TECHNOLOGY AND THE BUSINESS OF GOVERNMENT

Wired Workplace blogger Brittany Ballenstedt posted findings on Wednesday from a study conducted by Accenture on Millennials' use of social networking tools at work. (Millennials are the youngest workers among us, those younger than 28.)

One finding, near the end of Brittany's post, is of particular importance for agencies looking to hire young workers - and that's just about everyone - and needs to be highlighted, underlined and bolded. Brittany writes:

Millennials in the United States also noted that state-of-the-art equipment and technology will be essential when choosing an employer. More than 52 percent of U.S. Millennials agreed or strongly agreed that technology would be a key factor in their employment decision, while 45 percent partly agreed and 13 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed.

That's 97 percent of young workers who said they at least partly agreed that how an employer uses technology would be a key factor in who they would work for. Again, 97 percent - just about everybody.

As Peter Orszag said at a Government Executive event on Tuesday, the federal government must come out of the cave and into the 21st century.

Nextgov has launched the Nextgov Awards, an inaugural program to recognize federal managers who have shepherded a program, policy or management practice that is not only innovative, but bold and brave.

Yes, we know, there are a lot of awards programs in government. But when we asked federal managers and industry executives what is missing, they told us unanimously: No awards recognize federal employees who took on risks -- personal, political and otherwise -- and boldly acted to see their idea to fruition. Or if their idea died, at least they took on entrenched bureaucratic interests in an attempt to make government better through the use of technology.

We invite you to visit our awards page to learn more and to nominate someone who fits the criteria. The technology isn't the reason for the award, but the bold idea must rely on it in some way. And we encourage you to tell us a story about the individuals you nominate. We want you to wow us because we know there are dozens of stories of federal employees trying to improve government and the lives of citizens, but they are up against big odds. Yet, they have acted bravely and with resolve to bring about change. We want to know about them, the drama they faced and the results they achieved. And, of course, the technology they used.

The winners of the Nextgov Awards will be honored at a luncheon at TechWeb's Gov 2.0 Expo in May. (Nextgov is a TechWeb partner for the event.) We'd love to see you there.

More to come.

While our focus at Nextgov is mainly on information technology in the executive branch, I'd like to take a moment to mark the end of an era in the legislative branch's IT saga. On Friday, the House of Representatives decommissioned its last mainframe, which had been in place at the Ford Office Building since 1997.

"It's a symbolic transition into the latest and greatest in terms of green technology, virtualization, consolidation and all those things," says Jack Nichols, director of enterprise operations at the House of Representatives. "The mainframe plug was pulled, but it was pulled in favor of something that was started in the mainframe world."

The House had been using mainframes since at least the early 1970s, and at one time had a 13,000-square-foot data center dedicated to mainframe and mainframe operations. As mainframes grew stronger, the House moved down to just one machine, in addition to other types of servers.

The move is expected to yield significant savings, since the House spent $700,000 annually on maintenance and support for the IBM server and another $30,000 per year to power it. But that's not the only reason for the change:

New mainframes are far more powerful and efficient than those built in the 90s, of course. But the House decided not to buy another mainframe in part because its IT staff has more expertise running x86 and Unix boxes.

"We really don't' have those [mainframe] skill sets in house anymore," Zanatta says. "We try not to maintain architecture that we can't support ourselves."

There was a time when the phrase "federal technology" would evoke images of large black boxes, each surrounded by technicians in white coats. While the executive branch still maintains mainframes throughout the enterprise, the House's announcement is just another indication that day is long behind us.

Anyone who has used the Internet is likely familiar with Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia edited and run almost entirely by volunteers. Wikipedia is the Web's most prominent source of information, but because of its crowd-sourcing model, it's not always the most credible. That's pretty much the opposite of federal Web sites, which are generally considered among the most trusted sources of information on the Web, if not the best known.

So bringing the two sides together seems like a natural fit, and it is exactly what the National Institutes of Health did this month by teaming up with Wikimedia, the non-profit that publishes Wikipedia.

To make that online information more reliable, NIH is encouraging its scientists and science writers to edit and even initiate Wikipedia articles in their fields. This month, it joined with the Wikimedia Foundation, which publishes the cyber encyclopedia, to host "Wikipedia Academy," a training session on the tools and rules of wiki culture, at NIH headquarters in Bethesda.

Over the course of a day, more than two dozen Wikipedia volunteers -- just a few of the 4,000 people who edit English-language Wikipedia articles at least five times a month -- gave presentations promoting the open-source encyclopedia and encouraging about 100 NIH employees to become editors. The volunteer instructors, or "Wikipedians," were not just techno-geeks; they also included scientists who could appreciate the questions NIH staffers might have. Attendees were shown how to use the template that produces a Wikipedia article, with its embedded table of contents and multiple links; they also discussed topics such as managing the quality of articles and the verifiability of information.

