Notes from a City CIO

I'm shocked, SHOCKED, to learn ...

2008-12-13T06:15:54Z

... that an senior official of the Bush Administration would abuse his power, withhold information from the public and members of his agency, and attempt to manipulate data and information to advance his personal agenda, perhaps directing excess payments of up to $100 million to private companies.

Or, to continue the parallels with the 1942 movie classic Casablanca, "play it again, W". (Yeah, I know the line "play it again Sam" was never in the movie!)

I'm not referring to the bungled management of Iraq in 2003-4 or the vast sums of money funneled in no-bid contracts to companies like Halliburton. I'm referring to the majority staff report of the United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce, released this week, and its primary subject, the management of the Federal Communications Commission by Chair Kevin Martin.

My comment: DUH. The report is NOT news to those of us in local government who've had to deal with the FCC Chairman and the outfall of a few of his decisions over the past eight years.

Exhibit 1: Congress authorized the removal of UHF television channels 52 through 69, freeing 108 megahertz of spectrum in the 700 megahertz (MHz) band for other uses. This spectrum was really valuable because it has good penetration of walls and into buildings. The FCC auctioned most of this spectrum to wireless telecommunications companies with the money going into the federal treasury.

About 10 megahertz was reserved for public safety use: police, fire, and emergency medical services. Traditionally, cities and counties and regions have licensed and used spectrum allocated to them to build radio systems for public safety and general government. Spectrum allocated only for voice radio systems, that is. We expected the same kinds of licensing rules to apply to this valuable new chunk of spectrum, which could be used for "broadband" - essentially wireless Internet. Such spectrum could send building maps to firefighters, video from crime scenes, patient telemetry from medic units.

Under Martin, however, even that small piece of the 700 MHz spectrum was ripped from the hands of local government and was to be auctioned into the control of private companies. Only in the last few weeks - since the November 4th election and impending changes at the FCC - has this plan been derailed.

Exhibit 2: Martin demonstrated an active prejudice on behalf of telecommunications carriers by altering the rules for cable franchising. Under the Constitution, states, cities and counties control their streets and rights-of-way. Under the Telecomm Act of 1996, cities and counties franchise the companies who string cables on poles in those rights of way and then offer cable television and related services to consumers. The franchises funnel revenues and services (e.g. Internet access and cable TV at community centers) to the local governments.

But the FCC, under Martin, changed the rules - cities and counties are now forced to grant cable franchises within 90 days, but ONLY to telecommunications carriers who already operate within the jurisdiction. Anyone else wanting a cable franchise goes through the traditional process!

Under Kevin Martin, the FCC's mantra apparently was "no telecommunications carrier left behind". And cities and counties lost the ability to manage their own rights-of-way and airwaves on behalf of the public safety and welfare.

Certainly the FCC has done a lot of good work regulating the airwaves, telecommunications and cable, and there are a lot of talented FCC staff who are dedicated to serving the public.

They deserve a Chair of the Commission with similar values and ethical leadership.

You-Ah-Zee (UASI), Bureaucracy and Terror

2008-12-05T06:15:54Z

This week I was, in turn, amused, maddened and fasincated by disaster. I had the opportunity to do both leadership and followership as officials from the "Seattle Urban Area" considered projects to submit for grant funding from the fedgov Department of Homeland Insecurity.

This whole process is a look into the little-known culture of "homeland insecurity" which has blossomed over the last 7 years.

Let me say, right at the beginning, that September 11th, 2001, was a horrific event and a real wake-up call for the United States. We've been taught the same lesson we learned on December 7th, 1941 - two huge oceans do not make for a nation secure from the enemies of our way of life. My somewhat humorous tone in this blog is not meant to make light of the serious threats we face.

But what is our major response? Pretty typically, we create a giant bureaucracy, slosh a lot of political rhetoric and some money around, and get prepared to fight ... the last war.

The major bureaucracy is, of course, the Department of Homeland Security, or Insecurity, as I've named it, because it heads an industry and set of programs based upon the fear and feelings of insecurity of the American People. DHS is really a myriad of individual bureaucracies and programs, sometimes working at cross-purposes and often duplicating effort.

But I stray from the subject - the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI), usually pronounced You-Ah-Zee. In 2009 about $1.8 billion will be granted to urban areas through a series of programs as shown here. The UASI grants are made to "urban areas", a carefully defined (by the fedgov) set of metropolitan areas which share vulnerabilities and threats. The "Seattle Urban Area" is the City of Seattle, its surrounding King County, and the counties to the north and south. The Seattle urban area is eligible for $11 million, more or less, of that $1.8 billion pie.

Now $11 million may sound like a lot of money, and it is. But think about the Seattle Urban Area - a population of 3 million people, two major ports (Seattle and Tacoma) into which ships with nuclear bombs or bioterrorism agents or chemical weapons could sail, three major military bases (Naval Station Everett, McChord Air Force Base, Fort Lewis), and vulnerability to a potential magnitude 8.0 earthquake. We probably have 12,000 cops and firefighters (Seattle alone has 2,200), each of which needs radios and hazmat gear and training. All of a sudden, $11 million doesn't sound like a lot, and it isn't.

Its also a little amazing that places like Vermont and Wyoming - not exactly your typical terrorist or disaster targets - get $6 million each. But that's the reality of politics in our 2009 world with two senators from every state and a lot of dollars to be allocated.

Each year, a group of officials from the emergency management, law enforcement, firefighting, public health and technology disciplines - the officials responsible to prepare the region for disasters and terrorist events - get together to consider projects for UASI funding. We did that this week in the Seattle Urban Area. We have a strategy to guide us but it is still a give-and-take to determine which projects are most importnat to the region.

I lead the subgroup of technical and operational staff responsible to consider and prioritize interoperable communications projects. These are the networks and systems which allow first, second and third responders to communicate with each other and with their dispatch centers to prepare for and respond to disasters large and small. They include handheld and vehicle-mounted radios, computer and telephone systems, and fiber optic networks.

