- My Biggest Failure – Consolidation

IT Consolidation and "Assimilation"

Everyone likes to tell success stories, particularly if the success occurred under your own leadership. But we all have failures and make mistakes. Few of us like to discuss them. I am writing about my biggest failure as CTO, hoping there is a lesson here for others.

I recently spoke to an IT consolidation retreat in Nashville hosted by the Center for Radical Improvement. In 2005-2006 we tried to partially consolidate information technology in the City of Seattle. It failed. Well, let’s say it was “less than successful”. And here is the “rest of the story”.

City government in Seattle has 11,000 employees, of whom about 550 work directly in technology and 215 of those work in the central Department of Information Technology (DoIT) which I lead. We have three service desks, three different radio systems, four large data centers, and at least six different groups providing server support and desktop support. We have at least five different work management systems, and some unknown number of document management systems.

On the other hand, we are standardized in many ways – a single e-mail system, Windows XP on all desktops, Oracle and SQL Server for databases, a single award-winning web presence at www.seattle.gov, an award-winning municipal TV station, one set of connections to the Internet, a single firewall, and a single financial management system and payroll system.

In 2005 the Mayor and I proposed a consolidation of technology infrastructure employees – about 100 employees would have moved from a dozen departments into the central IT shop – DoIT.

It failed. Why?

1. We did not calculate a return-on-investment and a potential cost savings from the consolidation. Such a cost/benefit analysis is essential to proving the case to elected officials. Furthermore, I promised there would be “no loss of jobs” due to the reorganization. I did this primarily because I felt we could re-deploy employees more efficiently to tackle a whole host of new projects. But I was also hoping to lessen the fear of change which is embedded in any organization, especially government, and especially during an impending organizational change. This is a dilemna – in difficult budget times, consolidation/centralization has a strong return-on-investment (ROI) and good support from elected officials, but the ROI comes from cutting jobs, which has a disastrous effect on morale.   Yet in “good” budget times, when jobs can be preserved, the support from elected and appointed officials is less compelling.

2. I failed my Mayor. Mayor Nickels made the decision for this reorganization. But I didn’t properly engage him – and his senior staff – in supporting and leading the change. Consequently many employees, department directors and others saw this consolidation as “empire building” on my part – an internal grab for power rather than an honest attempt to improve government.   Indeed, a Seattle City Council member openly accused me of “empire building” in a City Council meeting (he later, but privately, apologized for the remark).   That meeting is undoubtedly stored somewhere in the vast video archives of the Seattle Channel.

3. We did not get a consultant. Yes, there are many jokes about consultants. And good organizational consultants are expensive. But the blunt fact is simple: a comprehensive look at consolidation by someone outside the organization – a dispassionate outsider – would have greatly improved the credibility of the change. A good consultant would also complete a detailed cost/benefit analysis.

4. A labor union opposed the change. IT professional employees in the Department of Information Technology (DoIT) employees have decided not to be represented by a union. Many of the employees in other departments (who would be consolidated) are currently represented. Those employees probably would have lost that representation when moving. Although the numbers are small here – 35 to 40 employees in a labor union of 2,500 – there are larger principles at stake.

Generally, I believe in centralization of tech infrastructure functions – networks and data centers and computer operating system support. Certainly, we should have a single financial management system, budget system, and payroll system. Centralized functions are almost always more efficient, effective and secure.

In an organization our size, some applications support should be decentralized, for example, the software used to manage Seattle Parks Department resources and reservations is certainly different from the software used to manage resources for the Seattle Police Department or our electric utility Seattle City Light. Employees in those departments know best how to use technology to support their unique business needs.

Consolidations can be done well, as in Missouri by Bill Bott and Dan Ross, or Teri Takai in Michigan.

But achieving technology consolidation is hard. Although I’m proud of most of the work done under my technology leadership at the City of Seattle, I’ve had a failure or two as well. I hope others can learn from this. I certainly have the “scars of the school of hard knocks” from this experience!

- E-Mail Mangling

Most people complain fervently about how electronic mail they get. My opinion: electronic mail is the best invention since sliced bread – or, at least the best since the Internet.

When you scratch the surface (or “open the envelope”), most of us are probably addicted to electronic mail and its newer cousins BlackBerrys, text messaging and twitter.

I know what large organizations did before e-mail. They wrote memos. They wrote stacks and stacks of paper memos. There were legions of clerks and secretaries who prepared memos for their bosses on typewriters.

I learned to touch-type on manual typewriters at North Tama High School in Traer, Iowa, a rural community school which wisely foisted typing class on every student, boy or girl. Why it was mandatory, I don’t know, as secretarial jobs were seen as menial even then. Perhaps the principal Bob Clark clairvoyantly foresaw (even before Al Gore) the Internet and computers? I know he died without a lot of wealth, so he wasn’t clairvoyant enough to buy Apple or Microsoft as startups, but clearly he was a prescient educator.

