The depth of negative feeling towards the French here is quite startling. Wherever the word crops up, it’s been replaced … so we have Freedom Fries, Freedom Kiss and so on.

Now this sounds good. What local authority in the UK wouldn’t aspire to what they’ve achieved in Fairfax county. It’s a good site with clean design. Everything looks easy to find. Worth a visit..

Seven years on, the county Web site gets 625,000 visits a month, and 257,000 people have used the kiosks. The phone lines have received 819,000 calls. Requests for court data, library books and tax payments are users’ most popular transactions. Still, the numbers represent a fraction of county business: 5 percent of the county’s real estate and personal property taxes were paid electronically last year, for example. But 61 percent of the books library patrons put on hold so far this year were reserved online, up from a total of 47 percent last year, county statistics show.

And mobile too …

Next, the county hopes to enter the age of wireless communication by displaying text messages on cell phones, beepers or hand-held computers alerting residents to traffic tie-ups, a plane crash in the area, a derailed train, fire or other emergency. Molchany calls this multiple delivery of messages “just-in-time” government, which he said “is the power of e-government.”

Sitting in the hotel room in Washington, TV on. No matter which channel I pick, the same image. A hazy, green tinged picture with a few brightspots. Maybe street lamps, maybe explosions. Hard to say. Even MTV is carrying war coverage. The Weather Channel is predicting possible sand storms. The financial sites have suspended coverage of earnings stories. The only respite seems to be HBO, which is showing Castaway. Perhaps trying to give Saddam a hint.

The progress of the war seems strange to me. The tactics of “shock and awe” have not started yet, just a few sporadic bursts of missile fire. It’s almost as if the US is trying to draw Saddam into showing his hand – loosing a chemical warhead maybe. The world will certainly round on him if he does that. Damned if he does. Damned more if he doesn’t. Or perhaps it’s about giving the troops a chance to adjust to the country, the endless gas mask drills (seven today alone says every reporter on TV).

Pro or con doesn’t really matter now (though, for the record, I am pro). It’s started and it will end sooner or later. Once it does, the rebuilding process is going to absorb a lot of people, a lot of time and a lot of money. Freedom is not free, as it says at the Korean War memorial, carved starkly in marble. Let’s hope the price in life is not too great this time.

Government websites struggled today to deliver information on terrorism and the war, notes Silicon.com. I’ve said before (is it 50 times or 100 times) that if we’re going to get e-government going a resilient infrastructure is vital. Departments have proven over and over again (Environment agenct, Iraqi dossier, PRO and so on) that they are all ill-equipped for sudden peaks, no matter how predictable they are. The Home Office terrorism site has been advertised widely and, given that, you’d expect people to visit – even now at midnight London time it is slow (and I’m using a 100KB/s connection from the hotel – twice BT’s ADSL speed in the UK). It is beyond belief that, at a time when the citizen turns to government for vital information, we are unable to deliver a reliable service.

Significant sites should be taken away from departmental control and put into a large-scale infrastructure that is capable of dealing with the demand. To not do so is to show that e-government is not being taken seriously and, in the worst case, could provoke a serious issue at time of greatest need.

To all those running sites that could be subject to high demand. There is no praise for keeping control and falling at the first hurdle. There is no praise for not distributing your content to as many sources as possible. There is no praise for architecting a poor infrastructure. The job is to keep the sites up, deliver the content to those who need it and to keep doing it.

September 11 proved that large proportions of the population turn to the Internet first when needing information. When they do, we’d better be there for them.

Not the simplest acronym, but I had my attention drawn to it today at a session with Dan Chenok at OMB. There’s a new organisation in town, solution architects who have the following mission

Assignment of Solution Architects. Provide E-Government initiative teams with solution architects who will assist in defining initiative blueprints and validate system and solution architectures to support the planning and implementation of the Presidential Priority E-Gov initiatives.

Solution Architecture Planning and Execution. Select, recommend, plan, guide, and assist initiative teams in the deployment of technologies that are proven, stable, interoperable, portable, secure, and scalable. Facilitate the migration and transition of E-Government initiatives from legacy and “inward-driven” architectures, to architectures that embrace component-driven methodologies and technology reuse.

