….::: VOX POPULI :::….

eComm 2010: San Francisco

Posted by Mark Headd under General Discussion

Next week, an event is being held in San Francisco to discuss the future of communications. The Emerging Communications Conference & Awards (eComm) will bring together top executives from communications companies, innovators, academics, hackers and others to discuss “what’s next?” in telecom, mobile and Internet communications.

I’m thrilled and honored to be speaking at this event - I’ll be talking about how the Open Data and Gov 2.0 movements are changing the way that people communicate with their governments. But I’m even more thrilled to be an attendee at this event.

The speakers list is like a who’s who of the telecom world, and I’m looking forward to hearing many of the presentations. (After eComm Europe in Amsterdam last year, I read some of the presentations that were given and was mightily impressed with their quality and focus.)

If you’re in the San Francisco area, or are someone who is passionate about the changing landscape of communication technology, this is an event you should attend.

Hope to see you there.

Classic Dilbert

Posted by Mark Headd under General Discussion

Classic Dilbert

Posted by Mark Headd under General Discussion

Longevity for Open Data and Gov 2.0

Posted by Mark Headd under General Discussion, Open Government

People that work for Gartner are starting to use “hype cycle” and “Gov 2.0″ in the same sentence (or rather, sentences that are really really close together). There is also a thoughtful piece on GovLoop examining which aspects of Gov 2.0 are on the right track and the wrong track.

I’ve raised similar questions about Gov 2.0 efforts in the past, and the need to tie them to quantifiable performance measures.

With all of the excitement around the country and around the world focused on opening public data and Gov 2.0, proponents need to take steps to tie these efforts back to the core mission of the governments and agencies that they serve. If open data and Gov 2.0 are a fad, then their 15 minutes are probably almost up — the longevity of these efforts and initiatives will be a function solely of their ability to enhance the performance of governments.

Efforts that support open government data and greater use of alternative communication channels (like social media) for communicating with constituents are fast approaching an important tipping point. The initial attraction of these efforts is that they are seen as forward thinking and cutting edge — they are inherently attractive because of their “newness.” But when social media penetration has reached the point that even the local dogcatcher is on Twitter, its natural for people in government (particularly those that don’t live and breath this stuff) to start asking: “What’s the point?”

Skepticism is probably most imminent for open government data projects because they typically require some investment of staff time and other resources. These efforts need to be carefully crafted to ensure a tangible relationship to the underlying mission of the governments or agencies undertaking them. How does opening government data help realize the goals of an agency? How does opening government data make the job of government cheaper or more effective?

These kinds of questions can be difficult (even offensive) to address when there is a strong belief in open government data as a principle. Nevertheless, if open government data projects and Gov 2.0 are to be around longer than 15 minutes, these are the types of questions that need to be answered.

Philly IT Chief Talks Vision / Savings

Posted by Mark Headd under General Discussion

Government Technology has an interesting piece with City of Philadelphia CIO Allen Frank.

Frank lays out his vision for the City of Philadelphia, and also speaks in detail about how it will be funded - his ambitious plan depends almost entirely on savings that will teased out of existing IT operations:

The biggest piece of low-hanging fruit, in terms of cost savings is consolidation, of course. ‘We are consolidating IT in a very careful way, but it will drive down costs immediately,’ Frank explained. With almost 750 servers in nearly 20 data centers, Frank figures he can wring major efficiencies out of the status quo. Some of the so-called data centers reside in departments with as few as five servers, but have their own IT staff, including a server administrator. ‘In a best-practice scenario, I should be able to manage 100 servers with just one guy,’ he said.

I was also impressed to hear Frank talk about the potential of virtualization technologies for public sector entities like Philadelphia (this is something I’ve talked about before on this blog):

In addition, Frank wants to ramp up the use of virtualization, which will let the city get more use out of the servers it keeps and run multiple applications from different departments. The days are over when each city department needs to have its own servers housed in its own building.

I couldn’t agree more. Here’s hoping that more governments take the same approach to identifying savings in their existing IT infrastructures, and reinvest the savings in products and practices that will improve service delivery.

Joining a New Team

Posted by Mark Headd under General Discussion

People that know me (and probably some that don’t) know that I’m passionate about telephony systems and applications, particularly in how they are used by governments. As the most ubiquitous communications device in the world, the ordinary telephone is one of the most important channels that governments have access to for communicating with and providing services to citizens and taxpayers.

For the past few years, I’ve been working as a consultant to a company called Tele-Works whose core business is helping governments utilize telephony applications to efficiently provide services and information to their citizens. Tele-Works is packed to the brim with smart, passionate people who have the same commitment I do to helping governments successfully utilize telephony applications to improve service delivery. There is a palpable sense within the company for the desire to develop well built applications - applications that perform well, are easily maintained and provide real value for customers. It’s a great place to work, full of enthusiastic and skilled developers committed to building standards-based telephony applications that utilize the latest technologies.

