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GCN Home > June 19, 2000 issue

Online government

The big picture remains elusive, but interactive sites are sprouting up across the federal landscape

By Richard W. Walker
GCN Staff

A few months ago, the General Services Administration’s Office of Intergovernmental Solutions and several other agencies assembled a panel of government and private-sector information technology experts to ponder prospects for transforming government.

The premise of the program was that agencies could build on the momentum of the triumphant year 2000 date-code repair effort and use it to expand efforts to develop electronic government.

But the fading glow of the year 2000 success left a little gloom in the air. The victorious warriors were now facing another battle.

The panelists agreed that the struggle for efficient online government will be a long one, full of uncertainties. And at present, they lamented, e-government is almost nowhere.

“On a continuum of 100 percent, we’re at 2 percent right now,” said Renato DiPentima, president of the government sector of SRA International Inc. of Arlington, Va., and a former deputy commissioner for systems at the Social Security Administration.

Harold Gracey, who recently left his position as acting chief information officer at the Veterans Affairs Department to become vice president of government affairs at FedBid.com of Germantown, Md., also was circumspect.

“I think we’re still trying to decide what the color of the brick road is—whether it’s yellow, red or gold,” Gracey told the group. “You can have a conversation for days about what electronic government means and get five different answers.”

So where is e-government now? There are loads of Web pages that provide information, but only a few are interactive.

“We’ve developed a set of independent Web pages that are essentially content, as opposed to transaction- or interaction-based,” said G. Edward DeSeve, national industry director for the federal sector for KPMG International of New York and former acting deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget. “We’re in the multiple-location, information-dissemination mode.”



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