Government Technology on Beckshome.com: Thomas Beck's Blog

IT Trends in State Government

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

With the 2007 NASCIO IT recognition award submission process closed and the evaluation process in full swing, I’m anxiously awaiting the publication of the nominations from across the country. It’s always interesting to see what new and innovative practices are being applied in different state governments. With Web 2.0, blogging, wikis, multi-media, and social computing firmly established in the Internet at large (see Time Person of the Year 2006), it’s high time that this wave hits the government sector, which usually lags behind in such trends by a couple of years.

Ruby on Rails in State Government

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The more I use Ruby on Rails, the more I become convinced that it is damn near the perfect framework for state government Web-based applications. Ruby on Rails in State GovernmentThat said, I don’t know of a single state, local, or municipal government that is experimenting with Rails in any meaningful fashion. I have a bunch of stored Google queries that have yielded woefully little information about the penetration of Rails into state government over the past year or so. I fear that is because there really has been little or no penetration.

Case Management Systems - 3 Compelling Alternative Visual Metaphors

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Learn from the Worm - Pennsylvania Trout Fishing 2007

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I realize that the title of this blog post is something that one would probably not associate with a blog that purports to cover technology. Bear with me please and surf over to YouTube (or view below) to look at the video posted by the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission. I think you will agree that the video is very well done. Much like the partnership between Google and the Pennsylvania Tourism Office that I blogged about a couple of months back, this posting to YouTube represents some signs of forward thinking, Web-based focus, and creativity on the part of state government.

Energy Policy Act of 2005

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Deloitte "States of Transition" Podcast

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Over the holidays, I had the chance to catch up with some back reading and Podcasts and there was one, in particular, that caught my attention. The book / Podcast combo on transforming state governments by Deloitte & Touche provided some really interesting, innovative, no-holds-barred analysis of the problems that state governments are facing in the early 21st century. Recorded the day after the 2006 elections, Deloitte’s Bob Campbell and Bill Eggers collaborate with Deloitte advisor, former governor of Pennsylvania and first secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge to produce an excellent Podcast. The Podcast serves as a solid introduction to the more extensive analysis in their book, States of Transition: Tackling government’s toughest policy and management challenges.

State Government Pattlet - Case

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

SOA Directions in State Government

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

E-Government Practices

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Project Oversight in the State Government

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Hierarchy of State Government Reuse

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently been re-reading Scott Ambler’s excellent work on the Enterprise Unified Process and focusing my attention on the strategic reuse discipline, in particular. Dealing with this on a day-in, day-out basis, I’m trying to apply this particularly to the business domain that I work in, state government. I like the way that Scott went about illustrating the enterprise management disciplines with the traditional RUP workflow maps. Above and beyond this, he borrows from an earlier article of his, A Realistic Look at Object-Oriented Reuse, to create a couple of diagrams that really hit home. I’ve taken the opportunity to adopt these diagrams to enterprise work being done in state government. The adopted diagram can be found below.

The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

On September 26th, President Bush signed into law the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. The represents the first piece of legislation sponsored by upstart Illinois senator Barack Obama to make it into law. Being touted as the “Google for Government”, the law directs the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to oversee the creation of a single comprehensive searchable Web site that would include information on all federal grants, contracts, and other funding awarded to public and private organizations. As the President mentioned at the signing, the federal government issues more than $400 billion in grants, and more than $300 billion in contracts to corporations, associations, and state and local governments. These range from reputable grants to operate state Medicaid systems to questionable allocation of funds such as the hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to build a bridge to a virtually uninhabited island in Alaska, the so called “bridge to nowhere”. Although at way to high a level to be a true comparison, the Death and Taxes graph provides a good representation of what we might end up seeing.

State Government Pattlet - Case Transfer

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Following up on a long-standing desire to get domain knowledge out of our heads and onto paper, a colleague and I engaged in writing our first state government pattlet. We spent about two weeks of our spare time putting together an abstract approach to case transfer based upon our varied experiences. We finally have a draft version which we feel comfortable sharing online.

As far as I know, this is a first-of-its-kind endeavor for state government. We drew heavily on Fowler’s Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models as background material for documenting the patterns. The underlying analysis, design, and approach are all original, though. Please understand that the pattlet is not perfect. We’ve marked it as a 0.1 version to reflect its state and we intend to update it over the next couple of weeks.