So I’m happy to say that I will now be going legit - joining Tele-Works as a full time employee, effective today!

I’ll still be blogging and Tweeting about things that interest me, and these musings will continue to reflect only my views and opinions. But I’m going to doing these things with a renewed focus on what really excites me - telephone systems and applications, VoIP, emerging standards, new technologies for building IVR applications: anything and everything phone-related!

I’m excited about joining a great company like Tele-Works, and to have a renewed focus on the things I really enjoy working with.

Bad Week for Public Sector CIOs

Posted by Mark Headd under General Discussion

In Delaware, the past week saw a State Auditor report released that showed inappropriate use of state credit cards by the former State CIO and several of his top staff members.

Now, in Washington, newly appointed federal CIO Vivek Kundra has taken a leave of absence after FBI agents raided his former office (a week after he left) and arrested an office employee in a bribery scandal.

An altogether bad week for public sector CIOs. If the way that governments use technology is to be reformed, public sector CIOs will simply have to do better than this.

What a shame.

Spread the Love

Posted by Mark Headd under General Discussion, Standards, Twitter

Is YouYube getting preferential treatment from governments?

Frederic Lardinois, of ReadWriteWeb, argues that when it comes to posting videos online governments should spread the love:

Lately, there has been a trend for government agencies and elected officials to put their videos up on YouTube. While we commend them for doing so, we can’t help but wonder if this is, in the end, a positive trend. After all, while YouTube is definitely the most popular video sharing site, it is definitely not the only one.

He’s right. I’ve made this same argument about governments using Twitter. There are other microblogging sites out there, and governments need to make sure that their use of new channels to communicate with citizens (whether through video or microblogging) is not targeted to one specific company.

Some might argue that using multiple video sharing or microblogging sites is just adding work. Don’t underpayed and overburdened public employees have enough to do?

If this is the argument, then I’d respond by saying that the use of these services should be automated — almost all of them (certainly any of them worth using) have an API that makes it easy to develop scripts or applications that can significantly cut down the time and effort required to post content. YouTube has one. So does Twitter.

Social networking platforms are becoming the norm for government communication and outreach. Its time for governments to get smart about their use of these services.

Automate your processes. Use the APIs. Spread the love.

Federal Government Goes Social

Posted by Mark Headd under General Discussion, Twitter

A couple of pretty significant social networking developments this week relating to the federal government.

First, YouTube joined with members of Congress this week to launch SenateHub and HouseHub which aggregate YouTube channels for members of Congress. Unfortunately, neither of my Senators (one of whom is about to become VP) has a YouTube channel. Booo!

Also, the outgoing Adminstrator of FEMA, David Paulson, held a Twitter “media conference” on Monday in which members of the public were allowed to submit questions and get answers via Twitter. This is a neat idea, and a very novel use of Twitter. I wish others would follow Administrator Paulson’s lead.

All this, and its only Tuesday…

Easier Doesn’t Always Mean Better

Posted by Mark Headd under General Discussion

I’ve been doing lots of research lately into tools, languages and platforms aimed at making the process of building voice applications easier.

These new tools offer extensions to existing programming languages like PHP and JavaScript, or entirely new XML-based languages for building voice applications. Each of these new approaches has some appeal and each achieves (to some degree) the goal of making voice applications “easier” to build.

Still, these new tools raise some issues that may be reason for concern as well.

Before the advent of VoiceXML, languages and tools used to build IVR systems were vendor-specific. No standards existed that would allow IVR systems built for one platform to be easily and efficiently ported to another.

Certainly there are instances where designing an IVR for a specific platform may rank as a higher priority than making the application portable (i.e., if a platform supports a specific feature that is critical to the application). But having a standard language for building IVRs is good for developers too - if you can learn to build IVRs for one platform, your skills will be portable to other platforms (and to other jobs).

Building good IVR systems is hard. Really hard. Examples of poorly developed systems abound. This is one of the reasons that satisfaction with IVR systems is generally low, and why projects like GetHuman and Fonolo have developed.

But the direct relationship between difficulty and quality isn’t reserved to IVR applications. Building good visual web applications is really hard as well:

How many web applications have you seen where the developer(s) did not think about important issues like accessibility, scalability, security, etc.? How many development projects have you inherited or been involved with that contained poorly written, poorly documented or just straight up broken code? How many stories have you seen that described a web site or application that suffered from a critical security hole that compromised personal information?

I don’t think the answer to raising the satisfaction levels with IVR systems is to lower the barrier of entry (in terms of developer skill and experience) for creating them.

Is it harder for more junior developers to create sophisticated, secure, well built voice applications? Yes. And maybe it should be.