Small disasters are the ones which occur every day - such as when I fell off my bicycle, shattered my arm and called 911 for help. The large ones are the fires, landslides, earthquakes, and (God forbid) terrorist events which may afflict our region.

Finding projects which prepare us for those disasters and which fit into $11 million is daunting. In the past we've procured fireboats and helicopters and personal protective equipment. We've found money for training our responders, buying radios and for public outreach and disaster preparedness campaigns. It is hard work to winnow 100 proposed projects and $40 million in needs down to a dozen or so projects with $11 million or so, but we mostly did it this week. In future blog entries I'll talk about some of those projects - the ones I can reveal without making us more vulnerable to terrorists (and that is most of them).

In the meantime, I'm just proud of the emergency managers, fire and police officials, and technical staff I was able to spend time with this week, prioritizing projects to keep the Seattle urban area safe.

And I'm tired!

A City Tech Thanksgiving

2008-11-26T18:06:59Z

As many of us sit down to the average American Thanksgiving 3000 calorie meal tomorrow, we'll be in uncertain and frightening times. But I'm also counting my technology blessings, and here are a few:

1. I'm thankful for the generosity of the people of Seattle. We've asked a lot of them over the years, and they have consistently voted to tax themselves to give our city and region an improved quality of life, for examples:

• A completely re-built and remodeled Seattle Public Library system, a beautiful central library and 26 branches, including wi-fi in every branch and 1000 computers for public use, all financed with a $196 million levy. This week we have a wonderful new City Librarian in Susan Hildreth, coming to us from the California State Library.

• A new light-rail line from downtown to the airport, set to open in 2009, and a just-passed bond $17.9 billion measure to extend that line by 34 miles over the next 20 years

• A $167 million fire facility levy which, although strapped for cash in times of rising costs, has already seen us build a new state-of-the-high-tech-art emergency operations center and fire alarm center , a new fireboat and a joint training facility. The technology systems supporting Seattle Fire help them achieve an average four minute response time to calls, and you can even see those calls in real-time on our website.

• Note: although I've highlighted the investments above, Seattle voters also have approved housing levies, parks levies and funding for other projects to improve our quality of life.

2. I'm thankful for wonderful, dedicated, employees in the City of Seattle and especially those 600 folks who run our information technology across multiple departments. Throw out your old ideas about clock-watching government bureaucrats pushing paper from the in-box to the out-box. These high-tech folks run the electronic mail systems and internal phone network and electronic payment systems and customer service systems which make our City government a truly 24 hour-a-day, 7 day-a-week business. And we have some unique twists such as an online directory of almost all employees to help customers cut through the organization - not many other companies or governments have that: . I've blogged before about how diligently and competently these folks respond to disasters large and small, e.g. the 108 degree data center, , Dial Tone comes from God , and Nervous System of a City Government .

3. I'm thankful for an award-winning City of Seattle web portal www.seattle.gov , twice winning the top city web portal from the Center for Digital government . And also for the Seattle Channel, winner of both Emmys and back-to-back 2007 and 2008 excellence in government programming awards from NATOA

4. Finally, I'm thankful for great and supportive leadership such as Mayor Greg Nickels who recognizes the efficiency and effectiveness which technology brings to City government by proposing significant technology improvements even in the upcoming lean budget years. And Seattle's City Council supported that vision by passing the technology portions of his 2009-10 budget with few changes - and those changes were improvements such as a Technology Matching Fund increase and a Citizen Engagement Portal.

Of course this sounds self-serving, because Greg's my boss and the Council holds the purse strings. But there are hard, solid, initiatives in this budget: a new customer relationship management system, an Outlook/Exchange replacement for an aging e-mail system, an electronic parking guidance system, outage and asset management systems for Seattle City Light, and much more.

5. And, in terms of leadership, we techies can also turn to the federal government and see a new President who knows the importance of broadband and technology to the economy and to making the Federal Government more effective and in touch with people. Everyone in the United States can rejoice and give thanks for that.

You may think I'm a bit Pollyannaish in this blog, and I am, because it is a time to give thanks. But I promise my next blog will be a bit different, as I give you my Recipe for making Technology Turkeys.

When it's 108 degrees - in your Data Center

2008-11-24T04:05:52Z

November in Seattle is always cool and rainy and sometimes stormy - windstorms, that is. Seattle's all time high temperature - for any day of the year - is 100 degrees. That all time high is, of course, outside. But it reached 108 degrees here on Sunday November 16th. Inside a data center. The City of Seattle's data center.

To make a short blog entry even shorter, I'll skip to the root cause: a failed power breaker on a pump for the domestic water supply to the building housing the data center. The water supply flows to CRAC ("crack" or computer room air conditioning) units which, in turn, cool the data center. For HomeCity Security reasons, I won't reveal the actual location of the data center, but let's just say it is in a downtown 60 story skyscraper which also houses about 3500 office workers during the week. The problem started about noon and was fixed at about 8:00 PM.

The data center holds about 500 servers, storage systems and other equipment. We shut down a lot of servers and many services starting almost immediately. Nevertheless the temperature in the data center rose to that toasty 108 degrees, setting a new record high (sort of) for Seattle.

So why is this notable? For two reasons: the problem and the response.

In terms of the "problem", let me assure you (especially if you live in Seattle) that cooling problems like this will be rare to non-existent in the future. Years ago we installed a one megawatt generator for backup power. This year we've been working a project to install "dry coolers". These aren't really "dry", but the water cooling the data center will flow in a "closed loop" between the new coolers and the center, so we'll no longer be dependent on external water or power supplies. Unfortunately, the dry coolers don't come online until January, which is why we went to 108 degrees last Sunday.

But there's a more general issue here - every city and county government has data centers and servers and vital information. Every area of the country is subject to some sort of a disaster and every government needs to have a backup and recovery plan.

But for what disaster should we prepare?