With paper memos (and carbon paper), bureaucracies took a loooong time to make decisions. And those decisions were hard to communicate other than via staff meetings or the ubiquitous company bulletin boards.

Usually very few people were involved in such decisions because of the amount of paper, the interoffice mail deliveries, and the slowness of the whole process. Beyond typing memos, pre-e-mail bureaucracies (to include corporations and private businesses as well as government) made a lot of decisions via small face-to-face meetings and the telephone – usually one-on-one phone calls.

E-mail changed all this. Now information can be rapidly disseminated to an entire company, or indeed, the entire world (skirting those ubiquitous spam filters). Through prudent and frugal use of e-mail, information can collected and decisions made, often without the need for face-to-face meetings. We’re more productive. We get more done in a shorter period of time. And we can get input from throughout our organization, not just the people we see face-to-face or in meetings every day.

Certainly millions of secretaries have been put out of work, but millions of much-higher-paid and more respected geeks (aka information technology workers) have been put INTO work, not just for managing e-mail, but also for all the related technologies (servers, storage, spam filters and so forth).

The City of Seattle is deep in the throes of converting from Novell GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange/Outlook for electronic mail. This $10 million project (including standardization on Office 2007) represents the 4th generation of electronic mail for us, starting with IBM’s CICS Office, thru a Diaspora of LAN-based e-mail systems to standardizing on GroupWise and now to Outlook. A team of 20 technology employees is hard at work at this conversion.  I’m looking forward to June 24th, when I (as CTO, Chief Geek, and Chief Dog-food-eater) become one of the first log-in to my newly-minted Outlook.

E-mail: the bane of our existence? A vast improvement in productivity and decision making? A way to flatten and democratize our existence? Yeah, it is all that and more.

E-mail: I like it.

- Tough Times, Tough Decisions

I just finished one of the most difficult tasks a manager can perform – making preliminary decisions on budget cuts for next year. This is a job which is difficult in any line of work, and more so in government for several reasons.

For one thing, there’s an expectation that government is stable and long-term in its operations and its employment. It has to be. Despite the situation with the economy at large, water and electricity have to keep flowing, streets and parks need to be repaired and cleaned, 911 calls answered, cops and firefighters dispatched. Most of this work is at the very base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – safety and security. The people who perform these jobs for the public expect to have security in their jobs and the tools they use.

Yet I’ve found most government workers are motivated not by job security or money, but by pride. They – we – are proud of the work they do, and proud to be meeting the most basic needs of the people of our communities. I’ve given employees raises and promotions, but, again and again, I’ve watched their motivations inspired not by more money, but with a kind word or e-mail of appreciation, or being recognized in front of their peers for doing a good job.

Certainly the legal machinery surrounding government – or, really, nowadays, work in any large corporation or bureaucracy – reinforces job security. Civil service regulations, unions, personnel rules, and other legal protections all reinforce the expectation that many jobs in government are “permanent”.

Making budget decisions is hard – we talk in terms of “cutting positions” or “abrogation” or other fancy words. But I know the first name of (almost) every employee in my 200+ person department, and hundreds of others in City government as well. It is hard to separate the name or reality of “services cuts” from the people who do the work and are directly affected.

Almost as difficult is making the decisions about cutting tools and equipment versus positions. It’s one thing to have people to maintain a public safety radio network or operate a computer center. But we also need to provide switches and radios and large-scale computers and space to keep those functions operating.

There are the other jobs of government – the public information officers and municipal TV channel, and support for arts organizations and the library, not to mention feeding the homeless and housing the hungry (and vice versa). All these are important functions, all requiring people, as well as tools and materials and other resources. Finally – and most important, perhaps – are the visible jobs of government – the people who run community centers and libraries, the cops and firefighters, the workers who fill potholes and maintain the electric grid.

Although my job is tough, and my decisions are hard, I don’t envy the elected officials who have to make choices for the government as a whole. Then those elected officials need to explain those choices to voters – many of whom have lost a job or a home themselves. And those explanations often occur during the heat of an election campaign, when emotions and misinformation abound.

Tough times, tough decisions.

Note: A few more details about the budget issues with the City of Seattle’s technology are in a recent Puget Sound Business Journal interview here. The Seattle Department of Information Technology’s budget for 2010 was authorized at $59 million and 216 positions – see DoIT’s and the full City budget here.

- The Translucent Government

Translucent Seattle - click to see

Making government “transparent” is in vogue in 2009, whether by doing map mashups of crimes or twittering by Mayors and public agencies. But I often wonder if we’re exposing the trees, without showing the forest or illuminating the true ecosystems of governing.

I’ll cite one thorny problem which (we hope) is somewhat susceptible to new, web 2.0 transparency tools such as data feeds, mashups, and social media: exposing government budgets for public scrutiny.

Google has a service for “making government transparent” usgov.google.com although I can’t tell the difference between this site and a normal Google search except only Government sites are returned.

