The Paperless Office

I'm sure I've mentioned before that IBM sold ASCS the System/36 partially on the basis that county offices would become paperless.  That was a common meme in the 80's.

Via Vox's Significant Digits:

"Despite some of the mightiest headwinds on the planet, the paper business actually saw consumption grow 50 percent between 1980 and 2011. That’s in many ways because no industry really ever went paperless. They just ended up using paper in different ways. [The Guardian]"

What's Perdue Up to?

From FCW:

"The Trump administration announced the establishment of five centers of excellence at a Dec. 14 industry day hosted at the White House. The General Services Administration's Technology Transformation Service will lead the development of centers focused on cloud adoption, infrastructure optimization, customer experience, service delivery analytics and contact centers. The Department of Agriculture is the first customer.
Wilmer said the decision to name Agriculture as the home of the first center of excellence came down to the commitment of Secretary Sonny Perdue.
"The secretary of Agriculture was extremely supportive of modernizing Agriculture, I think that's one of his major objectives, and I think [he] understands the importance of IT in all of this.... So Agriculture seemed like a perfect example." Wilmer said. "When you have secretary-level-down commitment in making this happen, we wanted to make sure the first one that we roll out is going to be a success... then we can follow up rapidly with others."

Not sure what area of USDA is being targeted here.

My Favorite Country

New Yorker has a piece on it.

It was during Kotka’s tenure that the e-Estonian goal reached its fruition. Today, citizens can vote from their laptops and challenge parking tickets from home. They do so through the “once only” policy, which dictates that no single piece of information should be entered twice. Instead of having to “prepare” a loan application, applicants have their data—income, debt, savings—pulled from elsewhere in the system. There’s nothing to fill out in doctors’ waiting rooms, because physicians can access their patients’ medical histories. Estonia’s system is keyed to a chip-I.D. card that reduces typically onerous, integrative processes—such as doing taxes—to quick work. “If a couple in love would like to marry, they still have to visit the government location and express their will,” Andrus Kaarelson, a director at the Estonian Information Systems Authority, says. But, apart from transfers of physical property, such as buying a house, all bureaucratic processes can be done online.

The Importance of Data Design

Getting the data design right for system operations is important.  But what happens is that we design systems using our assumptions, assumptions we've never examined or challenged, assumptions which someday will be undermined by changes in the technology or the culture.

An instance of this in the New Yorker: writer, a house husband, unknowingly describes the problem  He and his wife enrolled their child in kindergarten, filling out forms.  His wife works outside the house; he works inside the house.  But it turns out the school uses an app to make robocalls to a parent concerning school matters, apparently a lot of robocalls.  His wife got the calls, he didn't, creating a mismatch of information, which led apparently to some tension in the marriage.   When they challenged the school, turns out they could only contact one parent and someone had assumed the wife should be called.

In the good old days the number of calls from the school would have been rationed by the amount of time a human, likely the school secretary, had to make the call.  These days the cost of making calls has been reduced to zero, meaning a big increase in the number made.  Where the secretary could have dealt with the writer's situation, the robocaller can't, at least not with the existing data design. Since the calls don't cost, it would be easy enough to call both parents, if they desired.  But that would require a new design.

Updating Gun Check Databases

Vox has a piece on the Air Force's failure to update the federal gun check database with the data on the domestic violence conviction of the shooter at Sutherland Springs.

Proposals to strengthen the system are welcome.  I wonder though, whether the responsibility should be on the Air Force or on ATF or FBI (whoever runs the database).  The problem with our distributed system of government is all the silos and all the interfaces we need.  My general rule is that you need to put responsibility on those motivated to do it right.  In other words, it makes no difference to some AF bureaucrat whether she gets information into a Fed database--she's not going to act on it nor will any AF person act on it.  It does make a difference to the Fed bureaucrat, so she is more motivated to get things right.

Why Not Follow the UK: Gov Wifi

For commercial establishments everyone and her brother now offer WiFi.  Not the government, at least not that I am aware of.  But our British cousins offer it, specifically "GovWifi", as described in this post at the UK blog:

GovWifi, developed and managed by Government Digital Service (GDS), is a single wifi login which can be simply and cheaply installed by government departments over their existing infrastructure.Anyone who registers with GovWifi will have access to wifi at any participating public sector location. It’s available to civil servants, consultants and visitors to government departments.It’s been designed to replace user and guest wifi with a single secure wifi connection.Users register once. After that, they’ll automatically connect to the GovWifi network. They don’t need to remember a password or sign in to different networks when they move between buildings.