Here in Seattle, everyone is concerned about the "big one" - a magnitude 8.0 earthquake. While we need to be ready for an major earthquake, we have about one of those "big ones" every 300 years. Much more likely are disasters like last Sunday - a failure of water and cooling, a "meltdown" if you will (non-radioactive, however!). Or perhaps the disaster will be the opposite - too much water from a broken pipe, and a flood drowning those servers. Or - and this also happens in computer centers - a fire followed by (drum roll), a flood as the fire suppression system kicks in. Should we have a plan for "the big one", that earthquake? Sure. But most of our disaster preparation effort should plan for the much more probable disaster of fire and water.

Finally, any disaster response plan has one element which is vastly more important than any other: people. And, on November 14th, the "people" (employees) of the City of Seattle and its Department of Information Technology performed splendidly. A dozen IT professionals showed up on site within two hours (despite interference from the traffic around a nearby Seahawks football game). The computer center manager - a 44 year employee and true hero Ken Skraban - was on site and immediately in charge. Two employees set up an IT operations center with an incident commander and support staff. Several responded to the data center and shut down servers in an orderly, pre-planned, color coded (red-green-orange-yellow) fashion, with the most critical servers (for example "Blackberry" support) staying up continuously. Server administrators from every major department in City government responded on site.

And when the crisis was past and cool water was again flowing to the "crack" units, those same folks brought all services up in an orderly fashion. And there was not a single call to the help desk on Monday morning as a result of our unanticipated "summer" high.

Disasters happen. Careful planning and skilled, trained staff will always mitigate their effects.

Dial Tone comes from God

2008-11-19T06:15:54Z

Or so says the manager of telephone services for the city of Seattle, Stephanie Venrick. What she's referring to, of course, is that when you pick up a telephone, the dial tone is ... well ... there. You don't think about it, you just dial. On the other hand, mobile phone users can't take connectivity for granted. Cell signals come and go, even with companies who promise "more bars in more places" (and they are not talking about building prisons!) Yet we expect the old-fashioned "wired" telephone to deliver dial tone and connect phone calls day-in, day-out, without fail.

But providing that dial tone is not easy. Stephanie manages a group of about 30 skilled technology people who build, install and maintain the internal city of Seattle phone system of 23 large switches, more than 100 smaller switches, 11,000 phones, 7,000 voicemail boxes and other services such as interactive voice response (Press "1" for this, press "2" for that).

At first thought, you might ask "why does a city government have its own phone system?" But, as a matter of fact, most large organizations, corporations and public agencies have their own internal telephone systems because it is cheaper and more reliable to operate such systems than to procure services from a public telecommunications company.

For a city government, it's also a case of disaster preparedness. The public phone system gets overloaded during earthquakes and on Mothers' Day and, even, gee, when the Seattle Mariners' tickets for the World Series go on sale (as if that will ever happen!) Especially during disasters such as terrorist incidents or earthquakes, the public cell and land-line networks are vastly overloaded. With the city operating its own telephone network, city functions and facilities can still operate and coordinate our internal response to the disaster.

Doing all of this should be easy, right? After all, it is basically two telephone sets with copper wire in between -- just one step up from the two-tin-cans and string phones we played with as kids?

Alas, just as the two-tin-cans toy for kiddos has been replaced with the high-tech Xbox 360 and Wii, so has delivering basic dial tone been replaced with the marvels of technologies such as fiber-optic cable, voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP), and complex automatic call distribution systems.

Today large portions of the city's phone system rides on the city government's internal Internet, traveling on the same pathways as public safety radio transmissions and computer-to-computer traffic.

While more complicated, this set of networks gives us quite a bit more flexibility because the city government owns and manages its own services. With the IVR (interactive voice response), for example, city customers can get the balance on their electric bills, or pay their water bills or even pay a parking ticket with a credit card. We can highly customize distribution of phone calls, so that customers rapidly reach a city employee/specialist to answer specific questions or render service.

Putting telephone, data, radio all on the same fiber network saves taxpayers a lot of money when you are connecting 11,000 employees to 600,000 Seattle residents scattered across 142 square miles (40 percent of that being water) with many lakes, rivers, hills and a ship canal to provide additional challenges to making this one of the most "wired" cities.

Yes, Dial Tone does come from God, or at least the city of Seattle, but only with the help of a lot of angels in the guise of the city employees named "Telephone Services."

P.S. The city of Seattle is one of the very few governments or corporations to put a phone directory of almost all its employees on the Web. Click here to see it.