The King County (Seattle) government recently passed a measure calling for each agency to publish a line-item budget. This law isn’t exactly news, of course.

Some governments are going even further, putting entire databases or data sets on the web. Open Alabama partially accomplishes this as do Georgia and Washington State and notably Texas.

I’ve heard rumors of governments showing all their financial management transactions on the web, so anyone can see every payment made by the government. Some large cities now expose detailed crime statistics – right down to the 100 block of where the crime occurred. Others make restaurant health inspections, building permits, and a wide variety of other such detailed data available.

So I’d say we’re starting to get adept at exposing the trees – or maybe the branches, twigs, leaves, owls, squirrels, nuts and bark of government operations. But what does all this data mean, and how can it influence government behavior, budgeting and public policy choices?

Jonathan Walters, in a recent Governing column, talked about the ongoing attempts to link budgets to performance measures and results. As Walters states “This isn’t about looking for fluff in budgets, for waste. We’re already efficient. The question is, are we efficient at the right things?”

Ideally, we’d be able cleanly link all the inputs, processes, outputs and costs.

For example, we might know the Metropolis city transportation department filled 10,000 potholes in 2008. And they had four pothole-filling crews, each with four workers and a truck. We could gather a lot of data about costs, wages, time-to-fill, and so forth. Even so, there are a lot of variables, such as the simple fact that due to weather, pothole-filling crews can’t work every day, or some days those crews need to be doing snow-plowing or sidewalk construction. And then there’s the factor of executive policy direction. Every Mayor knows that it is relatively easy to get more potholes filled quickly – you just divert staffpower from building sidewalks or maintaining bridges to the more visible task of pouring asphalt into holes. But is that the right long-term public policy choice for Metropolis, or any city government?

The problem only gets thornier when we start talking about crime: how many cops do you have to hire to reduce auto thefts by 10%? That question is non-sensical on many levels.

And even thornier when we discuss choices – should we hire more cops or school teachers or put more money into public health or homeless shelters? Choices get even worse in times like 2009 where we are making decisions about what to cut. And notice I haven’t even talked about investments in technology or software systems versus any of those other choices.

We – government – complicate this all through little tricks such as “holding positions vacant”. A department’s official budget might show 500 full-time employees, but as a matter of fact the department might intentionally keep 25 or 40 positions vacant and then using the salary savings for other purposes. At least one quite large City of Seattle department has zero dollars for replacing its desktop computers and funds them through this method. But it is a widespread practice, as recently noted by Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene in Governing.

So is it time to despair on performance measures and data-driven governing? Hardly.

Traditionally, the analysis of this data has fallen to finance staff in government departments, or to employees in offices with names like the “office of management and budget” or the “budget office”. Even in the largest cities or counties, only a few dozen people actually did the analysis which informed elected officials who make policy choices.

Today, with databases and the Internet and the world-wide-web, and the advent of tools like mash-ups and Excel spreadsheets, all of this raw data can be exposed to hundreds or thousands of people who are interested in doing the analysis – on their own time with their own computers in their own homes.

Will they make mistakes? Sure. Will there be people who latch onto the data only to cast it in the worst possible light to impugn the elected officials currently running any given government? You bet.

But they’ll also ask a ton of questions, such as how pothole-clearing crews are allocated and what those crews are doing during snowstorms. Overall, people will gain a better understanding of how government works and of the management, processes and costs involved in running a government agency.

They undoubtedly will come up with suggestions for improvement.

And, who knows, in many cases they might even conclude many government programs are, indeed, operating as efficiently and effectively as possible!

Will government ever be “fully transparent”? Probably not, but as we get more and more translucent, we’ll shed more light on the problems of governing.

- Schrier to the FCC: Broadband

Fiber Broadband - Click for more

This morning the FCC will start a year-long process to craft a “National Broadband Plan for our Future”.

The agenda is here and here’s Ars Technica’s insightful view of the process. The meeting can be viewed live at 10:00 AM (EDT) here, and the video record should be posted at that site after the meeting is finished.

I’ve blogged a number of times about broadband and how I feel the only real “broadband” is fiber-to-the-premise. I feel the United States is in danger of becoming a “third world country” in broadband networks.

Here’s what I’ll tell the FCC Commissioners today (with a little luck, and FTP/Video technology willing):

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Good morning Commissioners.

I’m Bill Schrier, Chief Technology Officer for the City of Seattle, and I bring you greetings from “the other Washington”.

Thank you for the opportunity to address the Commission on broadband and its effect upon economic development and jobs.

Mayor Greg Nickels of Seattle is the incoming President of the United States Conference of Mayors and has been an outspoken proponent of broadband – and specifically fiber to the premise – since 2005 when a citizen’s commission recommended creation of a symmetric, 25 megabits per second or faster fiber network.

