CHAPTER 12 ________________________________
Technology Challenges for 21st-century Government

Consider how the world has changed in the last 25 to 30 years, since the Reagan administration’s Grace Commission investigated federal government waste and inefficiency and the Reform 88 initiative, intended to improve management of the government, was launched. The first microcomputers were just being introduced, and personal computers were mostly the realm of hobbyists. People came to work at central offices. A major role of the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) was to manage the building of, or build themselves, a multitude of federal buildings and offices to house all those workers. Most businesses were local or within driving distance. Mobile telephones existed only as car phones for the well-to-do. Telework was largely unknown. Research was conducted using books and at libraries.

Contrast this with the world we live in now—what the Gartner Group, an IT consulting firm, calls Future Worker 2015. Long-distance travel is common. Personal computers and cell phones are ubiquitous. Telework is routine. Business partners are as likely to be on different continents as in different cities. Research reports include graphics, sounds, and multimedia gathered in minutes on the web or through electronic interactions.

The Obama administration is considering building on and expanding existing e-government initiatives, increasing government’s openness and transparency, making use of so-called Web 2.0 collaborative tools, and exploring cloud computing (network access to a shared pool of computing resources) and other mechanisms to reduce existing infrastructure investments. Moreover, technology is being viewed as an enabler in dealing with major challenges in such policy arenas as health, transportation, energy, and the environment.

Technology Trends: Short Term

In the Analytical Perspectives volume of the FY 2010 Budget of the United States Government, the new president outlined a management and performance agenda. That agenda is organized around the following themes:

• Putting performance first by replacing the Bush-era Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART) with a new performance improvement and analysis framework

• Ensuring responsible spending of Recovery Act funds

• Transforming the federal workforce by reforming the current hiring process and hiring several hundred thousand civilian employees during the next four years

• Managing across sectors (e.g., private and nonprofit) and collaborating across levels of government

• Reforming federal contracting and acquisition

• Enhancing transparency, technology, and participatory democracy.

At the time this chapter was written, only the initial thinking about such a management and technology agenda is available. Here are some early plans and changes:

• Departments and agencies will harness new technologies to publish information about their operations and decisions online, in ways that are readily available to the public.

• The administration will provide more transparency and openness and devise new tools to let citizens participate and have their voices heard.

• How will federal officials manage millions of public comments in a meaningful way? Automation is the answer, observers say. Business intelligence software, including data mining, decision support, and reporting and web analytic tools, will help agencies extract useful information from public comments.

• Government must manage its information technology programs efficiently while reducing redundancy and risk from outdated and interoperable computer systems.

• The shift to cloud computing is inevitable.

• Web 2.0—social networking tools—is part of the next wave of government technology adoption.

• For 21st-century governments, human resource and management policies could become a differentiator in those governments’ ability to attract the best workers (regardless of where these workers live and the times of day they work). These policies should support workers’ expectations that the same productivity, multitasking, and mobility tools with which they grew up should also be in the workplace.

• Government agencies should adopt the collaborative open-source software model.

• The Recovery Act includes a robust ($7.2 billion) broadband stimulus program intended to spur deployment of high-speed Internet connectivity to areas with limited or no service.

• The president has appointed the country’s first federal chief technology officer (CTO).

• Information technology investments that reduce energy should get a boost in this administration as we seek to “green” IT.

• IT security and privacy remain high-profile areas of concern. The Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency, a bipartisan effort on the part of computer security experts, has recently recommended that President Barack Obama set up a high-level post to increase IT security and counter cybercrime, citing intrusions within the computer systems at the Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Commerce.

Challenges lie ahead for this ambitious technology agenda. They include the federal government’s organizational structure, the inability of managers to understand how these new technology tools create value, and executives who are suspicious of or uncomfortable with perceived changes or risks. How the administration manages and copes with these government cultural barriers will determine success (or failure) much more than will any technological challenges.

Technology Trends: Longer Term

A recent Wall Street Journal special report, “Thinking about Tomorrow,” begins as follows:

Technology will continue to bring about major changes in government and in governance, just as it did in the 20th century. We should acknowledge that it’s been far easier to project technology trends than it has been to predict which ones will really take hold and what their effects will be on government and society.

