With the 2007 NASCIO IT recognition award submission process closed and the evaluation process in full swing, I’m anxiously awaiting the publication of the nominations from across the country. It’s always interesting to see what new and innovative practices are being applied in different state governments. With Web 2.0, blogging, wikis, multi-media, and social computing firmly established in the Internet at large (see Time Person of the Year 2006), it’s high time that this wave hits the government sector, which usually lags behind in such trends by a couple of years.

I’ve been catching up on blogs the last couple of days and took in a couple of interesting sites. Dave Fletcher, who I believe is the CIO or CTO of Utah, has re-emerged with a vengeance in his blogging and is to thank directly or indirectly for much of this information.

•         Kansas’s new state portal features a MyKansas page with drag-and-drop type widgets similar to what you’d find on the Web 2.0 style portals like Netvibes. The portal has some other interesting features but still belays the shallow integration with other state sites that characterizes most state portals. As is to be expected, it is likely to be a multi-decade initiative to provide deep multi-channel integration across the different state government agency service offerings.

•         The federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) looks to have really done their blogging presence right on their Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog. Well laid out, with expert contributions and a wealth of comments (albeit moderated), the site is a great example of opening up a dialog with the experts in this area and making participation and information accessible to the public at large.

•         The State of Delaware is using VoiceXML to provide telephone-accessible services to citizens across different agencies (here’s that multi-channel thing again). This directly addresses the fact that e-government doesn’t flow exclusively through the Web browser. Citizens requiring state assistance services are less likely to have access to a high-speed Internet connection, less likely to be comfortable with these services, and more likely to have some degree of physical or cognitive impairments; all of which make Web-browser based applications less than ideal. VoiceXML solutions can leverage XML technologies in existing Web-based applications and provide access to citizens through a very important alternative channel.

•         I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention some of the trends in Dave’s own state, Utah. Dave has a bunch of information in his blog. I appreciate especially the Google search function as I’ve heard anecdotally, on a number of occasions, tales of state employees bypassing their own state portals and going to Google directly when they really want to find something within their states.

In Pennsylvania, as I believe in many other states, IT consolidation is the order of the day. The recently re-issued executive order from Governor Rendell has a specific section covering IT Consolidation and Services (Section G) and has strengthened the IT review and governance processes significantly from the previous revision. BSCoE’s implementation of the Logidex product, which I’ve blogged about previously, will provide some support in the area of reuse, consolidation and measurement and will be one of the NASCIO submissions that is publicized in the next couple of months.

The more I use Ruby on Rails, the more I become convinced that it is damn near the perfect framework for state government Web-based applications. That said, I don’t know of a single state, local, or municipal government that is experimenting with Rails in any meaningful fashion. I have a bunch of stored Google queries that have yielded woefully little information about the penetration of Rails into state government over the past year or so. I fear that is because there really has been little or no penetration.

When I think through the merits of Ruby on Rails and apply the pragmatic brush of my experience with state governments, I’m torn as to whether I believe Rails will ever gain a foothold in this arena. To articulate my ideas, I’ve enumerated, on one hand, my top three compelling arguments why Rails should be overwhelmingly successful in state government. On the other hand, I’ve listed the top 3 reasons why Rails doesn’t really stand a fighting chance. I’ve omitted what some would consider the “classic” selling points of RoR: ActiveRecord, Scaffolding, etc. By all means, I encourage you to look into these if you’re new to Rails. It’s just that they aren’t particular to adoption in state government. In the spirit of remaining optimistic, I’ll list the top 3 reasons Rails has a chance first.

Top 3 Reasons Rails Could Find a Home in State Government

1. Convention Over Configuration – With this mantra, the Rails community initiated a full-frontal attack against the J2EE crowd (pre-EJB3, have you), where XML configuration files had become the tail wagging the dog. Ruby on Rails, on the other hand, makes all sorts of assumptions about what how things will work and requires developer intervention as the exception rather than the norm. In an environment where developers really do work an 8 hour day (or less), focus on delivering functionality and not on tweaking and re-tweaking the application architecture means significantly greater productivity.
2. Painless Objects – For many developers, especially those transferring from procedural languages like COBOL or Visual Basic, objects do not come naturally. I’ve seen many state government developers spend years trying to catch onto the concept and still not get it. In Rails, objects just work out of the box, knowing how to deal with the database, providing easy validation hooks and manageable relationships. As a bonus, Ruby tends to be less intimidating to look at for COBOL or classic VB developers than do the C family of languages (C# and Java, in our case).
3. Embodiment of Best Practices – From unit tests and separation of concerns to database migrations and standard environment definitions, everything is built into Rails. These things can certainly all be done in the Java and .NET worlds, the practices and tools just seem so much more external to the way of doing things and have not been universally integrated into the standard way of doing things in these languages. As an example, how many C# texts talk about unit testing? How many RoR texts don’t talk about unit testing?
   