We feel such a network will bring a fundamental change America’s economy – it will affect our way of working and playing as profoundly as did the telegraph, telephone, railroad, and original Internet.

We believe a fiber network is an investment which will last 50 years or more

We believe such a fiber network will carry two-way high-definition video streams. This network can convert every high-definition television set into a video conferencing station. And this addresses a fundamental human need – to actually see our co-workers and friends.

For the first time, working at home – true telework – will be possible because workers can connect with each other and see each other in real time. Whole technology businesses will collaborate on developing 21st century products. Students will be able to attend classes and interact with their classmates from home. Quality of life will improve as families scattered across a region can talk together while actually seeing each other.

Such a network can significantly reduce commute trips and travel. This, in turn, reduces our dependence upon imported oil and reduces the production of greenhouse gases.

You are launching this momentous task of creating a national broadband strategy. I urge you to think of fiber broadband with two-way video and similar applications as a fundamentally new economic network for America. I urge you to think in decades, not years. And, again, on behalf of the people of Seattle and Mayor Greg Nickels, thank you for listening.

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I also had an ex parte meeting regarding the definition of “broadband” with FCC staff on March 31st. The public record of my statements at the meeting are here.

- Twitter, Facebook & Gov’t 2.0

Twitter Social Networking

“Web 2.0″ is taking the Internet by storm. Use of Facebook (and similar sites) has exploded and may even have become passé for some people. Even that notorious bastion of anti-change troglodytes, the U.S. Congress, apparently loves Twitter.

But, amazingly enough, social networking tools may not be of much use to local government, unless there are significant improvements or new applications.

This subject of this blog is basically: how do social media companies and local governments need to change to really bring social networking “to the people”?

Why do local governments (cities and counties) even exist? The answer to this question is easy: these are the governments most visible and directly involved in the daily lives of most people (although you certainly wouldn’t know that by looking at newspaper headlines, the evening TV news and the blogosphere where the fedgov gets a lot more square inches of newspaper or computer monitor space).

Local governments take care of streets and parks, provide water and dispose of solid waste/wastewater. When you call 911 your local police or fire department responds, not the FBI or the Army. Local governments are very much connected to neighborhoods and individual communities. Almost everyone can walk into their county courthouse or city hall and ask for help or complain about a service. People can actually attend City Council meetings and make comments, or even – most cases – talk directly to the officials they’ve elected to run their city/county government.

In contrast, finding the right state or the federal government agency to address an issue – much less contacting them – is more difficult. Try walking into the U.S. Capitol to talk to your Congressperson!

But the bottom line is that local governments are very much in the “call and we’ll respond” mode.

It would seem that the “social media” – which are built for enhancing interaction and communications among individual people – are tailor made to work for local government. These tools, however, need some significant enhancements to be really useful. Here are some specific suggestions.

Use of Facebook has really exploded, especially among folks my age, which I’ll just say is the “over 50″ set. Local government should really want to use this sort of social networking tool. We set up blockwatches, so people can let each other know about suspicious activities and crime in their neighborhoods. In Seattle, we have “SNAP” teams (”Seattle Neighbors Actively Prepare“) / try to train blocks of residents to be self-reliant and help each other after a disaster such as an earthquake when it may take days for help to arrive.

Facebook should be a natural application to allow neighbors to build stronger blockwatches or SNAP teams. But that’s not really the case. First, as a individual, I don’t necessarily want to share the same kind of information about myself with my neighbors as I do with my “friends” or relatives. That’s a serious deficiency of Facebook today, where my boss or co-workers as well as my “friends” and “relatives” – and now “neighbors” all might be Facebook “friends”. When I think about posting “25 things about myself”, I keep all those “relationships” in mind.

Next, there needs to be some relatively easy yet not overwhelming way for groups of neighbors on Facebook to communicate with their local government, and their government to communicate back. We (the City) want to hear about suspicious activities and get tips about crime. But clearly no police department can investigate the hundreds or thousands of such reports which might flow in daily from a thousand blockwatches which could be established in the City of Seattle. A really useful Facebook-like application would have an easy way to correlate these reports and allow neighbors to verify issues and support each other or at least sort out the “wheat” (real problems) from the “chaff” of perceived problems.

This is an issue on a daily basis but is ten times more important during an emergency situation or a disaster, when first responders are overwhelmed and reports of problems multiply.

On the other hand, a Facebook-like social networking tool might allow local government to quickly dispel rumors and calm out-of-control fears during those same situations. And, if structured correctly, the tool could allow the police to educate residents about keeping themselves safe. A Facebook-like application might allow the Fire Department/Public Health to be aware of health problems in neighborhoods, for example (with privacy controls) help neighbors check on and support the elderly or infirm in our neighborhood.

There are dozens of other uses I’m not mentioning – encouraging people to form and manage Parks Department sports teams, or find out about recreation opportunities or to join their neighborhood council for graffiti reduction or a neighborhood clean-up campaign. All these activities build community.