Two Way Presidential Debates

2008-11-15T07:51:14Z

A highlight of the recent Presidential campaign were the three Presidential debates. In my neighborhood, our good friends Teresa and Joe (the marketeer, not the plumber) sponsored debate parties, which were a great neighborhood-building event. We crowded into their living room around the big-screen HDTV, and alternately cheered and cried as each debate proceeded. We made dozens of pithy and funny comments (all our comments were both pithy and funny, although some were in questionable taste). We suggested pointed comebacks for the candidates. We had fun. We were that most basic unit of democracy - neighbors and friends. The 2008 debates pioneered new uses of technology. In at least one primary debate, questions came from YouTube. MySpace and MTV hosted one-candidate town halls with questions submitted via instant messaging and e-mail. Twitter was used extensively, I'm sure, for debate comments. And with the 140 character limit, I'm sure the comments were concise, if not pithy! CNN even tried to gauge voter sentiment, second-by-second during the debate, via a set of graphs powered by three groups of captive voters, a tactic which was interesting but disparaged by most observers. Televised debates have been a staple of presidential campaigns since the infamous 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates, the first of which was lost by Tricky Dick's five o'clock shadow. In these "hi-tech" debates of 2008, I see the seeds of an interesting technology future for our still-young democracy. My initial idea is a relatively simple one, but hard to realize. My friends Joe and Teresa have a widescreen HDTV. My household has an HDTV. With the digital transition in February, 2009, even more households will have digital or HD televisions. A few months ago I purchased an HD-camcorder at Radio Shack for $200. I just use it to take video of my three-year old, but suppose I hooked it up to the HDTV, and suddenly we had a two-way HD video stream? And we did that in every household. And suddenly, instead of having a Democracy where we observe a debate, we could participate in it. Instead of having hundreds of people drive (polluting the air) to a town hall meeting to interact with candidates, we'd have a virtual town hall with HD video feeds from households all over the City (Think "second life", but with real faces instead of avatars.) Now, clearly that won't work with a Presidential debate with 70 million households watching. But there are a LOT of elected officials in this country. There are debates for Governor, Mayor, City Council and even Sewer Commissioner. Constituents are interested and sometimes quite passionate about these races, and may be quite interested in participating from their living rooms. Of course two-way HDTV requires bandwidth. A LOT of bandwidth. And present DSL or coaxial cable networks won't support that sort of two-way bandwidth from dozens or hundreds of houses in a neighborhood at once. Fiber-to-the-premise will be needed, and I suspect that will still be somewhat rare for some time to come, unless you are lucky enough to live in a place served by Verizon FIOS or a municipal utility such as Lafayette, Louisiana, or Clarksville, Tennessee. Those cities will have a bit more democracy than the rest of us, I guess. 1960 was the year of debate cosmetics (five o'clock shadow), 2000 was the year of the candidate websites, 2004 was Howard Dean's year of Internet organizing, and 2008 was the year of IM and twittering. I'm not sure what new technology will take 2012 by storm, but I'm certain that eventually two-way HDTV will make us all active participants in elections.

The Digital Fireside Chat

2008-11-10T05:23:05Z

President-elect Barack Obama made groundbreaking use of technology to win the 2008 election. Can he now use technology to lead the nation and communicate with the nation's people in new, life-changing ways? I think so, and I think this foreshadows new ways for Governors, Mayors and other elected officials to lead and communicate.

On November 9th's ABC program "This Week" (George Stephanopoulos), the discussion turned to our previous major national economic crisis - the Depression. Our current situation has some parallels to that in 1932 - new leadership in a nation facing an economic crisis of frightening dimensions. As we know, the New Deal never really "fixed" the Great Depression - it took World War II to do that. But 1932 is still remarkable for the terrific leadership of Franklin Roosevelt: fresh ideas, a new outlook, and a new way of communicating with people, including Roosevelt's famous radio "fireside chats". "This Week's" commentators mentioned the possibility of "digital fireside chats" from our new President.

Barack Obama, with a tech saavy and skilled team, used the web and Internet to identify and mobilize up to ten million supporters, of whom at least three million financially contributed to the campaign. According to Time Magazine, the campaign raised $150 million in September, 75% of it online (not me, incidentally, I contributed by paper check!).

According to wired-dot-com, volunteers used Obama's website to organize a thousand phone-banking events in the last week of the race -- and 150,000 other campaign-related events over the course of the campaign. The campaign also created myBarackObama.com, essentially a social-networking site with 35,000 affinity groups - the site has some 1.5 million accounts. These social networks were also used to fight many of the false rumors and McCain robo-calls. The campaign even announced Senator Joseph Biden as Obama's running mate via text message.

Bill Greener, a Republican consultant from Alexandria, quoted in the Seattle Times, said: "We are getting crushed in early voting and the efficient use of technology. It's a huge deal when the other side is text-messaging to cell phones while our side is hoping we've got a good e-mail list."

One surprising part of that statement is this: a "good e-mail list" is now taken for granted in campaigning - and it falls short! Just three presidential elections ago, e-mailing was an esoteric technology only used by a small fraction of the population.

Researchers at Princeton and the University of Michigan conducted a 2006 study and concluded that a text message delivered by cell phone could boost voter turnout among young people by 4 percent. While that might not sound like much, Obama's margin of victory was just 6%.

Will the Obama campaign now shut down MyBarackObama.com and take its database of mobile phone numbers, e-mail addresses and supporter names and just put them on a backup tape and send them to Iron Mountain for storage until the next campaign? I doubt it! More likely they will be used to communicate the new President's message on programs and change, and turn out those supporters to lobby on behalf of legislation.

The "new" web, web 2.0, abounds with tools for communication and collaboration: not just text messaging, but blogging and social networking, YouTube channels and wiki's. A vast variety of ways for a new, tech saavy, President to engage the people of the United States, and allow us to engage him with our ideas and energy.

Invariably eyes will turn to the 20% to 40% of the population who do not actively use technology or have Internet connections - the "digital divide". Those without access to technology are, disproportionately, lower income and non-white. Bridging that divide has been a major effort at the City of Seattle and in many other governments.

Now, with a national leader who embraces high tech, it will become "cool" for everyone to use tech and have access. (We call this "Leadership by Example"). Cultural barriers to using technology will fall, and programs to bring it to everyone (such as Seattle's Community Technology and Broadband work) will gain even more momentum.

Then perhaps we - the People - can become active participants in government, not just observers between elections.

All these are great ideas for a digital fireside chat - and a two-way one - via the electronic fireplace of the computer monitor.

High Tech Election Dismay

2008-11-04T06:27:55Z

Election night will grow into an agonizing election week as King County (Seattle) slowly and painfully counts its ballots. Almost a million ballots will be cast in King County today, but less than 400,000 will be counted by Wednesday morning. And then the ancient vote tabulating equipment used here will count another 90,000 ballots. A day.

With some luck, we'll know the election results by ... next week.

What makes this all the more painful is two major races which depend upon the votes in this County. The 8th Congressional District encompasses the eastern suburbs and is a virtual dead heat between Democrat Darcy Burner and Republican incumbent Dave Reichert. Also, in 2004 the Governor's race was decided by 129 votes, with present Governor Chris Gregoire ultimately beating Republican Dino Rossi. This year it is the same match-up, and Governing magazine rates the race almost a toss-up. And in that 2004 election, decided by 129 votes, Gregoire received 58% of the vote in King County, the most Democratic county in the state. And the slowest to count!

