Not Using the Internet

Got an email pointing out this article in Nextgov. The hook is a McKinsey report on Government 2.0, and includes this:

"But a decade later, e-government services have not delivered on promises, according to the report, which pointed to a government agency that invested millions of dollars to develop a service to enable citizens to manage accounts with the government online, but achieved an adoption rate of less than 5 percent. The agency was not named."

That could be FSA. [Updated--though if you read the report it sounds as if it's a non-U.S. agency, but the report is not clear.]

If it is, I'd argue these reasons work against success, which might well apply to other agencies:

1. The idea that moving online endangers jobs. That certainly undercuts one's motivation (did in my case, anyway).
2. Mistakes in version 1.0.-- Harshaw's law: "We never do things right the first time."
3. Program people and IT people didn't communicate.
4. Lack of a broad enough vision at high enough levels.
   

Also from the article:

"The report recommends that agencies elevate the governance model for e-government initiatives so that lines-of-business executives are held accountable for users adopting the service, the costs of the online tools and for establishing teams to support development and management."

Problem is, the board of directors for FSA is Congress, and they don't know much. (BTW, watched Hal Holbrook's "Mark Twain Tonight" on DVD last night--there was a man who really didn't think much of Congress.)

Manual Labor

Musings from a Stonehead has a nice post, and discussion, of how to build fence with style. Stonehead does more manual labor than the average farmer today (compare waistlines if you doubt it), builds fences in a style to which I'm not accustomed, and does it all wearing a clean white shirt. It's almost enough to make me doubt the veracity of the site. Of course, I'm more like "Pigpen" in Peanuts.

Travis McGee

John D. MacDonald started in New York (Syracuse U.), but ended in Florida. I loved his novels, reading everyone I could find. Found a couple in a bookstore in Hawaii when the Continental plane landed to refuel. Finished them before we touched down in Saigon.

The LATimes has a piece on the possibilities his Travis McGee character will finally hit the movies. (Though Wikipedia is more comprehensive.) From the piece:

One abiding concern for McGee -- a dropout from society who seems more libertarian than liberal despite the '60s and '70s settings -- was the environment. Years before a full-fledged environmental movement, he was describing Florida's Mangrove Islands as "one of the few strange places left which man has not been able to mess up." In 1973, McGee talked about "instant Florida, tacky and stifling and full of ugly and spurious energies. They had every chain food-service outfit known to man, interspersed with used-car lots and furniture stores."

Worst Pun I've Seen Recently

At Walt Jeffries Sugar Mountain farm.

AC and Swimming

The local swimming pool is not much used, not compared to usage 33 years ago when I moved here. I speculate AC is to blame. When I was a boy, air conditioning was not prevalent. In the summer the best and cheapest way to cool off was to swim. That established a pattern, a habit which carried forward.

Compare that to now: everyone who lives in a house built in the last 40 years which is south of the Canadian border has air conditioning, and many others as well. So swimming has lost ground, fewer kids swim, and fewer swimmers persist into adulthood. It's harder to get lifeguards, insurance is more costly, and recreation is more organized.

A Salute to COBOL

Federal Computer Week has an article on the persistence of COBOL. Seems FSA isn't the only agency stuck in that world. (I met my wife when we both took a COBOL class way back when, so I have fond memories of the language. )

"because Cobol uses programming terminology that is close to the way people use regular English, it’s still considered the best language for capturing an organization’s business rules. Other languages use fairly arcane terminology that make it hard to capture those processes..."

"The Social Security Administration is wrapping essential Cobol applications in Extensible Markup Language envelopes and publishing them as service-oriented architecture services. It will retain about 20 percent of the 36 million lines of Cobol code it uses...."

Problem is, when you accept COBOL and the business rules it embodies, you accept the past. As a liberal, I have to think the future will require different business rules. And if neither the programmer nor the business type understand the rules in the IT system, you're, as we used to say, "cruising for a bruisin' ".

More on Caruso

Government Executive has a piece on Doug Caruso's replacement, which doesn't say much. Possibly Caruso didn't realize how little autonomy he would have, possibly there was a big disagreement on appointments of State executive directors. Who knows? Vilsack moved quickly to make it a one-day story by appointing a replacement. In the old days, it would have been a Southerner, because tobacco and cotton was that important, but not now.

Public Enemies and Terrorists

Saw the movie Public Enemies (wife's favorite Johnny Depp as lead) about John Dillinger yesterday. It's good, not as good in my opinion as Collateral, also directed by Michael Mann. One thing Dillinger says, in explaining why he can rob banks: "they (the authorities) have to watch every bank, I only have to hit one" or something close.

I thought of that in watching the ABC news last night, which led with a Senate committee hearing on a GAO report on how easy it was to smuggle into Federal buildings the materials necessary to make a small bomb.

Generally speaking, I think worries about security are overdone. Security details for mayors and governors? How many have been assassinated? Security for USDA buildings? I remember one incident in the South Building of USDA; if I recall correctly it was domestic violence, certainly not terrorism directed at the hard working bureaucrats of Agdom.

We used to have typewriters walk out of the buildings. But I wonder how many typewriters are left in the department. We used to have to account for calculators. But Moore's law took care of that. I suppose they still have to account for PC's, and security could deter their theft. But Moore's law will take care of that as well, as everyone will have his or her own personal electronics implanted at birth.

I wonder whether an economist has studied the evolution of loot for robbers/burglars: does minaturization increase the availability of high-profit loot (no one could steal a mainframe computer) or does Moore's law wipe out such loot? Do the two forces counterbalance?

But, having security makes people feel better, and that's important.

Coppess as FSA Administrator

That was fast--Vilsack's press release announcing the new FSA administrator is here

Luddites at Work

The spirit of Nick Ludd has not fled the sceptred isles.

Some British believe it's better to run services through local post offices than on the Internet. Reason? It keeps the offices open.

They're fighting this:

The government’s Digital Britain strategy calls for a “digital switchover” for public services from 2012 that would make the internet the primary delivery route for many government departments.

To overcome the issue that more than a third of the population do not have internet access, the plan also aims to widen digital inclusion by introducing universal broadband. Gordon Brown has appointed Lastminute.com founder Martha Lane Fox to lead the drive to bring the digitally excluded online.

I'm sure many in FSA county offices have the same feelings.