A second great service with similar application is Twitter. Twitter’s great strength is its short, 140 character statements, and the fact that one can tweet from cell phones and i-phones as well as computers. The applications for local government are legion, ranging from reporting public safety hazards – streetlights out, traffic accidents, potholes – to gaining a rapid, accurate assessment of what is happening during a major incident such as a gas line explosion, earthquake, power outage, the rantings of a CTO, or a plane crash-landing in the Hudson River.

Similarly, the city or county might be able to “tweet” the status of streets or traffic or snow emergencies, thereby informing people of emergent situations. Government twitterers could also be definitive sources of information, helping to quell rumors. But I think that tweets from on-the-scene “civilians” can play a major role in rumor-quelling and information gathering in and of themselves.

The problem with Twitter is just that it is so overwhelming. Mayor Gavin Newsom started to tweet a few weeks ago, and rapidly gained over 100,000 followers. Hey folks, there’s no way he can adequately respond to the @replies of 100,000 people!

We need some good way to link official twitter streams and @replies to City government service request systems or 311 services so duplicate reports are managed and government adequately acknowledges and responds to reports and requests. While you’re at it, Twitter could become GPS-enabled. Basically, that means your “tweet” about a pothole would automatically carry your present location along with it. In turn, if that pothole is scheduled for an asphalt bath, local government could immediately respond “that will be handled next Tuesday by noon”. Fedex delivery promises meet the local transportation department.

As a subset of Twitter and Facebook, I should also mention YouTube and Flickr services, which could allow people to post video of crimes or public safety issues or problems (or, god-forbid, the beauty and “what’s right”) of their neighborhoods as feedback to their governments.

Finally, I need to mention social networking and improving constituent input for the policy and legislative process. As I said above, one advantage of cities/counties is that people and walk right in and talk to elected officials or speak at Council meetings. But rarely do most people actually talk to their local council members, unless there is an issue of overwhelming concern. Usually special interest groups and gadflies provide feedback, while the interests and opinions of the vast majority of constituents are unknown. Every City has a “gang of 50″ (or 10 or 100) who loudly give their opinions on almost any topic, while the ideas of the “silent majority of 500,000″ (in Seattle’s case) are largely unknown.

Facebook, Twitter, LimeSurvey, Google Moderator and similar tools might provide a way to receive and better rank such input. Google Moderator was used by the Obama administration to allow people to post ideas, and then vote on them. Because a userid/password was required, a single individual could not overwhelm the voting process. Tools like Delicious can also be used for ranking. Visualization tools like Microsoft Virtual Earth or Flickr could be used in mashups to build visuals and gain comments on neighborhood plans, capital projects or parks improvements.

All these tools are in their infancy. They are not statistically valid measures, or even voter-valid measures (voter-valid means “elections”) for use by officials in formulating policy. These tools can produce a tremendous amount of data and opinions, but sifting that data and analyzing it into useful information is far beyond the current state of these tools. And the sheer amount of feedback and requests which people can generate to their government will rapidly overwhelm our ability to respond or even acknowledge it.

As almost an afterthought, I should mention the crying need for a working verison of audio and video search as key tools required to sift through data and make it into more useful information for government action.

As a final note, these tools could deepen the “digital divide” – the chasm between those people who have access to computers and Facebook and Twitter, and those who do not (although – as a bright spot in this – almost everyone has a cell phone, and you can tweet from a cell phone).

I’m convinced these new social media tools will make stronger neighborhoods and communities. They will improve the social fabric and cohesiveness of our society. But these tools need a lot of improvements and enhancements.

I hereby challenge the Facebooks and Googles and Twitters of the world to make those improvements happen.

“Yes you can.”

- The “P-I Test”

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1863-2009

Technology projects scare the hell out of me. And I’m a Chief “Technology” Officer! Tech projects are full of risk – there are two dozen career-ending ways projects can go south.

But how do you measure and control risk?

Bill Schrier’s first project management rule is the “P-I Test”.

Now, what is “P-I”?  No – it is not “private investigator”.   I named the “P-I test” after Seattle’s beloved daily newspaper, the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Although I’ve been using the “P-I test” for years, the real Seattle Post Intelligencer publishes its last paper edition today, March 17, 2009, after 146 years of publishing.

The P-I test is simple: if a particular technology project goes south, where will it show up in the Seattle P-I – front page above the fold? Local section, page 5, beneath a mattress advertisement? Or will the failure (hopefully) be off every reporter’s radar, that is, no one cares?

One of the big differences between government technology work and private industry is the P-I test. Only very rarely will a failed technology project from a private company make the newspapers. Private companies care about stock price, shareholder value and “face”. So their project failures are buried deeper and darker than the bottom of a coal mine.

But in government, everything is (at least eventually and theoretically), subject to public disclosure. Successful projects (or any good news, for that matter) rarely sell newspapers.

