Re-imagining e-Government

On the demand side, he says, “Twenty-four percent of Minnesotans—the boomers who drove technology in corporate America and corporate Minnesota over the last 20 years—are saying, ‘If I can get on line on a Sunday afternoon and do my banking, or buy an airline ticket at 10:30 at night, why can’t I do my business with the government then?’

“Then you have the remainder—Gen X, Gen Y, and younger. They’ve all grown up with technology. They’re putting pressure on the demand side in terms of how these services are delivered. So if government operations aren’t de-signed to fit the outcomes that the coming generations are expecting, there’s a major crisis.”

On the supply side, Khanna says that 47 percent of Minnesota’s state government workers will be eligible for retirement by 2014, and budget projections show that it will be all but impossible to replace each worker. “The convergence of those two factors—the ever-increasing expectations coupled with the brain drain—is a strange condition that really crunches the operations of state government,” he says.

Minnesota is hardly alone here. The retirement of aging populations in the United States, Europe, and Japan means that getting the most from every government dollar is becoming a top priority. According to Boosting Government Productivity, a 2004 report published in the online business journal McKinsey Quarterly, “Governments typically respond to such fiscal pressures by reducing the level or growth rate of benefits, raising taxes, or cutting public services for the rest of the population. But they have another, of-ten overlooked option: enhancing public-sector productivity could take the sting out of the hard fiscal choices our societies will need to make.”

Clearly, information technology is key to the solution. Currently, it’s part of the problem.

Federal at the State Level

Forty years ago, private and public entities alike were beholden to mainframe systems that stored all data centrally. But in the 1980s, the rise of the personal computer and specialized software gave state agencies and departments more autonomy—but also more overlap. Currently, the majority of the 66 Minnesota agencies participating in the Drive to Excellence initiative have their own IT departments. While the state’s Office of Technology—predecessor to the Office of Enterprise Technology—worked with the agencies via its centrally managed mainframe and telecommunications infrastructures, it operated primarily in a supporting role for the agencies’ IT projects.

Plans for the Office of Enterprise Technology are more ambitious—to be the overseer of the state’s growing IT needs. “It’s not uncommon that different agencies have the same issues, and technology can help them manage a mutual function or solve particular issues together,” asserts Khanna.

With developments such as networked applications becoming the norm in large enterprises, Khanna believes that the time is right for departments to start sharing wherever possible. His office is pursuing what’s called a federated model. In IT, a federated model is a structure where certain business processes and applications are shared and standardized across organizational boundaries, putting each function into one of three categories:

• The agency layer, containing functions used exclusively by one organization within the government.

• The enterprise layer, consisting of services shared by more than one agency, but not across all agencies. This might be the most crucial level of the federated model, for it’s here that agencies will be asked to work together on technologies used for common management functions, such as hiring and procurement.

• The infrastructure layer, which includes basic functions used at all levels and areas of government, such as Internet and word-processing programs.

Behind all this is the notion of efficient consolidation. Take licensing. Minnesota processes nearly 700 kinds of professional licenses through more than 40 departments and agencies. The Drive to Excellence initiative seeks to implement a one-stop portal for state-issued licenses and permits, in the process combining or eliminating redundant license applications.