The existing technology landscape for our new president in 2009—limited telework efforts, parallel processing, data mining/warehousing, business intelligence software, mobile computing, and so on—will change in his first and (potentially) second term. In its place, the nation’s leaders will encounter new strategic information and communication technologies that will change government: government 2.0, green IT, distributed co-creation, ubiquitous bandwidth, virtual space and simulation, smart environments, and the like.

Many of these changes have been outlined recently by Cisco Systems’ futurist, Dave Evans (see Figure 12-1).

But what trends are we seeing that have the greatest potential to affect government, governance, and politics in our society? In his provocative podcast The Technology Avalanche, Evans outlines a (very) brief history of human innovation. He notes that these technological developments—from the first locomotive to human genome mapping—have taken place during less than 0.2 percent of the time humans have existed. But those innovations were nothing! All of them will be dwarfed in the next few years by accelerating, exponential technology growth unlike anything before—a technology avalanche. Evans goes on to forecast explosive growth in the four pillars of technology:

• Storage. In 20 years, for a little over $100, a computer user could purchase 11 petabytes (11 million gigabytes) of storage.

• Bandwidth and computing. The first quantum computers are expected to be available around 2020. By the same time, a $1,000 personal computer will have the raw processing power of the human brain.

• Information. In 2015, the U.S. Internet will be at least 50 times larger than it was in 2006.

What changes does Evans see from these trends? First, all technological tools will be connected, and the Internet will be accessible through countless new devices. Wireless communication will be everywhere, and your phone will be your computer. And, beyond that, we will begin to get close to traveling to work by jet pack or teleporter and having robots that not only serve dinner but replace humans in the workforce.

Other Changing Horizons

What do other forecasters predict? Computer Sciences Corporation’s (CSC) Leading Edge Forum just issued a report called Digital Disruptions, noting seven disruptions that already are influencing or will influence business, society, and government in the 21st century. The list includes:

• New media

• Virtual reality

  Social media and networks

• Information transparency

• Communications infrastructure

• Next-generation computational power

• User-machine interfaces.

The CSC team considered including a number of other technologies on the list before settling on these final seven. Among those considered were collaborative technologies and cloud computing. They chose not to single out collaborative technologies because they are integral to a number of the items that made the list. And cloud computing is very much with us today, ever since Google, Inc., CEO Eric Schmidt uttered the term in 2006.

On another front, the federal government will face a retirement tsunami in its workforce. According to many experts, 60 percent of the government’s top managers will be eligible to retire in the next decade. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management has projected that the number of retirements will peak between 2008 and 2010—just as President Obama is launching his new administration. Over the next five years, the federal government could lose more than 550,000 employees.

The Chinese write the word crisis with two characters, one of which means danger and the other opportunity. The pending workforce crisis (the retirement tsunami) can also be viewed as a tremendous opportunity—to reshape the federal government, flatten hierarchies, remake the way government and citizens interact, and change the culture of the bureaucracy. It is an opportunity to mold government into a highperformance organization, create a more resilient workforce, and make government itself more resilient. It is an opportunity to build a 21st century government and workforce. This kind of opportunity has not come along since the Hoover Commission government efficiency studies were issued in the 1940s and 1950s and is not likely to be available again for another generation.

Technology has enabled the development of revolutionary business models for government and has elevated citizen and customer expectations. Secure communications are available anywhere and at any time through broadband and wireless. The network phenomenon has changed when, where, and how we collaborate and transact business. Rich and social media concepts, including video anywhere, instant messaging and presence awareness, podcasts, wikis, blogs, and shared bookmarks, have changed transactions and how we communicate. Governments must now change their business models from those of the last 50 or more years to those that will characterize the 21st century and beyond.

Recommended Resources

Leading Edge Forum. “Digital Disruptions: Technology Innovations Powering 21st-century Business.” Computer Sciences Corporation, 2009. http://assets1.csc.com/lef/downloads/LEF_2008DigitalDisruptions.pdf (accessed September 18, 2009).

Evans, Dave. “The Technology Avalanche.” Cisco, 2009. http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/podcasts/ciscocast_dave_evans_060407.html (accessed September 18, 2009).

Morello, Diane, and Betsy Burton. “Future Worker 2015: Extreme Individualization.” Gartner Group, 2006. http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=138172 (accessed September 18, 2009).

U.S. Office of Management and Budget. “Analytical Perspectives in Budget of the United States Government FY 2010.” Washington, D.C., 2009.

Journal Reports. “Thinking about Tomorrow.” Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2008, Special Report.