed to link information housed in different legacy systems, provide new ways to look at information, and enable people to make better, more informed decisions about services and programs.

Issues to consider in building a sophisticated network are the potential number of users, the bandwidth required, and the nature of hardware and software that will use the network. The type of security protections needed will depend on whether the systems on the network will be accessible remotely, whether it will connect to the Internet, and whether it connects to a legacy system that houses the agency's vital information in the form of files and databases.

Web servers can provide universal access to information. It is no longer so important what model of computer and operating system your users may have, but whether they have a Web browser with Internet access. Such broad access allows you to focus your attention more on giving users the information they need and less on where they are or what computer they are using. Information can be stored on a server located in a state agency in Albany and accessed just as easily in Syracuse, Buffalo, White Plains, Plattsburgh, or New York City. Government managers and employees on and off site can simultaneously view data from multiple programs or services from across the state.

The following articles and links illustrate some examples of using technology to streamline government.

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Working with cutting-edge technologies
Much of the time, you can analyze the information you have by working with commercial software ranging from spreadsheets to large data warehousing systems. For more advanced needs, several government agencies have teamed up with academic researchers to help apply even more advanced technologies to their needs. These projects help government managers get the information they want, while at the same time helping university researchers develop the next generation of data analysis tools.

Organized efforts to link government practitioners with IT researchers can be found in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) program in Digital Government and the Education, Outreach, and Training Program (EOT) in NSF's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure. In both of these programs, government agencies work hand-in-hand with academic researchers to develop new techniques and apply them to real-world needs of government agencies.

There are a number of benefits to having huge amounts of computing power available to support your analysis of the data. For example, using data mining techniques it is possible to look for patterns in the data that are only visible through a thorough analysis of the fine structure of the information. For example, at the University of Pennsylvania, researchers from the National Scaleable Cluster Project (NSCP) are working with Pennsylvania's Department of Commerce and Economic Development to analyze the state's rich archives of job creation data to help design economic development programs that work for the state. The research aims to solve the problems of using information stored on multiple databases and in multiple formats. New ways of dealing with this information can lead not only to an analysis that is useful to the state, but also can help researchers design systems that are effective in such complex environments

Another use of significant computing power is to present information in ways that make it especially easy to use. Having powerful analytic capability means that you can visualize the information and manipulate it in ways that increase its utility. For example, the City of Philadelphia is using NSCP's visual display capabilities to view information about neighborhood characteristics in order to help understand the pattern of housing abandonments in the city.

Having state-of-the-art technologies also allows you to access large amounts of data in an online format, amounts much larger than would be available through commercial technologies. The National Archives and Records Administration is working with researchers at the San Diego Supercomputing Center to develop a new system for archiving the nation's electronic records. It will allow documents to be retrieved in a fraction of the previous time, while at the same time guaranteeing that these documents will be readable even as technology changes.

A number of similar experiments are just now getting started. A group headed by the National Response Center, for example, is looking at how advanced data technologies can be used to prepare for and respond to national and state disasters.

Also, an article in an electronic news service provided by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), describes how three communities are collaborating on a common architecture for long term digital archives.

The Center for Technology in Government (CTG) has studied the effect of information technology as part of our Using Information in Government (UIG) Program. The technology concerns laid out above surfaced in different ways as noted below.

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Practical Examples

Mapping out the business process
Mapping out the current business process gives you a foundation for identifying how the process can be improved to fit with new technologies. For the Municipal Affairs Division of the Office of the State Comptroller, mapping out the work processes for handling technical assistance was resource intensive. But this work was vital to understanding how technology could be used to improve this core business process.

The Central New York Psychiatric Center found that major benefits were possible from only modest changes in their quarterly reporting process. After looking at how the current process works, they were able to define how applying technology would make the process more efficient.

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Keeping your technology options open
Sometimes not committing to one specific technology vendor or another can provide your project with the latitude you may need for success. In developing the Kids Well-being Indicators Clearinghouse (KWIC), the NYS Council on Children and Families decided to use an open source server that did not make them dependent on any particular vendor's product or support.

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Understanding the infrastructure
When the NYS Bureau of Shelter Services first began developing the Homeless Information Management Systems (HIMS), the first technology solution proposed was a Web-based application that could be accessed by homeless shelter providers to input and view data. Upon investigation, however, the project team learned that some of the homeless shelter providers were not connected to the Internet, some had policies that wouldn't allow access to the Internet, while others didn't know how to use the computers that were already on their desks. To address these limitations the HIMS project team modified the prototype plan. First they worked with the providers who could provide available data electronically. Second they are working on helping the remaining provider organizations find cost effective ways to improve their technological capacities.

The Office of the State Comptroller ran into a similar barrier when it wanted to develop a new technology system to better track information coming in and out of the Division of Municipal Affairs. Regional offices had electronic mail capabilities, but not all of them had access to the Internet. Before Municipal Affairs could roll out a new Web-based technology system that could be used by all the offices in the division, the regional offices need to gain access to the Web.

Faced with the challenge of streamlining the reporting process with their satellite offices, the Central New York Psychiatric Center was charged with choosing a system that could improve communication across the organization. Through the Using Information in Government Program (UIG) workshop series, it developed a business case to support its idea to implement an intranet application that would take advantage of the infrastructure already in place.