Top 3 Reasons Rails Will Fail To Find a Home in State Government

1. No Salesforce – Surprised that I didn’t mention cost in the reasons contributing to Ruby on Rails success in state government? That’s because it isn’t. The fact that the entire RoR stack is free means less “conventional” ways to make money on the software side of things. You won’t find IBM, BEA, or Microsoft pitching Ruby on Rails solutions to state governments. Furthermore, the large system integration vendors won’t be pitching it either. Without the software vendors and the SI’s, it’s really hard to get in the door at state governments.
2. Knocked as Not Enterprise-Worthy- Ruby and Rails have been knocked since their inception as great for hobbyist but not enterprise worthy. This is a knock that open source software gets in general and when it’s a scripting language to boot, you might as well be buying your technology from Toys-R-Us. For the real story on this, I suggest that you take a look at Dare Obasanjo’s classic blog post My Website is Bigger Than Your Enterprise. Dare’s points are very good, and although they’re not 100% accurate, you gotta think, “if this works for Google and Yahoo, why can’t it work for me?”
3. No Formalized Training Program – This may sound even more ludicrous than my first two points. What’s the right way of saying this… “it’s true.” Believe me, it’s a known fact that until there is formal training available for a technology and the big vendors are pitching it, it’s not enterprise worthy. Right?

I’ve spent the better part of the last 6 years dealing with state government systems that manage information about citizens receiving government services. As creative as state government can be in some areas, presenting new and interesting visual metaphors for the management of citizen and case (i.e. collections of citizens) information is certainly not a forte. This problem is not solely the fault of state governments. Rather, it’s the product of state government business leaders’ lack of knowledge of the available options, educational obligation complacency on part of government’s IT partners, and the real or perceived difficulty of being visually creative in an environment where accessibility compliance is not an option. 

There are ways around the accessibility compliance constraints; up to and including parallel functionality with both accessibility compliant and non-accessibility compliant versions. Education, however, is not always as easy to come by. With the technology supporting rich Internet applications, we can do so much more than could be done with an old 3270 mainframe terminal. Yet, across a broad swathe of in-house, outsourced, and packaged case management solutions, you’ll rarely find anything beyond some minimalistic styling and obligatory “smiling citizen” pictures that could not have been done 20 years ago. There are many new metaphors that we could use to make the data presented by case management applications more meaningful to workers. I present three of the more radical concepts below:

 

1.      Geospatial - Use a geographic metaphor to allow the discovery of relationships between individuals, cases, caseloads, or entire programs. With the advent of map mashups, this has surely become one of the more popular new visuals for creatively displaying data on the Web. For publicly accessible examples of what is possible, check out Chicago Crime and Citystat. These two examples represent visualizations of publicly available data in Chicago and Wasington D.C. , respectively. Also, these were built on top of relatively garden variety two dimensional maps. More recently, things are moving more in the direction of quasi 3 dimensional (a.k.a. “Bird’s Eye Views”) and fully navigable three dimensional models. If you haven’t seen Microsoft’s maps at all (or as of late), I strongly encourage you to give them a look. Right from your browser you get fully scrollable 2 dimensional maps and bird’s eye views of many major and non-major (check out the Capitol Complex in Harrisburg , as an example) US cities. As a bonus, if you’re using Internet Explorer, you can get fully virtual reality tours of several major cities. Firefox users, don’t despair, support is supposedly being added soon for Firefox too.

 

2.      Temporal – Use a timeline metaphor to show a longitudinal time scale relationship between various events. These events could be various transactions within a case or across multiple cases. Simile Timelines are an exciting new way to model such relationships. Check out the example timeline for the events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  Notice especially how the top and bottom timelines interact together as you drag them independently. For bonus credit, check out how the scale of time changes in the most critical moments surrounding Kennedy’s assassination from months to days to hours to 15 minute intervals. Timline, much like the maps that support the geographic metaphor, has a fully API against which one can program. This leaves the possibilities for state government based uses of the timeline metaphor wide open.