And, in an environment where taxpayer money is at risk and voters give a verdict on government leadership every four years (i.e. by electing a Mayor or City Council members), mitigating the risk of failing the PI test is “job one”.

But when projects are successful, no one notices! Indeed, that is possibly the truest measure of a successful tech project – implementation without notoriety.

Determining how newspapers or reporters or the public will determine failure is notoriously hard. I’ve had relatively trivial projects make headlines, like a simple mistake of sending an e-mail message with all recipients’ e-mail addresses in the clear, or having a bit of difficulty getting a Wi-Fi hotspot to work right.

On the other hand, implementation of a new billing system in 2002 for the City of Seattle’s electric utility – a project a year late and $10 million over its budget of $28 million – probably played a part in the end of the electric utility superintendent’s career.

I have a whole set of “Schrier’s project management rules” including (2) “hire somebody who knows what they are doing” and (3) “make sure the butt of someone in the business is on the line”. And I’ll write about those rules in a future blog entry.

But the real bottom line is that – since I took over as CTO in 2003 – the City of Seattle has not had a single significant information technology project failure. And we’ve done more than $100 million in projects! Credit for this string of successes belongs, not to me, but rather to Mayor Greg Nickels, who demands accountability from every department director, and to the Project Management Center of Excellence in my department, a dedicated set of four professionals who track and demand accountability on over 30 projects-in-progress.

I’ll write more about the other “rules” in Schrier’s project management lexicon. In the meantime, I’ll be extraordinarily sad about the last paper edition of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, publishing today, and the loss of the namesake of my first and most important project management tool, the “P-I Test”.

- U.S.: Third World Broadband

Fiber Broadband

The new fedgov stimulus bill was signed into law and it contains $6.3 billion to expand broadband in the United States.  Hooray!  The problem of Internet access in the United States is solved, right?

Hah!  Not by a long-shot.

The U. S. is 15th in the world in broadband penetration.  And our primary technologies used for broadband are still cable modems and phone companies’ Digital Subscriber Link (DSL).  Cable modems give relatively high speed – 6 to 30 megabits per second, but that speed is shared among dozens or hundreds of households.  And it is typically much slower “upload” rather than download.
DSL gives a dedicated connection to each user, but still, typically, at relatively low speeds such as 1, 2 or 7 megabits per second, and, again, much slower on the upload rather than download.

Now, you might think “gee a million bits a second is really fast”.  Yes, yes it is, if you are reading static websites or doing e-mail.  But the future of the “net” is video – and not the grainy, jerky (no pun intended), YouTube variety, but HDTV.  And HDTV requires 6 megabits per second each way.  Read on …

Most developed nations deploying “broadband” are NOT doing cable modems or coax or DSL or copper.  They are deploying fiber optic cable to each household and business. S eoul and Tokyo have deployed.  Amsterdam and Paris and Venice and Singapore are deploying.

A few forward thinking cities in the United States are – on their own – also deploying fiber to each premise.  Lafayette, Louisiana, Clarksville and Chattanooga and Pulaski and Jackson Tennessee are examples.  (See a great map of fiber deployments here.)

The beauty of fiber broadband is really high speed – 100 megabits-per-second or more, and true, two-way, symmetric networking.  These are networks capable of downloading whole movies in HDTV in a few minutes.  Or networks which can stream two-way HDTV so that every home/business can be an HDTV studio or a video conference/telework center or give people a phenomenal new Internet gaming experience.

Think about working at home, and joining meetings via HDTV video conference with quality so great you can actually watch your co-workers sweating.  With HDTV quality you can actually participate!  Or how about having your high school kid join a virtual HDTV classroom for that college-credit advanced placement class.  Or having your grandparents join you and their grandkids for dinner – several nights a week – using HDTV.  Think of the difference in their lives (maybe NOT yours!).
These same networks can be used to manage the energy use and carbon footprint of homes and businesses and buildings.  These are networks capable of telehealth and telemedicine – visiting your nurse or doctor from home and they can SEE you in HDTV.

And what will the fedgov broadband stimulus deliver?  Well, there is $2.5 billion for broadband to “rural areas” via the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Services.

In terms of urban areas, a lot of the requirements are still to be determined before $4.7 billion in stimulus grants are awarded.  The funds need to be spent in unserved or underserved areas.  But what does that mean?  Compared to the fiber deployments being undertaken elsewhere in the world, most places in the United States – other than those served by Verizon FIOS – are “underserved” because we only have DSL and cable.  How fast is this proposed stimulus-funded broadband?  Is it 256kb per second, or a megabit or 100 megabits?  Is it symmetric or is a very slow upload speed acceptable?

The fedgov NTIA ( National Telecommunications Infrastructure Administration) has published in the Federal Register an extensive list of such questions for us all to answer to help design their program.