So why can't the US government do this?

Getting Customer/Client/Citizen Feedback

Sens. Lankford and McCaskill introduced " the bipartisan Federal Agency Customer Experience Act (S.1088), a bill to roll back a federal requirement that makes it difficult for agencies to get feedback from the public concerning their satisfaction with agencies’ customer service."

That's from the press release  but it seems to me the bill does something more and different.  I think I've seen agency websites use a standard web feedback form (from Foresight, or some such company) and I doubt they've cleared such collection of data through OMB.  No doubt the clearance requirements for public data collections are an obstacle, but the more important thing they require is annual publication of the data collected.  Way back in the early days of this blog I think I recommended a similar process, though I was suggesting a running total, like the data Google Analytics gave to bloggers. 

The missing piece though in the Act is something explicitly tying the data back to Congressional oversight--it's fine to collect data but if the bosses (i.e. Congress) don't use it, it's simply an exercise. 

Hattip: FCW. 

The UK's Approach to IT

I've posted before, but not recently, about the differences between British and American governmental use of IT.  Briefly, as would be implied by the UK's civil service setup, the Brits are much more uniform, much more top down, while the US is (excessively) fragmented and siloed, much more bottom up.

Here's the website of the Government Digital Service:

• Going on the road to spread the gospel "we're here to help" to the field and "local authorities" (i.e., no states here)
• They have a Service Toolkit.
• Something called "roadmaps" (i.e.high level graphic representations of IT systems?)
• Clear writing training.

Records and Security Orientation for Trump Staff?

On Sunday the White House staff appointed by Trump had their orientation on ethics. Please tell me that the staff, and all department heads, are also going to receive an orientation from National Archives and Records Administration  and IT on records management, email management, and cybersecurity?

Bitching at OPM

Trying to be good and do taxes early this year.  Need my statement from OPM.  Their website has not, to my eyes, been updated in some years.  Usually these days a commercial site has a "Sign in" button in the upper right corner which allows access to the customer account.  Not so for OPM.  They have "Services Online" stuck in the middle of the page.  It should be obvious to the observant, but it wasn't to an old geezer.

Next, for some reason my password manager and OPM's software are allergic to each other. Over the years I've tried a few times to get into the site.  I've never been able to manage it, without having to reset my password (part of the problem is the weird way they handle account numbers). 

Finally they have two questions to determine whether you can request a new password by email or by snail mail.  That's fine, except who remembers whether one's accessed the site within the last 15 months and set up security questions?  I certainly don't.  Consequently, OPM may be stuck not using an automated process to reset my password. 

Love It--the Eternal Silos of FSA and NRCS

Just realized I hadn't heard from NASCOE in a while so I checked the website, which has been completely redone.

Here's what I love.

NATIONAL OFFICE RESPONSE: (combined sources)
At this point, FSA employees with access to existing systems can access FSAfarm+ using their employee eAuth Level 2 login; however, we have not added NRCS employees to the list of authorized users. The website was built as a customer self-service portal and FSA employee access has been authorized so employees may assist our customers with questions regarding the website. NRCS FSAfarm+ access has been discussed with leadership and they are looking into obtaining the required approvals.

They've got a new process for submitting field office concerns and getting responses from DC.  This response is to a request that FSA give NRCS access to their records.  This was Sec. Madigan's concept back in 1991.  As you can see from the response, those silos are still standing tall.

Great Work--NRCS

"Agriculture’s “Natural Resources Conversation Service dropped 13 places to rank 25th overall in the 2016 Index – no other agency fell further,” the analysts said"

This is from a Government Executive article on a survey of plain language in government websites.

Not sure how well done this is--the study dings USDA generally, but only NRCS is listed in the detailed results table.

Shared Services and Government as a Platform

GovExec has a piece on this subject by an IBM type.

By the nature of our government (weak executive, decentralized, federal system) we're fated to build such systems incrementally and from the ground up.  For example, the National Finance Center in New Orleans is one of the providers of shared services. Back in the day (i.e., 1968 when I joined ASCS) the agency had several ADP (automated data processing, for you whippersnappers) centers. I assume they were initial steps in the process of using computers to support operations.  Over time, ASCS closed some centers and consolidated in New Orleans and Kansas City.  Over the same time, other USDA agencies were going through the same process, leading finally to USDA taking over the NODPC.  So it came to support Federal personnel salaries and benefits for the whole department, and then to provide similar services for other units of the government.

