[back] [Justice, E-Government and the Internet Home]
Mr. Robert L. Marx
RLM Associates
Commencement
Address
These three days have been similar in many respects to
a college education in e-government. And now it’s time for that
moment you’ve been dreading since you showed up on Monday – the commencement
address.
You all know the drill – the dean gives a few introductory remarks which you can’t quite hear and then this guy is standing at the podium and you don’t have a clue who he is and you just want to go to the party, but you are curious about who the guy is. Didn’t he used to be someone? Can’t place the face. Then he speaks and you hear the unmistakable German accent and the arrogant tone – omigod, its Henry Kissinger – we’re going to get an hour of Henry Kissinger before they give us the diploma.
Well,
no one ever said college in three days was going to be easy.
One of the duties of a commencement address giver is
to tell you what to do with the reset of your lives. Let me start by telling you
what to do with the next few weeks of your lives. When you return to the
organizations that sent you to this conference, what should you do to start
capitalizing on your new knowledge?
I think it would be helpful to start slowly, with a
small data collection project about how you and those around you spend your
time. I would design a simple time sheet. Not the regular time sheet where you
record what project or contract you are working on, but one that shows what
general types of activity are
consuming your time. So instead of
project names I would have activity types like:
§
Arranging a
multi-person meeting;
§
Attending a
multi-person meeting;
§
Traveling to and
from a multi-person meeting;
§
Meeting
one-on-one;
§
Talking on the
telephone;
§
Teaching a course
or exam oversight;
§
Research and
analysis;
§
Thinking.
§
Everything else.
Your list might be a bit different, but similar in
some respects to this sample.
Then I would keep track of my time so that all my work
time for a week was captured and placed into one of the categories; and I would
ask my boss to do the same and would order one of my underlings to do the same.
You do have underlings, don’t you?
At the end of the week I would total the hours spent in each category for each
of the three reporters.
Then for each of the activity types (except for
thinking) I would ask myself – could technology be used to reduce the amount
of time used in this category while keeping the quality of the results of the
activity about the same or better?
What kinds of technology?
§
Instant messaging
technology (text only, add voice, add white board, add shared application);
§
chat room
technology (same add-ins);
§
Internet
conferencing technology;
§
threaded list
server technology;
§
meeting
arrangement and notification technology;
§
email newsletters
on selected topics;
§
course
preparation, course presentation, test preparation and test monitoring
technologies.
When you have before you a quantitative measure of how
you spend your time you will be able to add lines to this list.
I would then estimate
how much time these technologies would save per week for me, my boss and
my underling. I would reserve half of that productivity enhancement time
to my organization and the other half to myself, which I would consume in the
form of long lunch hours or early departures from work. In fact I would consume
not only my portion but that of my underling as well, since it was my brilliance
which led to the savings.
But what to do with the other half of the saved time?
Invest it. Invest it in reading about B2B and B2C and E-government. Invest it in
listening to product pitches, especially those which claim to be used in
applications which sound something like your areas. And most importantly, think.
Think alone. Think with your boss. Think with your underlings. Think with your
customers. Think with your users. Think silently and out loud. Think rationally
and intuitively.
And that brings us to the end of the first month of
the rest of your life. Already you have increased your free time, set aside time
for strategic thinking, started to alert those around you to expect to live in a
climate of change from now on. Not a bad start. Even if it takes two months, or
even three months, it’s still a fair start.
Oh, wait. I forgot to say that You’ll actually have
to deploy the time-saving
technologies and make them work, of course. Where will you get the money to do
that? In many of these technology categories there are free services on the
Internet, and I would practice with one or two of these in each category,
learning what works and what doesn’t, what look-and-feel works best, what has
to be inside the firewall and what doesn’t, and how the technologies fit into
the working style of my organization. I’m not talking about e-government yet,
I’m talking about the technologies that let me save the time that I need to
invest in thinking.
For actual permanent deployment of technology it may
be necessary or desirable to purchase a license for use of each such technology
so that I have the appropriate level of security and service on call at all
times. With some experience with the free versions you should be a smart
customer, and your boss will already have experienced the benefits of the new
environment (remember, your boss is saving time also, taking longer lunches
also, and thinking also) so getting the money you need for permanent
implementation should be a piece of cake. There is a danger in the approach I
have just outlined. Suppose you pick a product that is inferior, or is not aimed
that the particular needs you have. You may mistakenly come to believe that
there is a not a technical solution to your problem when in fact there is.