I have to admit I get a thrill walking into Admiral Congregational Church here in West Seattle on election Tuesdays, walking past he American flag and the church women selling cookies, and then saying hello to Jackie and Nancy and Susan and the other poll workers. I feel so much more a part of my community and doing my civic duty than mailing an absentee ballot.

I don't mid blackening the little bubbles on the paper ballot in the voting booth. And that paper ballot, held in my hand, and personally inserted by me into the ballot box, gives me comfort that my vote is real - and it counts.

But the trouble is, with a million ballots, you really need technology - fast, automated counting machines - to tally those ballots quickly.

And King County has machines, but they are ... well ... sixteen years old!

At first you might think "what sort of incompetent bureaucracy is this"? You'd be right about the incompetent bureaucracy, but it is not in King County, but at a little-known federal agency called the "Election Assistance Commission". King County says the EAC has been slow to certify new technology, a charge echoed in Columbus Ohio, Milwaukee, Colorado and elsewhere. The Board of Advisors of the EAC, in resolution 2008-3 issued in June, also referred to the EAC's slow certification process for new equipment.

Some Commission! Some "assistance". "They're from the federal government and they're here to help."

Personal ballot places, real pollworkers, paper ballots. Pretty similar to the workings of Democracy in the 1700's. Maybe, next year, the Elections Assistance Administration will reach the late 20th Century.

Tech Nightmares to Frighten a CIO

2008-10-30T07:00:22Z

Sometimes my job as a City CIO keeps me up at night. There are some pretty horrible things which can happen to the technology which keeps City and County governments running. Halloween seems like a perfect time to confront a few of our most frightful fears, and here are a few of mine.

Water. And Fire. Or Fire followed by Water. In my data center. The City of Seattle has multiple data centers, but our main one, constructed in 2001, has well over $15 million of stuff in it. Things like the e-mail servers used by the entire City government, or the disk array holding all our financial data. And about 500 mid-range servers. Our data center is in one of the most modern, earthquake-resistant buildings in town. But my real fear - and much more likely than the predicted 8.0 earthquake - is a fire or a gushing water leak. I guess it's time to test that disaster recovery plan again!

E-mail. Gosh, e-mail is the most important application we have - more important than utility billing systems or computer-aided dispatch or financial management systems. We all get an avalanche of e-mail every day, and the City of Seattle's great Postini spam filter from Google cleans out most of the viruses and junk mail. But it is really the content of the e-mail which scares me. Like that occasional email which says "hey, we've decided to cut your budget for xxx (fill in the blank) by $500,000 but you still get to do the project, on time, with reduced budget" or "oh, hey, Mr. CTO, your Wi-Fi network in the University District is down. Again. And the Mayor has a public meeting there at 3:00 PM". The only thing more frightening than some of the e-mail messages is arriving in the morning to find that the e-mail system is ... ah ... "down". And down HARD!

Tablet computers. Ah the great promise of laptops and tablets! You sit at your desk, and it is a desktop computer. You unhook it. You take it to every one of your meetings so you can view documents electronically, and don't have to print paper to take along. You take notes using Microsoft One-Note on the tablet, rather than writing stuff on paper (and, like me, promptly losing the paper in one of the giant piles in my office). You demonstrate that you are "friendly to the environment" by personally reducing your paper use by storing everything electronically. Then you forget to back the tablet up, you trip on the stairs with the laptop in your hands, and it crashes. Into the wall. Literally.

BlackBerries. An extraordinary combination of the two most nefarious technologies known to humankind, the cellular telephone and electronic mail. Now you get to be available to your customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The real killer is discovering, one September day, that one of my last havens where most cell phones and BlackBerries didn't work - beautiful little Republic, Washington - had been jerked into the modern era (see blog entry Fossils and Technology). The Blackberry worked there! Arggh. The only thing worse than a fully functioning BlackBerry is one which doesn't work, so you are out of touch! Arrgh!

Mayor's briefing. You show up to brief the Mayor and his senior staff on your latest new hotshot tech project, hoping to convince them to make a relatively small (less than a million bucks) investment. But, as you walk into the Mayor's Office, the Dow drops 500 points, Lehman Brothers fails, AIG needs a $85 billion bailout, sales tax revenues drop precipitously right along with consumer confidence, Boeing goes on strike and the room's technology systems go on the fritz.

The Help Desk. So you call the Help Desk (206-386-1212 for the City) about any one of the problems above, and they fix the problem over the phone. Quickly. Efficiently. Surprisingly well. And you - the Chief Technology Guy - are really frightened, because the problem was "user error" and the user is you!

Budget Crunch Opportunities

2008-10-24T05:04:56Z

What challenges do towns, cities and counties - large and small - face in 2009? I'm at the fall conference of Washington State City/County IT managers (ACCIS) this week. We've had a number of discussions about problems and solutions. But it is also apparent that many apparent problems have the silver lining of opportunity.

A common issue is budget squeeze. Washington State has a regressive tax structure - we have no personal or corporate income tax, so most agencies depend upon sales tax, property tax and user fees. Revenues are down across the board and every city and county faces cuts. At the conference - ACCIS or the Association of City/County Information Systems - we brainstormed a variety of responses to this challenge.

In many cases these are an "across-the-board" 5% or 10% cut. In some cases they are hiring freezes or elimination of vacant positions. I could write a whole column on this subject alone, but I'll simply say this: if you are a government CIO or IT manager anyplace in the United States, fill your vacant positions as quickly as possible. Yes, you may end up laying off these new hires next year, but at least a hiring freeze or a unilateral cut of vacant positions across your government (both quite regressive tactics for dealing with fiscal problems, incidently) won't hurt so much when you are fully staffed. In fact, filling vacancies rapidly at all times is good advice for managers of any government function.