In a way the process reminds me of the way our planetary system evolved, as I understand it, by the gradual accretion of material.

Because this is a slow process I get very envious of Estonia (as I've previously blogged) which apparently was able to do a top-down implementation.  To use another metaphor, it's rather the difference between a city like Rome, with an ancient history, and a city like Reston, planned and implemented from scratch within one man's lifetime.

ARRA and MIDAS

This piece on the ending of the Recovery Act database reminded me--MIDAS got $50 million if I remember correctly.  Maybe not, maybe the $50 mill was partly to upgrade the creaky technology at the time.

I do wish they'd included some usage figures on the website--how much did the media and others actually use the site?  I know while I checked it a few times early on, I never did go back to see what if any updates for MIDAS had been added.  It may well be the best contribution of the effort was to establish a precedent, to teach people what was involved so the next try can be more useful.

Government Web Sites

Finally there's some metrics on government web sites.  The analytics site shows the number of visitors to the top government web sites.  I'm surprised to see the main USDA site among the most popular (after weather, SSA, immigration, IRS, etc.) It's a small step forward.

What's Wrong With the Auditors?

The old question, from the Roman poet Juvenal, is:  "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

Earlier I posted about the new OIG report on FSA's MIDAS project. I've lost track of all the GAO and OIG reports critical of ASCS/FSA/USDA's automation efforts.  Juvenal's question doesn't quite fit--nowadays it implies some misconduct while my point is directed towards effectiveness.

In other words, given all those audit reports you'd think there would be some improvement over the years, but USDA and its agencies still seem to be ineffective in doing large IT projects.  I wonder why?

Some possibilities:

• IT procurement and development of IT systems keeps getting more complicated, so the bureaucracy's learning curve as embodied in the GAO/OIG reports doesn't gain on the difficulty curve of the projects.
• the USDA bureaucracy is incapable of learning, maybe because the policy officials turnover too fast, there's no insitutional memory, there's lack of ability or training, or something else.
• the auditors give bad advice, either misleading the bureaucracy on how to correct the problems or misidentifying the problems
• Congress fails to do good oversight--using the reports to hold the bureaucrats feet to the fire, or maybe they focus on the wrong issues.
• Congress fails to provide the money to do well
• the President and OMB fail to follow through on the reports
• the IT projects conflict with an outdated orgnaizational structure and culture.

I suspect all of these issues may apply.

What I'd Like: Move to Estonia

Via Marginal Revolution, this report on e-government in Estonia.  Through one user identity:

Today’s Estonian citizen can (though he or she does not have to):

• Identify themselves, via e-ID, an electronic identity system
• Vote (iVote, available since 2007)
• Complete tax returns (and make payments or receive refunds)
• Obtain and fulfil prescriptions (eHealth)
• Participate in census completion
• Review accumulated pension contributions and values
• Perform banking, including making and receiving payments
• Pay and interact with utilities (like water, gas and electricity)
• Interact with the education system (e-Education)
• Set up businesses
• Sign contracts
• And more.

Compare that with our government, where we're still struggling with USDA agencies providing such service.

Should Social Security Handle All Government Websites

FCW reports SSA has most of the topranking Federal websites.

FSA Outreach?

Was at the agriculture.com website the other day, reading comments on the extension of the time to allocate base/update yields.  Saw one comment, part of which I was almost able to answer (possible combination of two farms--a recon). Got me to wondering--if any government agencies are active on such sites.   In this case, an authoritative comment could have resolved a problem, educated some people, and enhanced the image of the FSA bureaucracy.  On the other hand, finding someone who could be authoritative on a number of different issues would be difficult and there would be the continual temptation to be either defensive or engage too much.

Clinton's Email Problem

I'm resisting the temptation to defend Hillary on her use of a private email account.  I'd observe that the chickens are coming home to roost based on NARA's failure over 20 years to deal effectively with emails and even more critically management's (i.e. President and Congress) failure to worry about such issues.  Records management was never a priority, not since the 70's.  I'm not impressed by the current commentary, such as the NYTimes piece here.  The number of historians who will ever read 30,000 pieces of email can be counted on one hand. I don't have an answer, but no one else does either.