Beckshome.com: Thomas Beck's Blog

I’ve spent the better part of the last 6 years dealing with state government systems that manage information about citizens receiving government services. As creative as state government can be in some areas, presenting new and interesting visual metaphors for the management of citizen and case (i.e. collections of citizens) information is certainly not a forte. This problem is not solely the fault of state governments. Rather, it’s the product of state government business leaders’ lack of knowledge of the available options, educational obligation complacency on part of government’s IT partners, and the real or perceived difficulty of being visually creative in an environment where accessibility compliance is not an option.

Try this on for size – the EPAct2005 is the Y2K of Y2K’07. No, this is not an anagram. No sooner is 2006 behind us and folks are already worried about “the next Y2K”, the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Between January 1st and January 3rd, I’ve received no fewer than 8 emails on this topic. These emails include everything from details about software and hardware that will require some form of remediation to EPAct2005-related business opportunities.

I’ve added a second state government pattlet to the portfolio. This one is for the case entity. Although a bit more simplistic than our previous pattlet, Case still has some very interesting nuances, such as the use of aspect-oriented techniques to account for associating the writing of case history records with various case-related transactions.

In addition, I have made some minor revisions to the Case Transfer pattlet, upped the version number, and reposted that as well. I’ve also started added these pattlets to two open source pattern repositories.

I’ve been kicking around some ideas in this area for a while, in hope of bringing them together in some coherent fashion. The image below represents the fruits of my labors. I’m not sure that it’s prefect or that I won’t look back on this as a sophomoric effort several months from now. The visual does, however, touch on several major observations I’ve made recently and allow me to illustrate them in a fairly clear and succinct fashion. Some of the terms are heavily overloaded and thus a bit more discussion of each of these trends is provided below for clarification.

I had the extremely good fortune to stumble upon a document on XML.gov that describes the cohesion between the varying areas of state government work that I am involved in. The document, a report on the E-Government Act of 2002, Section 212, was a revelation of previously unknown relationships between many areas of my work. Despite the fact that the document was written for the federal government, it appears to be very applicable to state government as well.

I ran across some very unique work from the state of Missouri in the area of project oversight the other day. Missouri’s well documented approach to project oversight is not only a great state government practice; it is by far the best documented practice in the public or private sector that I could find in this area. The project oversight methodology was nominated for a NASCIO recognition award in 2004 under the State IT Management category.