Here are some of the "silver linings of opportunity" which these managers are actively exploring in response to revenue shortfalls:
• Saying "no". When your budget is cut 10%, you have to do 10% less work. You've got to shut down some existing projects or somehow reduce the workload. Does the CIO make a unilateral decision? Absolutely not - this is where governance comes into play. The CIO needs a group of line department directors or another set of business executives in City government to make the hard decisions about what gets a "no" and what work continues. In fact, such a group should be making such decisions in good times as well as bad. The opportunity: increased collaboration between departments on behalf of the people we serve. P.S. A "take no prisoners"-touch City Manager will substitute as decision maker, in a pinch.
• Centralization and consolidation of the IT function within a government. I spoke to one small city where each department purchased its own computers, so there were a whole variety of hardware and software versions. This is an expensive, labor-intensive approach to IT. But consolidation of IT work and standardization of procurement and software are a great response to tight funding. The opportunity: improved efficiency and effectiveness in government.
• Regionalization: I'm a great fan of work being done by the eCitygov alliance in some of the suburbs of Seattle. This is a group of a dozen cities who are working together to present some common applications for use by their customers. These include building permits, parks, mapping and now jobs/human resources. See more here. The opportunity: If more cities and counties could share applications and help each other out, we could cut costs and improve service.
• Virtualization. Virtualization is putting many "virtual" servers on a single physical server. This trick not only saves hardware costs, but reduces electricity use, cooling costs, and maintenance. Wow. Talk about a triple-whammy opportunity!
• Hosted applications. Governments have this penchant for doing everything ourselves. Has to be done with our employees on our hardware. But the blunt fact is this: we can use applications hosted elsewhere, via the Internet. We can implement much faster and with less expense. There is an ongoing monthly cost, but in many cases the other benefits outweigh that. Years ago the City of Seattle outsourced production of its payroll, and we've not regretted it. Indeed, the regionalization mentioned above is just a unique, government-based, approach to hosted solutions.

Budget crunch time is when we'll be able to implement these solutions. Revenue shortfalls provide opportunities for IT managers, smart City/County managers and saavy Mayors to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their governments through wise use of technology. And the folks in ACCIS are just the ones to make it happen.

Awarding the Police

2008-10-18T20:45:10Z

The Seattle Police Foundation's annual awards banquet was last night, October 17, 2008. Almost 200 Seattle police officers and civilian employees received awards for excellence, valor and impact.

Speaking of impact, the "technologization" of law enforcement was a thread which ran throughout the evening.

The Seattle Police Foundation was created to seed new programs and encourage innovation in law enforcement. More than 90% of the police department's official $213 million budget goes to personnel costs. Using those funds, Mayor Greg Nickels and Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske have launched a number of innovations using both technology and community partnerships, but funding for those improvements is still limited.

The Foundation is supported by a number of prominent local people and firms, including James Sinegal, co-founder of Costco, Costco itself, Philips - which provided Heartstart defibrillators in every Seattle police patrol car, and even two Seattle Police detectives, Randall and Pilar Curtis, who contributed more than $10,000 of their personal funds.

Technology was highlighted during the evening in the awards, stories, and video. Here are some examples:
• SPIDER - Seattle Police Information, Dispatch and Electronic Reporting. This project has already installed a records management system (RMS) which is now used by officers throughout the department to enter reports directly into the system from laptops, vehicle-mounted computers and desktops. It will deliver a new computer-aided-dispatch (CAD) system next year which includes automated vehicle location (AVL) and new uses of geographic information systems. Three civilians and a detective received awards this year relating to their work on SPIDER. And the RMS training team of 30 officers and civilians received an award for their work training the entire department - one of the largest training efforts in the history of the department.
• VARDA - this technology has actually been around since the 1960s - devices which send a radio signal when an alarm is tripped, a vehicle stolen, or when activated by a human being who is in danger.
• SeaJIS - the City's justice integration system initiative. Many cities have such initiatives which attempt to link police, prosecutors and courts to allow seamless flow of information about defendants and cases between the parts of the criminal justice system. In Seattle's case, SeaJIS also connects to King County's jail booking system and other outside systems. The project manager received an excellence award for her matrix management ("leading without having direct supervision") of the work.

Other technologies mentioned last night and used by the department are too numerous to mention, but include BlackBerries, in-car digital video systems, red-light cameras (which have reduced auto accidents but are now in jeopardy due to Initiative 985 on the fall ballot), and many more. Learn more about the department here.

There are some interesting side effects of this wide-ranging use of technology. One is the amount of electricity needed in police vehicles. A typical patrol car is loaded down with radios, data modems, a fixed-mount computer, emergency lights and a variety of other equipment all of which draws power. Finding cars and batteries to support this is a continuing challenge for the City's Fleets Division.

Another side effect is just all the "stuff" that a typical patrol officer has to carry. When I was a street cop in the mid-1970's, I carried a weapon, nightstick, handcuffs. Now officers also have handheld radios, cell phones, BlackBerries and laptop computers - almost a walking Radio Shack!

In this article, I've emphasized the technology, because I'm a CIO/CTO and that's the goal of this blog.

But the real purpose of last night was to celebrate the people involved - the officers, the police department civilians, those in City and County government who support them, and the wonderful sponsors who contribute to the Seattle Police Foundation.

In the end, it is not really the software and systems and techie gadgets and devices which keep us safe, but, rather, brave people such as those we honored last night.

Hiring Felons

2008-10-16T05:46:36Z

Should local governments be hiring felons? Or, more to the point, should government technology workers undergo background checks?

San Francisco found itself locked out of its own data communications network in July after a rogue employee, Terry Childs, refused to share the password necessary to access network elements such as routers and switches. Childs had been convicted of aggravated burglary and robbery and actually served prison time in 1983, many years prior to his employment in San Francisco. A relatively routine check of convictions databases by San Francisco would have disclosed this fact.