3.      Network Graphs – Using the network metaphor enables the discovery of complex relationships between people and other entities. With a deep network of relationships in most case management systems, this is potentially one of the most useful new metaphors. Given the graphic and data intensive nature of displaying these relationships, it’s also one of the most difficult ones to implement technically. There are some great examples of this being done on the open Internet though, most of them using Flash. Check out Tracking the Threat’s terrorist network navigator. Imagine using the same thing to expand the network relationships in a case management system. Moritz Stephaner’s Relation Browser is also a great example of what can be done in this space. Unfortunately, there’s a lack of standard tools to build these types of models. The one tool that I know of (Prefuse) uses Java and Java Applets instead of Flash. Hopefully, we’ll see some key players recognize the opportunity and create standard tools to support this metaphor in the near future.

These really are the more radical of the changes that I can think of. There are, of course, more rudimentary changes that can be made that could have just as profound of an impact. The use of pictures with personal profiles or the ability to perform full text searches on the system’s case notes (the unstructured data lifeblood of many systems) immediately come to mind. As much of a challenge as it seems to implement these suggestions for existing case management systems, the far greater challenge lies in adjusting users’ approach to leveraging these new features. A genuine knowledge worker approach is required to get the most out of these features. This is a proposition bound to be a very exciting opportunity for some and a very scary change for others.

I realize that the title of this blog post is something that one would probably not associate with a blog that purports to cover technology. Bear with me please and surf over to YouTube (or view below) to look at the video posted by the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission. I think you will agree that the video is very well done. Much like the partnership between Google and the Pennsylvania Tourism Office that I blogged about a couple of months back, this posting to YouTube represents some signs of forward thinking, Web-based focus, and creativity on the part of state government.

 

 

Granted, with tourism and fishing, we are looking at revenue generating sectors of state government. You don’t yet see this sort of thing from Welfare service divisions. How long will it be though until other sectors of state government start looking at public Internet services as an alternate channel for communications with their constituents? The economics of these services surely works in their favor (that is, they’re free). It then becomes a question of what the best channel is to reach one’s constituents.

Face-to-face interaction, snail mail, and government sponsored portals will be around for a while to come, I surmise. But as usage of cell phones, email, inexpensive audio devices and collaborative community-based Internet services like YouTube continue to permeate through the layers of citizenry, state governments will not be able to ignore these viable communication mediums. The one question that remains is whether state governments are prepared to engage in the two way dialog and deal with the power shift that these new communication vehicles will invariably bring.

Over the holidays, I had the chance to catch up with some back reading and Podcasts and there was one, in particular, that caught my attention. The book / Podcast combo on transforming state governments by Deloitte & Touche provided some really interesting, innovative, no-holds-barred analysis of the problems that state governments are facing in the early 21^st century. Recorded the day after the 2006 elections, Deloitte’s Bob Campbell and Bill Eggers collaborate with Deloitte advisor, former governor of Pennsylvania and first secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge to produce an excellent Podcast. The Podcast serves as a solid introduction to the more extensive analysis in their book, States of Transition: Tackling government’s toughest policy and management challenges.

 

 

 

The Podcast is available via iTunes or as a download on Deloitte’s Web site. You can also download a decent sized book excerpt here. I have also mirrored the book excerpt as well for the sake of speed and continuity. I’ve highlighted some of the interesting points of the Podcast and book below. I encourage you to listen to the Podcast and pick up the book. My experience with state government leads me to believe that Deloitte’s analysis is spot on. Many of the truths analyzed in the book / Podcast are the veritable elephants in the room of state government. As important as these insights are for public policy and administrative specialists; they are equally important to technologists. As I have told several clients, the business architecture issues of state government such as workforce, political, and organizational constraints must be offset by tradeoffs that will ultimately affect the application and technical architecture solutions that we as technologists are asked to provide. If you are a technologist providing solutions to state governments, it behooves you to understand these business architecture constraints.