Federal Enterprise Architecture Guidance. Establish linkages between relevant Government-wide entities to ensure that standards, best practices, and lessons learned are leveraged across the entire government. Additionally, the SAWG will champion the creation and validation of the Service Component and Technology Reference Models.

Component and Technology Reuse. Identify and capitalize on opportunities to leverage, share, and reuse technologies to support common business requirements, activities, and operations across the Federal Government.

Generation of Intellectual Capital (IC). Champion the creation and propagation of intellectual capital that can assist in E-Government transformation.

See that … pan-government, reuse, capitalise, intellectual property. Bang on target.

I’m in Washington for a few days – I’ll be speaking at an e-government conference tomorrow, here is its press release, and have also taken the opportunity to meet some of the Federal officials responsible for e-government here. It seems a funny time to be in the USA and, particularly, to be in Washington but my theory is that there is no safer place than here given the security. I have to be at the conference at 8.30 tomorrow. Ugh.

I met with Terry Lutes at the IRS today and spent a fruitful hour or so comparing notes on tax filing initiatives. The IRS has a significantly higher percentage of people filing electronically than we do in the UK and I wanted to see how that had been done and what the plans for development are. I’ll draw out the contrasts another time. Terry also referred me to the “pay.gov” site which is going to provide some of the authentication processes necessary for online filing. Pay.gov is not there yet, the website contains lots of “coming soons” and little that I can latch onto, but there is a very good FAQ. As near as I can tell, the plan is to ask a series of questions that will vary depending on what you’re trying to access. The questions might include employment or credit information, and the answers will be compared with both government and commercial databases. If there’s enough of a match, then you get access. In the future, you’ll be able to build up an online identity that lets you do more and more. I’ve kicked this idea around many times back home, spent time talking to the Experian folks about perhaps using their databases and to the company registration database holders. But I’ve never managed to get sufficient interest to move it forward. It looks like pay.gov has the buyin to move ahead and, whilst there may be little there now, it’s something to watch. Partnership with industry to develop secure authentication has to be the right thing to do – if you can login to your bank account, you ought to be able to deal with government with the same id one day. Terry talked about work he’s doing with the credit card companies and others too, all of which is interesting and right where we need to be in the UK.

While I had an idle minute, I also checked the latest developments on the govbenefits.gov site, which I’ve visited several times in the past and commented on. What led me there was a news release on firstgov that heralded a Gracie award for the site (I don’t know what that is, but any site that is winning awards is worth a look). More and more benefit programmes are being added to the site, to the point where ticking just a couple of boxes on the home page (I ticked “senior” and “farmworker”) led me to 30 questions with those answers prompting 20 more, all of which led to a couple of dozen benefits I could apply for. You still can’t apply for the benefits online (so there is no “common information” page) and the information that you’ve typed in to get to the end doesn’t seem to be held, also some of the questions are a bit strange (they’re conjured up front, rather than in relation to specific answers – so you can get several questions about your children or your wife, independent of prior answers). But, that said, it brings together many of the benefits available, does it in a citzen focused way and saves you wading through the sites of all the benefits that you aren’t eligible for. That, to me, is worth an award. Doubtless improvements will be made over the coming months and, as some of the services come online, you’ll be linked directly to them with prepopulated information (perhaps taken from your pay.gov account). That, again, would be worth an award or three.

Computing continues the story of the OeE budget cuts. Speculation increases on whether Andrew Pinder will still be in post in 2005 (given his contract runs out in March 2004, I would not be going long that option). Kate Mountain is clear that if he is not there, someone else will need to be – which is true. I’m certain that the role is not yet done, there is a vital need for someone to be there to catalyse change and ensure that things are both done right and rightly done.

Kate is also quoted as saying “Whatever transpires with departmental budgets, maintaining funding for the Government Gateway is essential” which of course delights me. I do hope that she wasn’t misquoted.

I think it’s time for the “cuts” story to move on. The focus should not be on how much, but what and what that means. A tighter, leaner operation can focus on the most vital things – and there are a few of those that need to get done still.

I’ve been talking to some folks today about mobile government. That, sadly, is not a government that moves faster in the right direction, but the next iteration of online services delivered via mobile phones. The big questions were around what will government do, how will it do it and what might make it mess up.