I spoke today with Jay Walsh, spokesman for Wikimedia who called the collaboration with NIH a "watershed moment" for the tiny non-profit, which boasts a staff of fewer than thirty people.

"This is the first time the foundation ever met with folks at the federal government level," Walsh said. "The dialogue is really about pushing forward. Our goal to get as many people from as many departments as possible to edit Wikipedia."

Walsh said the foundation hopes by increasing the number of government officials and researchers participating and editing Wikipedia, the site can reach a new level of professional competence by removing some of the existing bad information.

"This is an opportunity that was many months in design," Walsh said. "The folks at NIH, including the researchers, recognize that when you use Internet Wikipedia is constant, highly visible source of facts and data."

Walsh said his organization has just begun with its outreach to academics and professional researchers, with the goal of increasing trust and understanding of the site's unique all-volunteer format. That includes creating more workshops like the academy as well as more teaching materials and outreach directed at specific groups or subject-matter experts.

However, one thing that government officials may want to avoid is attempting to edit the entry for their own organization, which Walsh said is taboo in the Wiki community.

"Wikipedians are keen, it's not tough to determine if [someone] is editing an agency's entry from inside the agency," Walsh said. He encouraged government officials interested in learning more about Wikipedia to e-mail his organization at info@wikimedia.org.

We've heard working for government has become cool again. Here's some anecdotal evidence.

Stephen Goldsmith -- former Republican mayor of Indianapolis, chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and a professor of government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University -- spoke on Tuesday at the Senior Executives Association's annual conference. Near the end of his keynote speech, he said that when he used to ask a class of students at the Kennedy school how many planned to go work for government, only about 20 percent raised their hands. Now when he asks how many plan to go work for President Obama, "about 98 percent of the class raises their hands."

The increase in interest can be attributed to the administration's emphasis on technology.

Wired's Danger Room blog has obtained a copy of a May 18 operations order from the Army's 93rd Signal Brigade directing information managers on domestic military bases to allow personnel to access Facebook, Vimeo, Delicious, Flickr and Twitter. From the order:

1. SITUATION: The Army has recently made access to several social media Web sites available from the Army home page within the .mil domain.

Access to these sites or a subset of these sites is available from some installations across CONUS and restricted at others. Similarly, Web-based email is available from some installations and restricted at others. IAW 7th Signal Command Theater 100 Day Plan, and in an effort to establish a Web filtering standard for DOIMs across CONUS, the 93d Signal Brigade Commander directs all DOIMs to allow access to specific social media sites and access to Web-based e-mail from their respective campus area networks.

2. MISSION: Permit access to specific social media Web sites and all Web-based e-mail from the installation campus area NIPR network NLT 22 May 09.

The key word in the passage above is "several." The memo continues with a list of social networking sites that should be banned, including YouTube, Pandora, Photobucket, MySpace. MTV and hi5. No explanation is given for why some sites are allowed while others are banned, but it's worth noting all of the approved sites have signed terms of service agreements with GSA and that the banned list includes several sites aimed at sharing media, especially music and videos.

While it's good news that the military is embracing some social networking tools, we'd love to know what exactly the process is for approving some sites versus others. Signing an updated terms of service agreement seems like an obvious first step, but YouTube was among the first sites to sign an agreement with GSA, and it remains on the banned list.

There also is an issue of competition here. By making Facebook available to military personnel as opposed to MySpace for example, the government is essentially endorsing the product, helping it attract more business. Here's hoping the Army will shed some light on its reasoning in the near future.

The problem with technology is that once something has been deemed "hot," it's most likely not (anymore). Could that be happening to Twitter?

Only 22 percent of 18 to 24 year olds have a Twitter account, compared with 99 percent of that same age group who have a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace, according to a study conducted by Participatory Marketing Network, a marketing firm that focuses on how the Internet influences consumer behavior, and Pace University. The study's researchers, not surprising, view the low-participation rate for these young, soon-to-be and just-beginning-to-be workers as a "glass-half-full" opportunity. "There is a tremendous opportunity now for marketers to develop strategies to get this important group active on Twitter too," says Michael Della Penna, co-founder and executive chairman of PMN.

Doesn't this strike you as odd? Doesn't Twitter seem like it was created for the young? Twitter is the sister of texting, and anyone who has a teenager or college-age daughter or son knows texting is about as popular as it gets.

Could it be that only 1 out of 5 18 to 24 year olds Twitter because only 1 out of 5 18 to 24 year olds value it? They clearly value other social networking sites. Are we seeing the beginning of a trend here? As these late teens and early 20-somethings grow older and begin to affect the workplace more, they will bring with them their Twitter disdain. And what does that mean for federal agencies, which are creating Twitter feeds as fast as they can?