 

Before I go into the highlights of the book / Podcast, I’ll start with a bit of ethically obligatory disclosure. I am a Deloitte employee. That said, I am not writing this blog entry to tout or profit from my employer’s intellectual capital in any way. The materials I am blogging about are, obviously, all publicly available. Furthermore, I am writing about them because I feel that they would be of interest to the majority of this blog’s readers. Enough of the fine print; highlights as well as a matrix excerpted from the book can be found below:

 

• Bob Campbell hits the nail on the head but citing federal entitlement programs as the drivers of siloed state government operations. Makes you wonder if things like the Federal Funding Accounting and Transparency Act are eventually going to have trickle down effects on the states.
• Focus on states as the “laboratories of democracy” and drivers of innovation. This is especially important since states have the potential to be much more agile than the federal government in addressing policy issues and providing innovative solutions.
• Coverage of the tough choices needed to fix an ailing Medicaid system. Innovations such as the Vermont Medicaid waiver system are included in the discussion. One fact that I found both interesting and scary (though not surprising) is that, were state Medicaid budgets the basis of independent operating entities, nearly half of the states’ Medicaid programs would be Fortune 500 companies.
• Detailed analysis of state government workforce issues. There is a lot of information about unfunded liabilities on state retirement and healthcare plans. Governor Ridge went as far as to compare state government with the steel and automotive industries; a comparison I contemplated a lot on my recent trip to Detroit.
• Critical look at an infrastructure deficits and discussion of the need to increase focus on this area. There are some interesting examples of the public-private partnership model at work. One in particular that came up during the Podcast was the purchase and execution of warranties on roads by New Mexico. For those with further interest in this area, I’d encourage you to listen to the IT Conversations Podcast about transportation networks.

Trying to remain fair and unbiased, there are also several things for which I would have liked to have seen analysis and opinions. It’s understandable these issues didn’t make the cut for a text that is already tackling a lot of huge issues. However, I’d be interested to know where folks stand on these issues:

 

• Detailed analysis of the real cost of a state worker (per hour). When you factor in the number of hours worked and the liberal pension and healthcare benefits, what is the actual cost of your hypothetical state worker? I’d be interested to know.
• Focus on the citizen-centric viewpoint of government. That is, with my cable company, whether I go online, call on the phone, or walk into one of their storefronts, they can ask me a question or two to establish my identity and then pull up all of the information they need to help me without asking me to provide it again. Government, on the other hand, comes across as having a serious case of amnesia when trying to pull off the same act. “Need to file taxes? Tell me your name, your address, your dependants…”, “Need Welfare? Your name, your address, your dependants…”, “Need a license...”
• Discussion about digital and energy infrastructure as well as physical infrastructure. Not to diminish the value of physical infrastructure, but last time I checked, we didn’t rank too well globally in terms of the pervasiveness of high-speed network connectivity. We also have a serious addiction to dead dinosaur juice. While energy policy tends to be largely a federal thing, states like California are well versed trend setters in this area. If states really are to be the drivers of innovation, what could they do in this area? Check out my post on the Destiny USA project. Seems like New York has mixed emotions about being too much of a trend setter.
• Realistic view of drawing the best and the brightest to state government work. I’d be interested to know how many states offer tuition reimbursement as part of their employment package. Anyone, anyone?? Also, with the private sector increasing chunking work into projects and matrixing staff across projects, I’d be interested to hear ideas about if and how a hierarchical organization such as state government can be contorted to follow this precedence.

I’ve added a second state government pattlet to the portfolio. This one is for the case entity. Although a bit more simplistic than our previous pattlet, Case still has some very interesting nuances, such as the use of aspect-oriented techniques to account for associating the writing of case history records with various case-related transactions.

In addition, I have made some minor revisions to the Case Transfer pattlet, upped the version number, and reposted that as well. I’ve also started added these pattlets to two open source pattern repositories.

On PatternShare.org, these two pattlets were the first examples to be added under the business architecture category. I’ve found PatternShare to be very usable and friendly. In essence, it’s a Wiki for patterns. Unfortunately, after the initial loading of the well-known patterns (e.g. GoF, Fowler), there has been little activity in this community, which is a real shame. I was especially disappointed at the non existence of business patterns, since this is an area where I see so much potential.

On et.gov, the process of adding and mapping a pattern was very interesting. You are actually required to submit create and submit an XML mapping describing your asset(s) and then post this XML file out to your site. The XML file I submitted can be found here. The underlying assets seem to be mapped against the FEA. In many ways, this process is similar to the one I described in my reusable asset post. The only difference is that the discovery mechanism in et.gov is very rudimentary, not near that of some of the commercial tools out there.