I delivered a presentation on this a while ago and since then have been refining my thinking a little. I haven’t really got much past what we might do in the next year or so, preferring to leave the private sector to blaze a trail that we might follow. Government is not good at leading in the technology space and I’m not sure that this is a good place to start.

There’s a big opportunity for us to use mobile phones (which have something like an 80% penetration in the UK now) for quick notifications and alerts, “your house is in the flood plain and there’s a big storm coming”, “your passport is ready for collection” or “we’re short of blood in the donor bank and you haven’t given blood for 12 months, now’s a great time” or something like that. There may even be the opportunity for a bit of dialogue, “you have a hospital appointment tomorrow at noon, can you still make it” coupled with a bit of to and fro to confirm the time. I’ve also talked in the past about some location based services like “the streetlight where I’m standing is out”, “there’s an abandoned car outside my house” and so on – simple to implement and, if done right, likely to attract traffic. Clearly, we’re invading people’s personal devices here – we’re pushing content for probably the first time online – and that means we have to be careful about what we send, when we send it and what we do next.

What worries me though is that we’ll repeat what we have done with websites – built lots of them – and establish 101 (or, more likely, 1001) services via mobile, but all with different phone numbers, preference settings and places to register. It’s bad enough that I have to remember URLs, but how bad would it be if I have to remember the text phone number of my hospital, my doctor, my tax office, my flood warning service? That means there’s a real, important and urgent need for some strategic thinking here. How do we set up a single “preferences” page where you can register for the services you want to receive and how you want to receive them – via mobile, via email, via voice and so on? That way, you know where to go to change your preference, all the services are collated so it will be simple to remember and you can quickly turn services on or off (if government gets push wrong and starts to annoy you with regular texts).

On top of that, we need some thinking on “what is a government mobile phone number?”. It’s easy with URLs. I’m pretty sure that only government can register something in the “.gov.uk” space, but uncertain what a government phone number would look like? Would we spell out g-o-v-e-r-n-m-e-n-t on the keyboard (something that might make sense in the USA where words as numbers is common)? Would we use a simple number like 888 or 777? How would we handle replies to that number and know where to route the text? There’s a lot to cover there.

Finally, to make these services really work, I think we’re going to have to do some real partnership work with the mobile phone providers. Ideally you’d want something in the phone menu that was already setup as “government services” so that people knew where to look and didn’t have to do any configuration. At the same time, we’d have to do some work on who pays for the messages to and fro – for a few texts that’s not a lot of money, but if we latch onto something big, a few million 5p messages could mount up pretty fast.

Meanwhile, any day now the UK will see real 3G phones on the loose. I wandered into a Hutchison shop the other day and put my order in. Meanwhile, the US has finally started to catch up with UK phone technology and, as Dan Gillmor notes, you can get a P800 or even a Nokia 3650 (horrible keyboard, what were you thinking?). I’m up for a P800 as my triband phone and will plump for an NEC 606 as my 3G phone. So sorry Nokia, after more years than I can remember as a customer, you’re about to lose me for good. I’m looking forward to seeing how video calls work, what the location based services could really do and, importantly, to playing what looked like some really good games at last. I’m fed up with Bounce, the only game on my 6610.

Projects fail for pretty much the same reasons all over, whether they’re private sector or public sector. The top few are all about stakeholder engagement, decent business case, focused risk management, capable people and day to day project management (a la Fred Brooks). In the public sector there’s a special reason though.

This week the press picked up on a report in Computing noting that over £1.5 billion had been “wasted” in government IT projects since 1997, although a big chunk of that came from just a couple of projects. If you were able to add up the 1s, 10s and 100s of millions here and there across projects, doubtless the number of billions would rapidly hit double digits. And I have no doubt that if you were to do the same in Citibank (where I’ve worked), Cable and Wireless (where I’ve worked) or ICI (where I’ve worked) the numbers would be not dissimilar in %age of IT budget terms.

Simon Moores followed up the Computing piece, in his Computer Weekly column, with the observation:

“Has anyone been sacked or lost their index-linked pension? I think not somehow. If any IT Manager blew a million away in the private sector – unless perhaps he worked for AOL -Time Warner – he’d be toast but in the public sector, it’s possible to sleep at night, knowing that £100 million or so of one’s responsibility is about to go ‘Tits-up’.”

