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The Five Initatives
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EXPANDED ELECTRONIC GOVERNMENT
The President Urges Agencies to Work Together on 24 E-Gov Projects
We Are Spending $50 Billion On Information Technology!
The government spends well over $50 billion a year on
information technology. If used well -- it can significantly
improve how agencies perform their missions and free up
additional funds for agencies to use in achieving those
missions. If used poorly-- and in the past we have had too many
examples of this -- it can lead to unnecessary spending by the
government and unneeded burdens on the public.
E-Gov Will Eliminate Burden On Small Businesses
A small business may have to submit compliance reports about its
operations to three different agencies. That firm spends a lot
of time and wasted effort by sending three different
forms, following three different processes, and complying with
three different IT systems. As an E-government, we should operate as a
team to create a single avenue for
communicating with the government and share the information
according to each agency's requirements.
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E-Gov Is Not Just Putting Forms Online
E-gov does not mean putting scores of government forms on the Internet. It is about using technology to
its fullest to provide services and information that is centered around citizen groups.
What We Have Done So Far
In February, we released our E-Government strategy and Vice
President Cheney re-launched our centerpiece website, www.FirstGov.gov.
In April, we launched www.GovBenefits.gov to
provide easy access to government benefit
information.
24 E-Gov Initiatives
The President's E-gov strategy unifies and streamlines some 500
programs into 24 citizen-friendly, citizen-focused, and
citizen-first programs.
Here is the deployment schedule for the 24 initiatives:
To be successful, these initiatives require the involvement of
cross agency teams. Recognizing that not all members of the
President's Management Council need to be directly involved in
each initiative, the PMC's E-gov committee has grouped the 24
initiatives into three categories:
- PMC driven - those that require extensive involvement and commitment by members of the President's Management Council;
- Agency coalition driven - those being driven primarily by a coalition of 3-5 agency partners;
- Single agency driven - those being handled by a single agency partner.
The Role Of "Managing Partners"
The department or agency which is managing partner for each
initiative will build the necessary funding into its FY 2004
budget request and will work with partner agencies to develop a
multi-agency business case. OMB will take responsibility during
the budgeting process to reject or integrate duplicative
requests, in order to avoid the financing issues that have
arisen in FY 2002.
For managing partners in particular, the PMC Committee
encourages senior political officials at agencies to take a close
look at the business cases and sign off on them before bringing
them to the Committee for endorsement. The Committee anticipates
that progress reports and business case updates will be handled
in the same way.
What The Public Expects
We know that the public expects this kind of service from the government, and that it uses the Internet more than
ever before. Polling data from the Pew Foundation, for example, show that over 40 million Americans went
online to look at Federal, State and local government policies, and over 20 million used the Internet to send
their views to governments about those policies. This and similar data show that if we harness the power of
technology, we will be meeting expectations of an increasingly wired citizenry.
What The President Expects
The President is urging us all to actively engage in cross-agency teamwork:
"Our success depends on agencies working as a team across
traditional boundaries to better serve the American people,
focusing on citizens rather than individual agency needs . . . I
thank agencies who have actively engaged in cross-agency
teamwork, using E-government to create more cost-effective and
efficient ways to serve citizens, and I urge others to follow
their lead."
We Cannot Do This Alone
To be successful, each member of the Administration's team has
to reach across agency boundaries to meet the challenge of
creating a government that works for everyone. This means that
for some of the initiatives listed above, agencies will have to
share financial and FTE resources with each other in ways that
they have not done before. But as successful e-businesses
demonstrated in the last decade, busting silos can lead to
greater efficiencies and better performance for both the
enterprise as a whole - in this case, the Federal government -
and for each of its components - or, in this case, each agency.
We All Need To Work Together
The unacceptable alternative is for agencies to spend money in
redundant and unrelated ways, which means each agency has less
to spend on the mission areas that matter - like educating
students, cleaning the air, or serving our veterans. We cannot
be bound by a parochial sense of false ownership or bureaucratic
territory.
Sincerely,
Mark Forman
The Five Initatives:
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