As before, the pattlet is licensed under the Creative Commons “Attribution Share-Alike” license. As a next step, I’m looking to move outside of case management for a while and potentially deal with participants. I’m especially interested in working on a Participant Relationship pattlet, since I’ve been having a lot of discussions in that area as of late. I’d also like to fully open source all of this work, including the source code, and post it out to a Subversion repository for people to download. There just don’t seem to be enough hours in the day to get this all done. Any help or assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Case.pdf (165.74 KB)

The Governor’s office announced an exciting new partnership between Google Earth, Carnegie Mellon University, NASA, the Pennsylvania Tourism Office, and the National Civil War museum that will allow virtual tourists from all over the world to experience Pennsylvania’s Civil War trails first hand. The partnership will be creating Gigapixel Panoramas (Gigapans), enabling users to visualize these destinations with a great degree of detail.

It’s hard to tell what this consortium is going to bring together exactly, but it sounds very promising. There has been talk of even introducing a time-based element into the visualization, which would be very cool, given the nature of the subject. For a quick look at other Gigapan type work, I’d recommend xRez. I find it hard to make much out of the landscapes but their panorama of downtown Boston is simply awesome.

I’ve been kicking around some ideas in this area for a while, in hope of bringing them together in some coherent fashion. The image below represents the fruits of my labors. I’m not sure that it’s prefect or that I won’t look back on this as a sophomoric effort several months from now. The visual does, however, touch on several major observations I’ve made recently and allow me to illustrate them in a fairly clear and succinct fashion. Some of the terms are heavily overloaded and thus a bit more discussion of each of these trends is provided below for clarification.

• Information Monopolies – Several states have internal brokering setups in place. These information brokerages are found most frequently in the areas of law and justice, financial transactions, and health information. I believe these areas represent the first of several information monopolies. These monopolies were driven by federal data exchange efforts in homeland security and bioterrorism and, in the case of financial data exchanges, system consolidations on common ERP platforms. Expect to see more of these natural information monopolies in the near future with efforts such as Real ID, the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), Medicaid spend management, and the National Provider Identifier (NPI) taking hold. As these monopolies take shape, certain organizations within state government will be the logical choice as keepers of this data. These keepers should be building their systems in a service-oriented fashion to facilitate easy exchange of information amongst all systems requiring access to this data.

• Increased External Brokering – Data exchanges with external business partners are a critical source of information for many state government systems. Many of these exchanges still function via standard mainframe flat file transfers that occur at predefined intervals. The federal government is working to transform their data exchanges to use service-based XML file transfers. Interestingly enough, the private sector is lagging behind a bit in this area. I recall a recent experience where we were notified that the 3 major credit bureaus had “upgraded” their data exchanges from automated flat file transfers to HTTP POST transfers invoked manually through Web pages (still using the same flat files). I would expect to see an increased push from both the public and private sectors to move towards HTTP SOAP-based Web services over the next several years.

• Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) – The two most common patterns of Web service automation that I’ve witnessed in state government are service-based point-to-point integration and service façades. The point-to-point services represent a simplistic upgrade of existing point-to-point mainframe file transfers to use more current technologies. The service façades are usually the product of auto-generated Web service interfaces whose structure mimics that of the underlying components’.

Without going as far as to label these uses of services as anti-patterns, they are definitely crude uses of a Web service based infrastructure. Without publication in a registry or consideration of the consequences of how these services might be used outside of their intended scope, the service infrastructure can be considered anemic, at best. ESB promises to right some of these wrongs by acting as a central pipeline to enable access to these and other legacy services. Along with this access comes centrally provided infrastructure and transformation services that shield the service providers from some of the change and configuration management headaches associated with providing these services.

• Robust Business Process Infrastructure – The current state of business process integration in most legacy enterprise applications is characterized by a complete commingling of business process logic, data processing logic, and other rudimentary services. In most systems, you’d be hard pressed to trace the progression of a business process from end-to-end, let alone measure the effectiveness of the process execution. Yet, business processes are the lingua franca of the business managers and business users. Show business people a UML sequence diagram and it’s likely to elicit blank stares. Show them a process flow, on the other hand, and you will probably receive all sorts of feedback on how to modify the flow to make it more representative or efficient.

It’s really a shame that it has taken the IT industry so long to come up with tools that meet this relatively elemental need of business application development (see article - State of Workflow). It does appear that these tools are finally beginning to materialize in the form of Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) compliant servers and tools. Support for BPEL is fairly widespread among the newest Java IDEs and application server vendors (Sun, Oracle, IBM, BEA, and JBoss). On the Microsoft side, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Visual Studio support in the release of the .NET 3.0 Framework represents a major step forward towards standards-compliant support. BPEL will allow for the orchestration of services and the representation of this orchestration using common process flow diagrams that business analysts and business managers can use to effectively communicate process execution.