But, should local government technology workers undergo background checks?

On first thought, you might think the answer to this is, as expressed by my teenage daughter "no duh". Of course such background checks should be conducted. Government agencies work in a fishbowl. Freedom of information act requests and public disclosure acts and open meetings laws mean that almost everything we do is subject to public scrutiny. Scandals and mistakes and incidents like San Francisco's are front page news and sell a lot of newspapers and "advertising by Google" on Internet sites.

Government agencies should be held to a higher standard of service and scrutiny. We spend thousands, millions and billions of dollars. ($3.6 billion at the City of Seattle next year.) These are taxpayer and ratepayer dollars, not voluntary contributions from the public. We definitely should not be employing felons.

But, as in everything else, there is always a simple answer to any given question and it is almost always wrong.

So what is a "background check"? At its basic level, this is a search of public or law enforcement databases for convictions. Are we looking for felony convictions, or misdemeanors and felonies? A misdemeanor in one state is a gross misdemeanor in another is a felony in a third.

Does the crime conviction have a nexus to the work of the employee? In other words, is a conviction for drunk driving a reason not to employ someone as a database administrator? If I was convicted for possession of an illegal substance when I was in college 20 years ago, but have a spotless record since; am I unemployable in all governments throughout the United States for the rest of my life?

Do we search for arrests, as opposed to convictions? If I am simply arrested for drug possession, but not convicted, should that "count"?

Should we do a credit check on potential employees, on the theory that they may take government property and sell it on craigslist if they have a history of bankruptcy or bad debts? If a potential employee has racked up hundreds of unpaid parking tickets in Milwaukee should they not be employable in any other government anywhere in the nation?

Furthermore, let's presume I pass the background check, keep my nose clean for 6 months or a year or whatever the probation period is, and become a "permanent" civil service employee. But then, 5 years after starting to work, I have an altercation with my spouse and am convicted of domestic violence. Or perhaps I have multiple drunk driving convictions. Or maybe I declare personal bankruptcy due to my inability to manage my credit card debts.

Should we (government) conduct checks for criminal convictions every year? Should we constantly pull credit checks on our employees? Or, once you get "into" the civil service system, are you home free for a life of working - and, in most cases, diligently serving - government?

I just don't know the answer to all these questions.

But I do know this: if you are a felon, you need not apply to work at the City of Seattle's Department of Information Technology.

I won't hire you.

Budget Time for City Technology

2008-10-10T06:08:08Z

Seattle - like most cities and counties - is now deep in the middle of its 2009 budget process. A looming recession, the housing crisis, decreasing revenues and increasing demands for City services are all colliding to strain a $878 million general fund budget. Faced with the need for "feet on the street" - cops, firefighters, clean parks, and human services - how will needs for maintaining and improving the City's technology fare in this looming budget earthquake?

Luckily, Mayor Nickels, Dwight Dively (the City's CFO) and their senior staff understand the need for investment in technology to support the "feet on the street". Oh, you won't hear a single reference to technology in the Mayor's budget speech on Monday, September 29th (if you missed it, view it here). The Mayor talked about issues such as public safety - continuing to add police officers to bring the department from 1,241 sworn officers in 2003 to 1,360 in 2010. He discussed significant increases in emergency shelter, food and library collections. In 2009, Seattle will spend more money to create affordable housing than every other City in the State, combined. There's $9 million to combat youth and gang violence.

While there was not a word about technology in the budget speech, there is a lot of action for technology in the budget itself. Seattle's elected officials know their "on the street" budget priorities will require technology to be successful, and here are a few examples.

It's one thing to add more cops, but each cop will require voice radios, laptop computers and digital video systems in cars, and this budget provides for those.

Seattle has one of the highest bond ratings of any City in the nation, but that requires a smooth-functioning financial management system. This budget provides for new high-speed computer server and high-end data storage system to run that financial management system and hold data for it and for other priority functions such as customer service and utility billing.

Customer service is a top priority for the Mayor - making sure Seattle's people receive good service and fast response to requests and complaints. Mayor Nickels has recently implemented a customer service "Bill of Rights". This budget supports these initiatives by providing for Constituent Relationship Management system software (CRM). We also will implement a modern electronic mail system (Exchange/Outlook) and other technology which will speed service requests and problem reports from customers to City employees who can rapidly respond.

As in most budgets and most companies, the bulk of the budget is not for new projects and initiatives, but rather for carrying on the normal business of City government. So my department's $58.6 million budget provides $2 million to support the City website www.seattle.gov which won the "Best Municipal Web Portal" award from the Center for Digital Government in 2001 and 2006, $2.4 million to support a public safety radio network of over 5,000 radios which is up 99.999% of the time, and $3.4 million to support the top municipal TV channel in the nation, the Seattle Channel. There is money for more commonplace functions like $1.4 million for a help desk, $10 million for an extensive telephone network, and even $700,000 for the technology leadership office (that's the Chief Technology Officer - me - and my leadership team!).

There are a few hidden gems in this budget too - like connecting every elementary school in the City with high speed fiber optic cable (the school system pays for it but my department does the work). With some luck, I'll be able to blog about these "run-of-the-mill" projects over the next year.

The City's proposed budget is on the web here, and you can find the central information technology budget on page 543 here.

Is it a lot of money? Yes.

Does it help make the City of Seattle efficient, effective and safe? Damned right it does.

MIXing Cities, Counties and Web Two-Oh

2008-10-05T18:50:30Z

The Metropolitan Information Exchange (MIX), an association of City and County CIOs, met in Seattle this week. MIX is a select group of 55 forward-thinking technology leaders. Their discussions about the future uses of technology in government have been quite enlightening.

For the most part, these are mid-sized cities and counties, almost all with populations of 100,000 or more. These Chief Information Officers (CIOs) share at least one passion: making information technology work in service to the government and people of their communities.