NASCIO 2006 Recognition Awards

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The nominations for the 2006 NASCIO state government recognition awards are now available online. There is some really interesting and innovative stuff in here.

BSCoE can be found under Cross Boundary Collaboration and Partnerships and JNET, which I’ve blogged about in the past, can be found under Data, Information, and Knowledge Management. Happy reading.

Software Engineering Processes and the BSCoE SEP

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

In addition to the technical assets that I’ve mentioned in previous blog postings, BSCoE also makes a set of software process assets available. These software process assets are arranged into disciplines and collected under the umbrella of BSCoE’s Software Engineering Process (SEP). Information about the BSCoE SEP is available online to the general public.

The SEP is based roughly upon the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF). Those looking at the sample assets will notice the similarities with the standard RUP templates. The process component of the SEP is specifically vague, leaving decisions such as formality versus agility, process activities, and roles to the projects employing the SEP. In particular, projects have several options for SEP customization including document-driven (RUP-style development case), local modifications to the process, or modifications with intent to contribute back changes to BSCoE for inclusion in the master SEP distribution. The SEP is conceptually similar in some ways to Ivar Jacobson’s new Essential Unified Process (EssUP). However, whereas the EssUP variability comes through the selection of practices, SEP’s variability comes through the selection of artifacts.

Keystone Technology Plan Issued

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Pennsylvania’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) issued the Keystone Technology Plan to serve as the information technology blueprint through the year 2009. The plan’s phased approach is quite interesting, with the following phases taking center stage:

Yesterday: Enterprise Planning and Governance
Today :Shared Infrastructure Services
Tomorrow: Business Centric Services

BSCoE plays a prominent role in OIT’s vision and is mentioned as a driver of infrastructure today and key player in the creation of business-centric services in the future.

e-Government Mashups

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Phil Windley’s recent post on e-Government mashups is a great introduction to the topic of citizen-facing Web services. As refreshing as it is to see that progressives in Rhode Island and the District of Columbia are exposing government data to their citizens and opening themselves to the law of unintended consequences, this only scratches the surface of what is possible. As I’m sure Phil knows as a former state CIO, fully open citizen self-service is likely to only go so far. As cool as it is to mashup public highway, crime, and public entity data on a map for the world to see, enabling truly effective government is going to be, to a greater extent, dependent upon empowering government knowledge workers. Imagine if, as an example, a knowledge worker was able to pull together information from their state’s welfare, criminal justice, and revenue (i.e. tax) systems and mash these up in a way that enabled them to uncover hidden relationships between this data and serve the state’s citizens more effectively.

BSCoE4J Java Framework

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The BSCoE4J Java application development framework was released today to the Commonwealth and is now available for download. The framework contains both abstract and concrete components that support the creation, manipulation, and persistence of domain objects. It interfaces well with, and is meant by no means to supplant, well-understood open source frameworks that address presentation layer, persistence layer, or domain object creation and discovery challenges.

The addition of the BSCoE4J Framework as the third core BSCoE assets rounds off the BSCoE offering for custom enterprise application development. BSCoE4J joins the BSCoE.NET Framework and the BSCoE Software Engineering Process (SEP), forming a comprehensive set of tools for Commonwealth applications looking to do development in either Java or .NET.

BSCoE Awarded 2006 Computerworld Laureate

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The BSCoE project recently received a Computerworld Honors Program laureate honoring the project for its use of information technology to benefit society. It looks like the official case studies and pictures of the award ceremonies have been posted online. You can find the BSCoE case study here. I’ve also included a couple of interesting photos from the Computerworld ceremonies including the snapshot of our client receiving the award.

BSCoE to use Logidex

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The official press release just came out announcing that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania will be using LogicLibrary’s Logidex product as its asset metadata repository. This is quite an exciting development since it will afford BSCoE the opportunity to automate many of the asset cataloging, management, and approval functions that would have otherwise been manual processes.

As a card holding member of the tool skeptics club, I admit to being plesantly surprised and impressed by all of the product demos that I’ve seen and the technical expertise displayed by LogicLibrary’s product technicians. Logidex has a number of extremely interesting features that I have seen in no other product, let alone product suite, including: