Electronic Commerce

The government’s advance down the electronic commerce road sometimes seems like Zeno’s paradox as agencies strive to go from Point A to Point B without ever getting there.

If federal e-commerce appears to be progressing in slow motion, consider this: The Government Paperwork Elimination Act requires all agencies to offer to the public the option of interchanging mandatory documents electronically—including the use of digital authentication systems—by October 2003.

Go paperless in a little more than four years.

With such a forbidding deadline on the horizon, what’s slowing things down? The short answer is year 2000, which is sapping resources and preoccupying chief information officers.

“The blessing of electronic commerce is not going to come into full play until after the Y2K situation is over with,” said Tony Trenkle, director of electronic services at the Social Security Administration and until recently director of e-commerce at the General Services Administration and co-chairman of the Federal Electronic Commerce Program Office.

“Within the next 18 months we’ll really begin to see agencies mobilize toward electronic commerce. Once Y2K falls off the radar screen, that’s where a lot of CIOs will begin focusing,” he said.

At the Army Materiel Command, new CIO James Buck-ner has had little time to concentrate on anything other than year 2000.

“I’ve been so tied up with Y2K issues here, I haven’t delved deeply into e-commerce yet, but I know that’s the future, and that’s where we need to be moving in AMC,” said Buckner, who was chief engineering executive for e-commerce at the Defense Information Systems Agency before moving to AMC. At DISA he helped develop a model architecture for implementing e-commerce at the Defense Department.

Trenkle also predicts that e-commerce will gather more momentum next year as it becomes a campaign issue.

“Vice President Gore has done a lot in pushing Access America and online access,” he said. “That’s one of the major themes he’s pushing on his campaign Web site.”

Access America, part of Gore’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government, is one of the dozen or so federal programs and pilots designed to illuminate the path ahead for federal e-commerce and find ways to navigate barriers such as interoperability and authentication.