There are two other trends that are likely to follow the creation of BPEL-compliant processes. First is the introduction of Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) to measure the ongoing execution of the business processes and provide real time business intelligence. Second is some degree of standardization of business process models and potentially even the rise of business process outsourcing. In state government, this outsourcing is likely limited to the programmatic execution of the process as well as support and maintenance for ongoing process changes. Business processes that are codified in legislation (taxation and welfare eligibility, for example) are good candidates for automation and standardization of process commonalities.

I had the extremely good fortune to stumble upon a document on XML.gov that describes the cohesion between the varying areas of state government work that I am involved in. The document, a report on the E-Government Act of 2002, Section 212, was a revelation of previously unknown relationships between many areas of my work. Despite the fact that the document was written for the federal government, it appears to be very applicable to state government as well.

The report highlights enterprise architectural elements as well as pilot implementations underway to support presidential e-government initiatives. I’ve touched on a couple of these examples below.

• Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) – The FEA consists of five reference models (business, performance, service, technical, and data) and a series of policies to help link IT investments with the reference models to help identify commonalities and IT spending priorities across the government’s agencies.

FEA_lg.jpg (36 KB)

The FEA obviously does not apply to state government out-of-the-box. However, the extensible structure of each of the FEA reference models facilitates customization. The Commonwealth of Virginia provides an exceptional example of how this can be implemented in practice.  Virginia has used the FEA as their model and, from the top down, has begun creating the business reference model in a manner consistent with the operation of state government. I have not seen any other work of this quality and breadth made publicly available by other states. I’ve included a local reference to their enterprise business model below. More detailed mappings can be found on Virginia’s enterprise architecture page.

 VirginiaEnterpriseBusinessModel.pdf (121.5 KB)

• Grants Management Pilot Project – I’ve been spending a bit of time familiarizing myself with the grants management domain over the past several months and posted on this topic more than once. With the passing of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, focus on this area is likely to get even more intense at the federal and state levels in the next couple of years. Special thanks go out to Dave Cassidy of TCG for pointing me to the right section of Grants.gov with some meaty design and implementation details concerning granting system information exchanges.

• Case Management Pilot Project – Case management has a place near and dear to my heart. The state government pattlets all deal with case management and it’s an area where I have some experience and even more opinions. It is encouraging to see the federal government aspiring to move towards data unity in this area. I have my doubts however. Case management, with its diversity of data elements and business practices, seems to have antibodies that preclude any form of true standardization. Normalization seems more likely to me here.

The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) was mentioned as a unifying enabler. I am encouraged to see government pursuing data standardization so rigorously with NIEM. They seem to have made great progress in areas related to homeland security and are now eyeing other areas. I long for the day when NIEM becomes a first class citizen of the integration standards world and garners widespread vendor support like its industry brethren, SWIFT, HL7, and RosettaNet.

I ran across some very unique work from the state of Missouri in the area of project oversight the other day. Missouri’s well documented approach to project oversight is not only a great state government practice; it is by far the best documented practice in the public or private sector that I could find in this area. The project oversight methodology was nominated for a NASCIO recognition award in 2004 under the State IT Management category.

The five guidance documents on Missouri’s project oversight website represent a comprehensive, end-to-end project oversight methodology. In addition to detailed process flows, artifact definitions and templates, the methodology also includes simple but very useful explanations, such as the table illustrating the differences between project management and project oversight, which I’ve reproduced below.

ProjectOversight.png (7 KB)

In my mind, items such as Missouri’s project oversight approach are the types of knowledge capital that would have been great seeds on which to found the Government Open Code Collaborative (GOCC), which I’ve blogged about in the past. Since the GOCC appears to be all but dead, I don’t know what other alternatives are available for inter-State exchange of government practices, outside of NASCIO. I’ve decided to mirror Missouri’s documents on my site and have included links below. Hopefully, Missouri can find a way to proactively open source these documents, even if no common exchange exists for such materials.

Project Oversight, Part 1 (598 KB)
Project Oversight, Part 2 - Chapter 1 (2086.5 KB)
Project Oversight, Part 2 - Chapter 2 (2019.5 KB)
Project Oversight, Part 2 - Chapter 3a (1820.5 KB)
Project Oversight, Part 2 - Chapter 4 (1042 KB)

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m a pretty dedicated listener of both the Wall Street Journal Audio Edition and the IT Conversations podcast site. This morning, I caught some great audio from both of them.