Many of these jurisdictions have award winning government websites - Las Vegas, Riverside, Wake County (North Carolina), King County (Washington) and Yuma County (Arizona) each were among the five top web portals in eRepublic's 2008 competition. Others - such as Seattle and Tucson - have top municipal television channels. Still others have cutting edge implementations of a wide variety of technologies, ranging from the 35,000-public-safety-radio network operated by Harris County (Texas) to the Second Life experiments of Nevada County (California) to the City-wide Wi-Fi network operated by Corpus Christi.

Web 2.0 was the subject of this conference. All of us working in government technology know Web 2.0 is leading edge. But Web 2.0 is really "icing" on our government technology "cakes".

The core, first layer of IT in government is infrastructure - networks, computers, data centers. That infrastructure has to be rock solid and operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week because local government delivers service all day, every day.

The second layer of our "cake" is the applications, built upon the infrastructure, which provide efficiency and effectiveness for government. These applications include mapping, utility billing systems, financial management, computer-aided dispatch and many others.

The third layer of our IT "cake" is a wide variety of ways government employees and constituents use the technology to request and render services or provide information. These methods include interactive voice response systems, television channels and the websites of our jurisdictions.

Web 2.0 is the "icing" in one sense, because it is so leading edge (for government). In another sense, web 2.0 technologies are the essence of government. Web 2.0 is about collaboration. It is about social networks. It is about building community. And that - building community - is what government is all about - collaboration and making our communities stronger.

How are governments using Web 2.0 technology? I have a detailed set of examples here (and welcome feedback with more samples). Some highlights:

Some elected officials are blogging, but only a few regularly write - Tim Burgess of Seattle and Walter Neary of Lakewood (Washington) are two examples.
Chicago Police is doing a great mashup and display of detailed crime statistics by address or ward, around schools and parks.
Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, is making extensive use of wikis to improve information sharing among county departments.
The Seattle Channel is doing podcasting and interactive television with its Ask-the-Mayor program for Mayor Greg Nickels - viewers can call or e-mail real-time and there are video-taped questions.
A very few governments have YouTube channels, e.g. Mountain View/Los Altos California, although constituent video of local government meetings appears to be a more popular use of YouTube, such as Somervell County, Texas.
Some cities and counties have Facebook or Myspace pages, e.g. Prince William County, Virginia, which uses MySpace for recruiting. MIX, itself, has a LinkedIn group.
But I've not seen local government effectively use social networking yet. Fertile ground for innovation!

In short, we in MIX - and other local government CIOs - are concentrating on keeping the core of information technology networks and systems running well in our governments. And we are experimenting with a wide variety of Web 2.0 and similar technologies which we know will make government more collaborative and interactive.

Internet Pin-up Girls (and Guys)

2008-09-29T05:30:58Z

Is it acceptable for City government employees to use the City government's Internet connection at work for personal web browsing?

At first I'm tempted to say "no, absolutely not". Abuses are not only newsworthy, but headlines, such as when a third of the Port of Seattle's police offers were caught exchanging or receiving racist, sexist and sexually explicit e-mails between 2004 and 2007.

Almost every survey of employers, public and private, shows quite extensive use of the Internet by employees for shopping, finding relationships (i.e. dating services) and planning vacations.

On the other hand, we certainly allow employees to use the telephone and even e-mail to make dental or medical appointments, talk to their schools and daycare about their kids and perform a wide variety of quick, short personal transactions. Why shouldn't we have the same sort of policy about use of the Internet and e-mail?

Let me first say that almost all the employees I know at the City of Seattle are ethical, diligent, and hard-working. I see that diligence, that dedication, every day.

But everyone (government employee or not) has their weakness. Some folks are addicted to alcohol, others to shopping, many to cigarettes/smoke breaks and many others to surfing the Internet or YouTube. They can't help themselves from surfing or bidding on e-bay or browsing MySpace for their friends.

Pin-up girls. The very phrase evokes images from World War II barracks. In City of Seattle call centers in the 1970s, we had problems with pin-up girls decorating cubicles. Then it was pin-up guys. Naked pin-up guys. In guy's cubicles. We ended up banning all such photos from the workplace and no one would think of allowing them back in today.

Yet I've had workers visiting dating sites and leaving images of half-clothed people on the computer screen scandalizing a co-worker. I've seen workers leaving their City e-mail address for craigslist and e-bay sales. I know of employees surfing Internet sex sites. We "flatten" at least five computers (out of 10,000) a week. (This is a process also known as "re-imaging" or wiping a desktop computer clean and re-installing all programs.) Why? Because they became infected with malware from visiting non-business websites.

In almost every single case cited above, the City employee was a good employee. Hard working and well-intentioned. Someone I'd be proud to call a friend. But they either didn't know the rules or had to indulge an addiction to the Internet.

One department director tells me how much he loves the "Websense" (Internet filtering software) installation in his department because it reduces the number of Loudermill hearings he conducts, disciplining workers for non-business use of City computers. Websense helps keep honest people honest.

And hard-working City employees chafe when they see co-workers wasting time "surfing". My experience is that morale among the top-performing City workers improves when they see low-performing employees unable to indulge their Internet addictions and/or disciplined for it.

Most City government workers earn a living wage. They work 40 hours a week, and many get overtime for hours beyond that. They have both the ability to buy a personal computer for home and the time to indulge themselves in the cyberworld at home.

Public employees are held to a higher ethical and work standard than workers in any other industry. When there's a disaster, private employers shut down and their employees go home. Public employees work 12 hour shifts for the duration of the emergency.

Those same higher standards apply to use of City equipment, and conduct at work day-to-day, and the Internet content filters remind all of us of our duty to meet that standard. S

o how do we balance what is acceptable use versus unacceptable? I'm struggling with that issue right now - working with our management and unions to find that equilibrium.

The Pin-up Girls are long gone from the workplace. We don't want to bring them back with the web and Internet. But we also want to treat our employees like the responsible, dedicated employees they are.

I'll report back when we figure this out!