I certainly hope this great new stimulus package will not just try to extend DSL or cable Internet and call that “broadband”.  I hope the NTIA and Agriculture stay true to the Obama administration’s goals of being bold, inventive, and innovative.  And, with this broadband stimulus, they don’t try to make the United States a “better” third world nation in terms of broadband, but rather sponsor projects which show the way for the future of a truly high-speed, two-way-HDTV-networked world.

- Microsoft vs Open Source

This week is the Microsoft Public Sector CIO summit in that village named Redmond “across the pond” from Seattle. It’s also a week of continuing rotten economic news for public and private sector alike. In this environment, it sure is tempting to chuck Microsoft’s Office and web products and their complicated Enterprise and Select Agreements in favor of open source equivalents.

But you know what, the City of Seattle is not going to do that. Why?

Regular readers of this blog – if there are any – know I’m from Seattle and most of you know I’m a serious supporter of Microsoft software and products.

Clearly, I’m prejudiced.

Microsoft provides 40,000 jobs in my area, we have hundreds of thousands of shareholders (many of whom are also constituents) living here. We benefit from the tremendous wealth which has flowed from the around the world into Puget Sound to literally thousands of people, institutions and non-profits in the region. That wealth flows elsewhere, of course, too. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is doing wonderful things for schools and libraries across the nation and around the world. Microsoft research and technology centers are at many locations outside of Puget Sound – indeed there are about 50,000 Microsoft jobs OUTSIDE of Washington State.

On the other hand, all governments have budget pains. I got my first official budget cut memo three weeks ago (we’ve been doing actual budget cutting for at least 9 months). In the past I’ve had to lay off people based almost solely on seniority (or, rather,”juniority”). And I’ll undoubtedly be doing it again at some time in the future, if my job isn’t cut first!

Microsoft’s licensing costs are a large part of our budget, as are the maintenance and licensing costs we pay to Oracle, IBM, ESRI, and many other vendors. We do need to examine alternatives and options.

But I’m somewhat baffled that any CIO of a large government would seriously consider using open source software for our mission critical systems and services. This seems a little bit like using cell phones to dispatch police officers and firefighters or outsourcing your help desk to India. It will save money in the short term and work pretty well “most” of the time …

What is the advantage of using software from Microsoft – or Oracle, or ESRI, or Peoplesoft, or Hansen or … any major software vendor?

No business large or small would seriously consider writing its own financial management system, even though, with web services, database software and a spreadsheet program we could probably do it. We could probably cobble together a computer-aided-dispatch system or work management system from similar components.

The advantage of off-the-shelf or “shrink wrap” is that it is pre-written for us, the bugs are fixed, the upgrades are provided and – of increasing importance – security issues are handled and addressed.

Sure, you’ll say, Microsoft software is really prone to security flaws and attacks. Why is that? Because it is the most popular and ubiquitous software in the world! Its logical that any software which reaches significant market share will become a target for teams of hackers employed by terrorist-nation-states and crime syndicates. And the software for open source is on the web and freely available for such hackers to view!

Now, I understand that open source is supported by a developer community, and that’s good. But this developer community is nebulous. It is a difficult place to find when something serious goes wrong. Governments now rely heavily upon technology to provide critical services and interact with constituents. CIOs are responsible to elected officials keep that technology reliable and available. To depend upon an amorphous “community” of developers with no direct stake in your mission is a risky proposition.

Few businesses -other than local governments – have technology systems so important that people’s lives are actually in jeopardy when those systems fail.’ Sorry, I don’t want a “nebulous” community supporting my public safety and utility system.

Next, in an open source world, what do we do about application integration? Gee, almost every vendor writes their software to work with Microsoft Office, Exchange/Outlook and similar products. Even hardware vendors such as Nortel or Avaya or Motorola will make sure their hardware/software integrates with Microsoft. If there is an issue with the way PeopleSoft HRIS or Government Financials works with e-mail software or office software, they will always fix the Microsoft integration first. When a hot new product comes out – like BlackBerrys – the vendor will make sure it works with Microsoft software right out-of-the-gate.

Believe me, I know this first hand, since the City of Seattle was (still is) a GroupWise e-mail user. I had department directors knocking down my door to get BlackBerrys but the GroupWise version was released FOUR YEARS behind the Exchange/Outlook BlackBerry.

Furthermore, many of our applications now vitally depend upon web services for their user interface. Most of those applications vendors will not be officially supporting open source versions of web services anytime soon.

So, if we – government CIOs – move to using open source software, how do we handle the support and integration?

Answer: like everything else, we hire smart people. Highly proficient technical people who understand the bits and bytes of how this stuff works and can make it happen. Managers who can develop networks of people in other jurisdictions and in the open source community to fix the bugs, get the new releases and work with the integration. Skilled “open source” employees who are dedicated to our mission of “making technology” work for our government and the people we serve.