I know the FT followed up on the Computing piece, but I haven’t yet subscribed to the online version. Also, I have a page from Computer Weekly ripped out in my notebook right now that I’ve been carrying around for a couple of weeks or more. It observes that IT departments should scrap at least a quarter of current running projects to improve success rates. So if government IT failures are hitting 54% (from the HMT Green Book) and we scrap a quarter, that means we’d have at least a 66% failure rate (because we’d certainly wrongly identify the projects and cut the good ones). I have another piece from Computer Weekly in my pile to read that is headlined “EffortStop Duplicating “. There it’s noted that “companies are wasting millions of pounds because work is being repeated and expertise is not being shared”. And, remember, that’s corporates, not private sector.

And the special reason why public sector IT fails?

Delivery is not a valued skill in government. There is no “fast stream” route to the top for delivery people – find me a permanent secretary (a far more vital position than it sounds, for you US readers, this is someone who is at the very top of the civil service tree) who has actually delivered real projects – IT or otherwise. For all their skills, the perm secs have not done that, nor have the deputy perm secs or anyone else at the top of the tree. So, when you’re young and aspiring to the top, you don’t go into a delivery route because there is no way up. Glass ceiling? More like rock solid cave ceiling. There are, as always, exceptions. Senior people in the Revenue (and you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the press about them) are working hard and delivering results, folks like Richard Granger prove that you can come in from the outside and do well – but the exceptions are few.

So what happens in government is that important, even vital, strategic projects are overseen by policy wonks. And I don’t mean that in a derogatory fashion – techies are geeks, delivery people are mavericks and policy people are wonks. Their focus is on process, documentation and doing things the right way – certainly not in doing things right. The OGC’s Gate reviews are trying, with some success, to address this but ask them what the top 10 reasons for failure were when they started the reviews and ask what the top 10 reasons are now. Any change? I don’t know for sure, but I doubt it.

So when the policy folks are working on process, the delivery people are gnashing their teeth wondering when they get their chance to shine. If there are delivery people. By the time the few that are there get the project to hand, it’s over-scoped, behind on time and absent of money to do things right.

And because government puts policy wonks onto projects, suppliers are forced to do much the same thing. Woe betide the supplier who mixes up the relationship by putting someone creative and delivery focused up against a policy person. That’s a bad idea. It doesn’t work.

So, for projects to work in government, the delivery people have to become valued, given a route to the top (if that’s what they want). At least they should be given the project to run before it’s too late. Then, suppliers will be encouraged to put delivery people in their teams to match. The combination will prove powerful as people with common aims – to make a difference through delivery – fuse and work to make the agenda happen.

But if it’s too late, the project never arrives, arrives under scope, disappoints the stakeholders and fails to ignite the transformation of government that we all know is possible – the one that allows people to get what they want from government, whether it’s through .gov.uk, .co.uk, .com, the phone or whatever.

A climate of fear (and certainly uncertainty and doubt) in the NHS says Tony Collins on Page 6 of this week’s Computer Weekly. Long on criticism, short on other ideas it seems to me. Anyone taking on a job as big as the NHS has got to be pretty brutal and upfront – everything is stacked against this working so every advantage you can gain you have to press to the maximum. For Richard Granger to request (demand?) that the issues are not debated in the press but with him is unsurprising – I’d like the same for my world of course. “How will we get [clinicians] to adopt systems that they weren’t involved in at all?” says one nameless IT director. Well, you haven’t got them using any system yet, doubtless you have a little local system that has limited benefit to the clinician and even less to the patient, so what do you propose as an alternative? Ah, nothing. As Bertrand Russell said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.”

This is the biggest job going. The results will be clear and unequivocal three to four years from now. Until then, there’s a lot of work to be done, a lot of suppliers to partner with and a huge range of stakeholders to herd. This job needs people to line up behind it, not against it. Unless you’ve got a better idea of course. As Bill Thomas has said elsewhere in the press this week … it’s a bit like sport, easy to criticise if you’re sitting in an armchair.

These wise but chronic Seekers of Injustice need to put up, or shut up.