IT Conversations - The IT Conversations audio came from the Software 2006 conference series. The focus of the podcast in question was a CIO panel at that conference. Toby Redshaw and Con Goedman, IT executives from Motorola and Shell International, respectively, provide some great insights into the user-focused mentality that it takes to succeed as an IT executive in the corporate world. They are both quite candid, with Mr.Redshaw providing some especially interesting insights and sound bytes. I’ve quoted a couple below:

[On dealmaking] “You’ve got to remember, the people that cut the deal aren’t the people that manage the relationship. I don’t care if the [software] salespeople leave with blood coming out of both of their ears. I’m not going to see those guys again.”

[On the widespread use of wikis and blogs at Motorola] “Where the real work gets done is down in the ranks that interact with each other and exchange information and build ideas and come to conclusions and do stuff. Management is just overhead.”

[On introducing wikis and blogs at Motorola] “I purposefully didn’t tell anyone upstairs or laterally that this was going on until we got to a scale where we couldn’t stop it.”

[On vendor dislikes] “The easiest way for you to watch me pull the trap door lever in my office and drop you into a pit of crocodiles is ‘tell me about your problems.’ ‘Hmm… interesting, we have some software that we think will fit your problems.’”

[On vendor likes] “I love honesty. My best vendors pull me aside and say ‘you know that idea you have, it’s stupid. Don’t do it, it’s a bad idea and here’s why.’”

Anyone who thinks that IT executives are out of touch needs to give this podcast a listen. These guys are focused on delivering user value, remaining business centric, and they just get it when it comes to understanding what it takes to encourage the type of collaboration and creativity that it takes to differentiate a company’s product or service offerings.

Wall Street Journal - On the other side of things, and totally unrelated to IT or the normal stock option backdating concerns that the WSJ has been so focused on lately was their cover story on the move towards home-based care in Vermont, entitled “Olden Days: Seniors in Vermont Find They Can Go Home Again.”

The article covers an innovative approach being taken in Vermont to move elderly citizens out of facility-based care and into home-based care with their families. Interesting here it that the families are then allowed to collect for the care they provide to their family members (spouses not included). The plan is approved and funded by the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) under a special waiver to normal Medicaid administration protocol. The waiver’s goal is to reduce or cap Vermont’s annual Medicaid funding / spending increase.

These Medicaid expenditures amount to 20% of some state’s budgets and are matched with funding from the federal level as well, providing a huge incentive for innovative ways to reduce these costs. The WSJ audio focuses not on the money side but on the human element instead; telling the story of several individuals whose lives were dramatically improved through participation in Vermont’s program. The audio also paints the assisted living providers as organizations scared of and resistant to change and willing to resort to scare tactics to retain the facility-based care entitlement legally afforded to Vermont’s citizens.

The reason that I found this audio file particularly interesting, aside from the fact that my parents care for my 93 year old grandmother and that my first state government project was on a Medicaid waiver system, is that the story reminds me of why I stick it our with state government projects – the potential to make a difference in peoples’ lives. Transformation programs such as the ones enabled by the Medicaid waivers not only offer the possibility to save money, they afford people the opportunity to lead normal lives, where that otherwise might not be possible. Far beyond the dollars, the bits, and the bytes, this is what really makes a difference.

The Wall Street Journal article is available in printed form or in MP3 format to Audible.com providers. The official text of the Vermont waiver can be found at http://www.dad.state.vt.us/dail/1115Waiver/VTLTCWaivernoappendices.pdf, while a provider-slanted but informative summary can be found at http://www.ahca.org/brief/ib_vtwaiver.pdf.

I’ve recently been re-reading Scott Ambler’s excellent work on the Enterprise Unified Process and focusing my attention on the strategic reuse discipline, in particular. Dealing with this on a day-in, day-out basis, I’m trying to apply this particularly to the business domain that I work in, state government. I like the way that Scott went about illustrating the enterprise management disciplines with the traditional RUP workflow maps. Above and beyond this, he borrows from an earlier article of his, A Realistic Look at Object-Oriented Reuse, to create a couple of diagrams that really hit home. I’ve taken the opportunity to adopt these diagrams to enterprise work being done in state government. The adopted diagram can be found below.