Reading the technical literature and advertisements in IT magazines will help.
Let me suggest another possibility.
What if BJS, one co-sponsor of this conference, and
SEARCH, the other co-sponsor, acted as pathfinders for you? SEARCH holds dozens
of meetings every year. Maybe some or even many of them could be held in a
manner other than face-to-face; maybe BJS would provide funds to procure
software replacements to travel for those meetings; maybe SEARCH would document
the results of using the solutions – not just the savings in travel and
attendee time, but more nebulous factors such as loss of informal hall-visits;
and maybe you would have access to those results. That might be a very good thing indeed. You see, if you
try a new technology and it fails, that’s a failure. But if SEARCH
tries a new technology on your behalf and it fails, that’s research.
So far I’ve been talking about changing the way you
work internally, how you interact with your fellow workers. That’s fairly easy
to talk about because there is substantial generality here. I gets harder to
generalize when we start to talk about actual e-government, as we shall soon
see.
I see some of you slouching down in your seats. Your
body language says “I didn’t invest three days of my life in this university
education so I could go back and fiddle with little applications like
meeting-arrangers. I want to invest my time in thinking the big thoughts and
building the big applications.” My response is “where are you going to get
the time you want to invest? You have to save the time before you invest it.”
Doing the small stuff got you and those around you accustomed to fairly rapid
change, bought the time for thinking the big thoughts, and now it’s time to
start thinking. So, sit up straight.
In this second stage of the process, you will learn
two valuable lessons that may not have been taught in these three days:
First -- No one discovers new operational requirements
without at least a glimmer of how the
requirement might be solved. No one knew
there were so many needs for precise geographical location until the GPS
satellites were launched; no one knew
there was a large market for distance learning technology until there was such
technology in at least a primitive form. Immersion in technology is a
requirement for proper requirements analysis.
Second – Discovery of solutions to large and complex
problems is not possible without engaging both the conscious and the unconscious
mind.
For example, the burning question of mid nineteenth
century organic chemistry was the structure of benzene; finally a man who had
been working on this problem for over a decade with his conscious mind dreamed a
dream; in the dream he saw a snake and in the snake’s mouth was its own tail;
he awoke in the morning, remembered the dream, and quickly performed
calculations which showed the benzene structure to be a closed ring, like the
dream snake. And from this conscious-unconscious collaboration has flowed the
myriad products of organic chemistry which have changed our world.
For another example, the burning question of mid
twentieth century bio chemistry was the structure of DNA. Another man who had been working on this problem for
over a decade, was hospitalized. While in the last after-effects of anesthesia
he had an intuition, made a simple drawing, and returned to sleep. When he
returned to his research he made calculations which quickly confirmed his
intuition concerning the double-helix structure of DNA. And from this
conscious-unconscious collaboration has just flowed the decoding of the human
genome and all the life-enhancing benefits which that decoding will enable.
But how do you get your conscious and unconscious
minds to cooperate? There may be many ways, but I only know one. That is to
focus intensely on a single problem, so intensely that all your capabilities and
energies are concentrated in a single direction.
Now that you know how to think (that is, consciously
and unconsciously) what should you
think about? Four things:
§
What
is it we do?
§
Why
do we do the things we do?
§
Why do we do the
things we do the way we do them?
§
What things should
we be doing that we are not doing?
1. What things do we
do? What are your products?
Who are your products’ users? Who are your customers? Customers are people who
pay your way and can decide not to pay your way; users are people who consume
your products. In many government situations your users
get your product “free” because your customer
is the legislature. Is your product a service, or information, or something that
can be kicked? Do you receive subassemblies from elsewhere and assemble them
into your product?
It is important to focus on the product, not the
method by which you make and deliver the product. Is it the right product, that
is do your users find that it meets their needs? In much of the private economy
the users are also customers (that is, they pay for your product) and there are
multiple sources for similar products (that is, competing suppliers). In such
cases it is fairly easy to get the answer to this question. In most governmental
cases these criteria are not met and it is much more difficult to get an answer.