Well, where is our budget pressure? Yes, it is in revenues and budget dollars. But it is also in FTE – headcount. How many times have each of us been told to reduce headcount? What is the one number (again, besides raw dollars) which newspapers, the public and elected officials always watch and measure? It is “Number of Government Employees”. There is constant pressure – even in good times – to hold the line on headcount, if not actually reduce it.

And when we do reduce headcount, what positions are cut and who is laid off? It is always the last hired, which are usually the youngest, tech-saavy (at least on new software or open-source software), most connected employees.

With open source not only will we have to increase headcount, we’ll become vitally depend upon those new hires and that additional headcount to make our most critical and important applications work.

By making us MORE reliant on headcount and FTE, I think a move to open source software actually exacerbates our budget problems.

On the other hand, elected officials and those with budget oversight are much more likely to accept payments to our software and hardware maintenance vendors as necessary requirements. They all have personal experience with technology, if only their cell phone and desktop computers. They all understand the need to maintain cars and buildings and computers.

But how much of our core and critical work can really be “crowd sourced”? Do we really want to open-source computer-aided dispatch systems or records management systems which have personally identifiable data or arrest/911 call information? And I’m very nervous about open sourcing any part of SCADA (utility control), or traffic management or other control systems which are vital to our governments and targets for attack and compromise.

In these high-pressure, budget-constrained, headcount-hunting times, use of open source software appears to be a high-risk, low-return proposition at best, and a “government fails” newspaper headline at worst.

- Death to Newspapers

Print newspapers are dying. The evidence is everywhere and was recently highlighted on a Time Magazine cover.

Local government officials should be ecstatic about this event, right? Daily newspapers are much more likely to have negative coverage of local government’s activities. And if they do carry positive news, it is usually buried on page 16 of the “G” section.

David Horsey, wonderful cartoonist and columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, wrote an insightful February 15th column about the National Press Association’s recent awards dinner. That dinner was essentially a funeral dirge for newspapers. Note: Horsey himself may very well be out of a job at the end of March when his newspaper ceases printing.

Despite the plethora of negative coverage, I suspect most city and county officials are as quite upset about the difficulties of the daily papers. First, I do believe a lot of the daily newspapers’ coverage is negative, and I’ll cite some examples:
•   Gil Kerlikowske, Seattle’s long-time Police Chief, has been extraordinarily successful as chief. Seattle is adding cops to its force even now, in a serious recession. And our crime rate is at the lowest in memory. Kerlikowske is leaving for a cabinet-level post in the Obama administration. So what do the mainstream media write about when announcing his departure? The Mardi-Gras riots of 2001. An event which lies at the feet of a sleeping Mayor Paul Schell and his deputies.
•   Indeed, “crime” is the poster-child for negative reporting. Newspapers of all stripes regularly report the details of criminal acts and give neighborhood “activists” a forum to blast government about everything from failure to patrol the streets to accusations of racial profiling when such patrols are conducted too aggressively.
•   Streets and transportation are another favorite topic for reporting. Rarely (but sometimes) will you see an article about new sidewalks or bike paths or street paving projects which are finished, usually on time and under budget. Potholes, mistimed traffic lights, traffic delays are frequently highlighted however.
•   Although the City of Seattle invests at least $100 million annually in building and maintaining information technology systems, rarely are successful technology projects mentioned in a daily newspaper. Inaccurate reports about high electricity bills from a new computerized billing system helped Seattle City Light’s former superintendent Gary Zarker lose his job. And the one headline I’ve received in five years as CTO is about a botched e-mailing to 2000 cable television customers (which was, indeed, the fault of my department).

In contrast, coverage in community newspapers and in the trade press (e.g. for me, Government Technology Magazine, Network World, Computerworld) is considerably more positive. Perhaps that’s because those media outlets have small staffs who rely more on government for press releases and interviews to create their content. Perhaps they have a readership and advertising base which desires and reads news which is more informative, less “sensational”.

Given this, am I happy about the decline and impending death of many newspapers? Absolutely not. The investigative reporting which newspapers have funded has not only improved government, but also highlighted issues with private companies such as John Thain’s infamous $1.3 million office remodel while running his company Merrill Lynch into the ground. Newspapers have changed the direction of the nation from high-profile issues such as the Watergate Investigation and the botched war in Iraq to exposes such as toxic medicines and failed cancer drug trials. Just have a look at the past 20 years of Pulitzer prizes for more examples.

Is there a business model which will allow the local daily newspaper to survive? Time’s Walter Isaacson suggests a possibility in his February 5th article – essentially having readers pay for content on the web just as they pay for content today by subscription or at the newsstand. I agree with Isaacson that the “advertising” model is flawed. Not only does relying solely on advertising lead to ethical conflicts, but it also drives the need for sensational and negative reporting I mentioned above. I’m not sure that a micropayment model will work, and I have no other bright ideas to offer.

But I do hope newspaper reporters continue to be there to call me – and other local officials – even if they are writing a negative story!