Reuse.png (79.92 KB)

The comments to the right of the chart demonstrate that there are three coarsely delineated segments of reuse:

1. Areas where domain-specific reuse is occurring now. Unfortunately, these areas fall towards the lower end of the benefit spectrum. In this segment, wholesale cross-state system transfers are particularly widespread. In many cases, the cost of the system being transferred is negligible or nonexistent due to federal funding rules. However, it is rare when these systems can be transferred without acquiring the knowledge of the people that created them. In many cases, this is an acceptable trade off because the domain in questions is inhospitable to other solutions and orthogonal to the domain for which they were originally created. Make no mistake, however, this is more a reuse of human resources and knowledge capital than it is of system elements.
2. Areas where domain-specific reuse is not warranted. In the center of the above chart lie frameworks and artifacts. With industry standard processes such as the RUP, MSF, and a variety of Agile processes, there is little need to create domain-specific processes or artifacts. The same holds true for frameworks, where Sun, Microsoft, and a variety of vendors and open source options are likely to be much more stable and better supported than any inhouse created options. This should not preclude you, however, from customizing these processes and frameworks and, as necessary, extending them to meet your exact needs.
3. Areas where domain-specific reuse should be occurring. These are the higher-order levels of reuse. This includes domain-specific analysis patterns for state government as well as a variety of architected solutions. These solutions may include COTS products such as the one from Curam Software, solutions targeted as cross-cutting domains such as licensing, and leveraging emerging data exchange standards to encourage the sharing of knowledge and data between business partners and communities of practice.

On September 26^th, President Bush signed into law the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. The represents the first piece of legislation sponsored by upstart Illinois senator Barack Obama to make it into law. Being touted as the “Google for Government”, the law directs the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to oversee the creation of a single comprehensive searchable Web site that would include information on all federal grants, contracts, and other funding awarded to public and private organizations. As the President mentioned at the signing, the federal government issues more than $400 billion in grants, and more than $300 billion in contracts to corporations, associations, and state and local governments. These range from reputable grants to operate state Medicaid systems to questionable allocation of funds such as the hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to build a bridge to a virtually uninhabited island in Alaska, the so called “bridge to nowhere”. Although at way to high a level to be a true comparison, the Death and Taxes graph provides a good representation of what we might end up seeing.



With an estimated start-up cost of about $5 million per year for the first two years and ongoing costs of $2 million per year, the Web site to support the law will be relatively inexpensive (in the grand scheme of things) for the Federal government. What is the impact going to be on local and state governments? From the bill’s text (more information), it would appear that the costs of reporting direct and sub-award data are to be factored into existing grants as indirect costs, since these costs would result from complying with conditions for federal assistance. Whether or not the states choose to follow suit and drive out more accountability from their grantees and contractors remains to be seen. This type of “trickle down transparency” would certainly be good for the taxpayer though and would demand a level of accountability previously unheard of at the state and local levels.

Following up on a long-standing desire to get domain knowledge out of our heads and onto paper, a colleague and I engaged in writing our first state government pattlet. We spent about two weeks of our spare time putting together an abstract approach to case transfer based upon our varied experiences. We finally have a draft version which we feel comfortable sharing online.

As far as I know, this is a first-of-its-kind endeavor for state government. We drew heavily on Fowler’s Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models as background material for documenting the patterns. The underlying analysis, design, and approach are all original, though. Please understand that the pattlet is not perfect. We’ve marked it as a 0.1 version to reflect its state and we intend to update it over the next couple of weeks.

We would really appreciate your feedback on the pattlet. Specifically, we’re looking to understand if there are important case transfer nuances which we missed, flaws in the analysis and design, or significant domain details which might shed new light on how to approach this problem. I know that most people feel very comfortable with email but I ask you to please consider using the comments section on this page. That way, everyone can benefit from your insights.

Note that the pattlet is licensed under the Creative Commons “Attribution Share-Alike” license. This license falls along the lines of common open source software licenses, allowing you to modify and re-disseminate this as you see fit, so long as you attribute the original work to us and any new work goes out under the same license as the original. We plan on distributing future pattlets under the same license. It seems to be a happy compromise between rights and reuse.

Right now, we are only giving access to the final product in PDF format but we have kicked around the idea of hosting sample code, pattern documents, and design models on a Subversion share. Let us know if this would be interesting or if we’d just be wasting our time in this endeavor. Finally, you can find the pattlet by clicking on the link below.

Case Transfer.pdf (164.24 KB)

The nominations for the 2006 NASCIO state government recogn