If you are not sure that your product is valued by its users,
you had best find out. Your product must also be valued by its customers,
that is the folks with the bucks. If you don’t know if the legislature or the
federal grant agency or whoever is footing the bill values your product, you had
best find out.
2. Why do we do the
things we do?
Blah
3. Why do we do the
things we do the way we do them?
Fingerprint cards always used to bear two signatures,
those of the person with the prints and those of the person taking the prints?
Now they seldom have any signatures. Did legislation change? Not in most states.
Did a former operational requirement cease to exist? I don’t think so. What
happened? The user community, faced with the fact that live-scan fingerprint
systems had many advantages but didn’t do signatures in any very good way,
forced the change.
When criminal history records were reproduced by
mimeograph machines they always were on letterhead stock; now they are on plain
paper or not on paper at all. What happened? Users decided that teletyped
rapsheets, and later network-delivered rapsheets were faster and therefore more
valuable than mailed rapsheets.
Remember back several minutes when I said that peeking
at technology can lead to the discovery of new requirements? Technology can also
lead to the refinement, maybe even to deletion of requirements.
How will you know if you can change some of the
“hows” of your business without decreasing the value of your product? Ask
your users. Not open-ended questions like “Is there anything I can drop to
make it easier to slap together what I am required to give you.” More cool,
like “Suppose I could decrease the monthly connection fee you pay from $800 to
$79, would you want that even if it changed you average response time from 2.3
seconds to 12 seconds.” Or “I could provide the same information you are now
getting at your desktop on a personal Palm Pilot like the one I am now showing
you, but every user would have to carry a smart-card like the one I am now
showing you; would you be interested in that?”
Another example. What type of governmental entity
issues arrest warrants? A court. What entity is in the best position to know if
a warrant is still in effect? The issuing court. Where do we go to determine if
a person has a warrant outstanding? The issuing court, right? Nah! We go to a
law enforcement agency. Why? Because there is a requirement that an agency about
to serve a warrant must be able to have the warrant looked at and verified any
time, seven days and 24 hours. One state has already simply said that the
warrant in the state court system is not only an accurate pointer to the
“real” paper warrant, the computer version is itself the real warrant.
One more related example. Every warrant that is in the
national database is also in a state
or federal-agency database. An intricate set of procedures governs the creation,
synchronization and use of this multi-appearance phenomenon. It is not hard to
understand the technical limitations that led to this system concept in 1965
when the national system was designed. Would anyone design it that way today? I
am not saying that everything that can be changed should be
changed. I am saying that just
because it is that way now is not
sufficient reason for it to remain
that way.
Now my honest-to-goodness last example in this area.
If you are doing things in suboptimal ways because
your hardware – computers, servers, workstations, printers, networks –
can’t do things in modern ways, then - - - stop doing that! It’s costing you
more than it’s worth.
If you are doing things in suboptimal ways because
your staff doesn’t know how to do things in modern ways, then - - - stop doing
that! Train them or get them trained. Build a career path that encourages
technical advancement. As vacancies occur recruit with the recognition that more
cost per programmer/analyst hour may
well result in less cost per program because of increased productivity.
If you are doing things in suboptimal ways because
your legacy database cannot be converted to a more modern technology, then - - -
stop doing that! Not every medern thing is better than the older thing it
replaces, but modern database management systems are so far superior to their
previous generations that the cost of translation and migration is almost always
compensated by higher reliability and increased power.
4. What things should
we be doing that we are not doing?
Conclusion
The world you left three or four days ago has already
changed. Computer hardware is cheaper now than when you left home. Software is
more powerful now than when you left home. Pressures on state legislatures to
hold down expenses and especially to hold down employee counts is more intense
than when you left home. Calls to privatize some governmental services and to
out-source others are louder than when you left home. In short, the home you
left is no longer there.
All of these trends will continue for the rest of your
employment life. There is nowhere to hide. There is no escape. The only constant
in your life will be constant change. If you try to stand against it you will be
pushed over. If you try to divert it you will be pushed aside. Your only chance
is to catch the wave of change, hang ten and enjoy the ride. Good Luck.
Now there is just enough time for me to tell you about
the day that President Nixon came into my office and told me that he was going
to resign the presidency. Well, I stood as he . . . . oh, I am receiving a
signal that my time has expired. Thank you.