Megan Mcardle, a blogger for The Atlantic (which is owned by Atlantic Media, the same company that owns Nextgov), wonders why the federal government is so bad at information technology -- and by IT, she means building Web sites that are easy to navigate and make it easy to find information. She says Obama's new whitehouse.gov site is "smart looking," but "unfortunately, that sleekness has been achieved by tucking even more of that unsightly information out of the way, where it won't mar the vista."
Alyssa Rosenberg, who blogs for Government Executive in FedBlog, followed up defending the federal government's IT efforts:
If the National Security Agency, working with private companies, can create a top-secret digital channel for Obama's Blackberry, clearly government is capable of IT innovations and creativity, especially when a) security is involved and b) the president asks. The IT work that's gone into building telework programs, for example, has been extremely impressive: when 60 percent of an agency's headquarters staff can work away from home and not crash the network, that's a real accomplishment.
Government IT does suffer, but the programs typically are on a scale that makes IT projects at some of the largest corporations look like a high school project. They also often push technology to its limits, asking to do things that have never been done before (consider the Army's Future Combat Systems).
That said, most IT project management consultants and scholars -- including those at the Government Accountability Office -- say what is the biggest culprit for failed IT systems in the federal government is the inability to manage risk. The Census Bureau's effort to build handheld devices to collect data from households during the 2010 census is a prime example of not managing risk.
But that still doesn't answer the aesthetic and usefulness problem of government Web sites. Mcardle isn't the only one who has this complaint -- it is indeed vary difficult to find many government documents and the most sought after data agencies collect. That's the point Jerry Brito at George Mason University's Mercatus Center pointed out in his 2007 paper, "Hack, Mash, and Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency." The paper would be good reading for the Obama administration before they get too far down their road of making government more transparent. I wrote a blog item about it here (some links are bad).
COMMENTS
The DNS and mx records are a hierarchical naming system for computers, services, or any resource participating in the Internet.
mymnlypeRet 09/02/09 05:50 am ET
Activities have been underway at the U.S. Government Printing Office for several years to inprove our information management system and dramatically enhance the ability of visitors to quickly and accurately access federal publications. We didn't approach this task casually, instead we embarked on a significant effort to gain market research on information access needs in the community and then, from the ground up, develop a system to meet those needs.
Earlier this month we launched FDsys, our new site (http://fdsys.gpo.gov), which is in a public beta phase now. This new system offeres advanced, easy to use tools to access federal publications. This site will stay in beta until all of the content in our legacy system (GPO Access) is processed and migrated into the new system, which is anticipated to be complete later this year.
Additional system enhancements and features are planned for FDsys over the next few years. Additional information about FDsys can be found at www.gpo.gov/fdsys.
I invite everyone to take a look at the site and forward any comments and suggestions to pmo@gpo.gov.
Mike Wash
CIO
U.S. Government Printing Office
Michael Wash 01/23/09 01:02 pm ET
One of the main problems is that in order to conduct customer surveys in the government you must go throught a bureacractic process OPM administers under the Paperwork Reduction Act, which was designed to reduce the government paperwork burden on the public. However, the Act is interpreted to also apply to voluntary surveys of customers whether conducted electronically or not, thus usability surveys and customer surveys in general are a pain to conduct in the government, unlike in private industry. Thus, many agencies without the manpower or $ to go through this bureacratic process design a Web site to the best of their ability without customer input. Most of us know it isn't the best way to operate, but until customer surveys are exempted from the Paperwork Reduction Act, it will continue.
Margaret 01/23/09 08:53 am ET
Two words: Poor Design.
Nobody plans these sites out, they just design them as they go, with little or no regard for the user experience.
DesignNinja 01/22/09 07:10 pm ET