Nick Mudge’s Technology and Government Weblog

I'm going on vacation, to Nova Scotia, Canada, for a week and a half. So I won't be posting anything up here for a little while.

7:36pm | web technology | no comments

In a memo dated July 12 2005, Clark Kelso, the CIO of California says:

We are working on an approach and plan to take the State’s web pages to the next level of services, functionality and sophistication.

I hope that the upgrade includes RSS feeds. Kelso?

In the memo, he outlines many other things the state IT guys are working on and some recent major IT developments in California.

Clark Kelso Memo

2:15pm | egovernment - enterprise architecture | no comments

Last month California released a framework for building its enterprise architecture.

California Enterprise Architecture Framework - Release 2.0 Draft

From the document:

This document provides a framework for California to initiate, develop, use, and maintain the enterprise architecture. This framework offers an end-to-end process to initiate, implement, and sustain an enterprise architecture program, and describes the necessary roles and associated responsibilities.

1:52pm | government resources - enterprise architecture | no comments

Phil Bredesen, Governor of Tennessee started up his blog again.

Recently he wrote about his observations of the recent NGA summer meeting on his blog:

I've spent the last two days at the National Governor's Association (NGA) summer meeting, which was held in Des Moines this year. About 30 governors were there. It was hot and humid, and we are in Biloxi next summer. I lobbied the governors of Maine and Montana to host a summer meeting in _their_ states!

He mentioned the governors meeting with DHS Secretary Chertoff:

There was an excellent discussion in a governors-only session on homeland security with Secretary Chertoff, with a lot of it revolving around the RealID program, which has governors worried about implementing it. Tennessee is ahead of the curve on this one due to the legislation from last year which established the two classes of liscenses (regular and a "not for identification" certificate). We are already doing many of the things that this would require, and so if it comes to pass should not affect us as severely as many of our neighbors.

2:45pm | egovernment - blogs | no comments

I've had a few general principals burning my sole for awhile now that I'm now going to share. I know they are true down to the bone. I've never been so dead certain about IT than these.

These maxims are very helpful in general to anyone involved with IT, but they have an especially unique helpfulness to the IT manager.

I wouldn't be surprised if these were natively inherent in competent programmers and other IT professionals.

These are most useful for people who want to get things done. But they are not just nice principals that may help things along. Whether they help or not, they are actually true.

I believe that intelligent application of these datums can help get things done and speed up and more efficiently get things done.

IT Maxims:

1. There is always a technology solution to any technology problem.
   When someone tells you that what you request can not be done, evaluate the situation and act accordingly because that is not true. This maxim is helpful to the developer because it tells him yes it can be done and it is possible that he find a way.
2. There is always a cost-effective solution to any technology problem.
   There may be many different solutions to the problem. There is a cost-effective one. Costs could be money, time, effort, whatever you consider cost. Cost-effective means it makes sense to expend for the return in the given circumstances.
3. IT isn't done until it is done with.
   That means that IT projects are finished when its products or services are no long being used. As long as a product is in use, the IT project that creates that product isn't finished. Products stay in development until they are no longer used. So don't ever expect to stop developing something as long as it is still being used unless you want to kill it and cause problems.

These are beginning ideas that I'd like developed more and I'd like to know what others think. What do you think?

3:43pm | technology governance | no comments

Wayne Hall and Nicholas Carr write about a research brief from MIT that covers various IT governance structures. I wish I could write a lot more about this right now because I absolutely love this stuff, but for now I figure I should at least link to it.

Wayne's post nails the essence.

1:12pm | government resources - technology governance - egovernment | no comments

I've never seen this on a government website before. Using javascript, the news on the homepage of Oklahoma's Department of Commerce website rotates automatically every 20 seconds or so. It is a news slideshow.

The website won a Webby Worthy award.

5:25pm | web technology - egovernment | no comments

David Sifry is CEO and founder of Technorati, a major blog search engine.

Yesterday he said this:

What a couple of months this has been! First, some stats on what’s going on in the blogosphere. Technorati is now tracking over 13.3 Million blogs, and 1.3 billion links. We are seeing over 900,000 posts per day on average, which means we're adding about 10 posts per second. We’re also seeing about 80,000 new weblogs created each day. That’s more weblogs created each day than there were total when I started the service in November 2002. And our search traffic has increased by over 40% month on month for each of the last 4 months. The day of the london bombings we saw over 1.2 Million posts, and had an additional 30% increase in traffic as people turned to weblogs, moblogs, and other citizen’s media for instant updates on events in London, survivor accounts, and sharing of deep feelings on the tragedy.

In fact, Technorati has been being used so much that some people have reported some problems.

I think Technorati's response here is an excellent example of a company listening to and talking with people in the blogosphere for the companies benefit and continued survival.

Technorati's page views graph from Alexa.com:

The word blogosphere is now in the dictionary. It's in Webster's New Millennium Dictionary of English, Preview Edition (v 0.9.6). I don't know if this is new news or not, but it's news to me.

Technorati Tag: Technorati

4:42pm | blogs | no comments

The National Weather Service has an experimental XML feeds service.

Weather alert XML feeds are available for each state and for some counties.

The alerts are provided in several formats: on the Web, RSS feeds, and CAP.

CAP, which stands for Common Alerting Protocal, is an XML format used specifically for hazard warnings.

7:28pm | web technology - egovernment - rss - xml - web services | no comments

Rhode Island released a set of Web services providing state government data over the Internet.

I wrote about it on Govtech.

Phil Windley, on Between the Lines, said the following about how I wrote part of the article.

He says:

To show you how far we are from what Jim has done in Rhode Island being universally adopted by cities and states the second paragraph reads:

A Web service is a mechanism that allows separate software applications to share data over a network. The Internet is such a network. Web services can enable a high degree of interoperability. With Web services, different software applications can share data despite being on different operating systems, platform environments, and written in different programming languages.

When your audience is government technologists and you feel obligated to describe what a Web service is in 2005, you know you're in trouble.

Below is what I think and my opinion. Look at the content of www.govtech.net to decide for yourself.

While I think there is some validity to what he says here, I don't think Govtech's content is written so much for government technologists. It's largely written for government technology managers and people not necessarily very familiar with technology, but who have some weigh in on what goes on in IT in their areas.

Don't get me wrong, govtech is for government technologists, and I think it will be even more so in the future, but I think, at times, govtech and GT Mag are attempting to bring business and general understandings to technical things -- attempting to bridge a gap between business-oriented-and-non-technology and technology.

Govtech, GT Mag and other such resources align with a responsibility of a CIO to bring a greater understanding of and the need of technology in state and local government. CIOs can use these resources to better educate others as well as become more informed themselves.

Today, I believe it is true that any entity Web site on the Internet that wants to provide new information regularly, and actually wants a lot of people to see it, should be publishing the data through RSS feeds no matter how else they are providing the data -- this especially applies to any news or media area. Without such, it is a sign of being behind the times.

Many city, county and state Websites don't have RSS feeds available and I don't know of any other than RI to have any other kinds of Web services available. I know of 10 state Websites that have RSS feeds available to the public. So a lot of state and local governments don't know about RSS feeds or Web services, or why to use them, or are prevented somehow from using them.

Rhode Island's Web services are another step forward. The Rhode Island IT guys are opening the state up to open source development and collaboration. Imagine a bunch of developers not employed by the state writing applications or including features in existing applications that forward the mission of a state government to provide services to its citizens online. This could be really cost effective.

Govtracker

7:50pm | web technology - government resources - govtech web site - technology governance - egovernment - rss - web services | no comments

It is interesting to look at the abstractions of code, from low level to high level.

I was recently reading about services in a service-oriented architecture. How abstract they are, so close to business services.

It is interesting to watch as code goes from hardware dependant, compiling and procedural, to less and less technology dependant, object-oriented, interpreted, and now there are services.

One day I bet technology is going to abstract right up into the manager's own business talk, business and technology becoming one at the decision level.

I wonder if that has already happened to some degree with services in a service-oriented architecture.

What do you think?

8:12pm | web technology - technology governance - SOA | 1 comment