MENLO PARK, California -- In the bubbly days of the bubble economy, it was not unusual to hear "e-government" described as something of a panacea: The various functions of world governments would go online, it was said, and public institutions would become cheaper, more reliable, and more accountable to citizens. Antiquated bureaucracies would be refashioned from optic fiber and silicon, and ordinary citizens would once again have faith in the Department of Motor Vehicles.
E-government still has the power to be "transformative," in the words of one expert who spoke to Silicon Valley professionals at an e-government roundtable held here on Tuesday morning. But the speakers -- including Bill Owens, Colorado's Republican governor -- also said that wiring up various local and national governments will be neither easy nor cheap, and few offered any rosy predictions about how an online government might change society.
The event -- co-sponsored by the libertarian Pacific Research Institute and by TechNet, an organization for tech executives -- was billed as a forum for discussing e-government with the Colorado governor, but Owens himself spent most of his time talking just about Colorado.
"We've been seeing, lately, some less-than-good times," Owens said in his remarks, referring to the depressed economy. But Colorado is a nice place for tech businesses in this dismal climate, he suggested, especially because of his policies -- he said that he's lowered taxes, improved education, and built more freeways and a rail system in the state.
But while he didn't mention any specific e-government initiatives, Owens did note that he's savvy about tech.
"I'm about the only governor opposed to taxing the Internet," he said, adding that he has appointed a cabinet-level Secretary of Technology and has spent $40 million to bring broadband access to every county in his state.
Owens then thanked the audience for doing their part to improve the country, and said he had to leave to catch a plane.
The fact that a tech-friendly governor didn't say much about how he's bringing state services online at a panel discussion devoted to that topic alone is perhaps illustrative of how the face of e-government has changed during the past year and a half.
In the past, e-government was about paying your parking tickets online, or avoiding going to the DMV -- in other words, it was about conducting government as e-commerce, offering services that are frustrating in the offline world to users in the online world.
Several sky's-the-limit startups mushroomed during this time, all expecting to be the public's online conduit to government. It's almost unnecessary to note that several of these have now failed.
He didn't explicitly say it, but Owens suggested that his tech priorities were elsewhere: teaching high school students about IT so they might survive in a tech-centric world, say, or making sure that rural Colorado has access to the Internet.
The speakers who followed Owens did not contradict him, really, but they did put more emphasis on the services that he neglected to mention. Mark Boyer, the director of Cisco's business services group, said that "all of us as customers have expectations of our politicians," and that soon a politician may lose an election because he doesn't emphasize e-government.
Indeed, Boyer said, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 will "galvanize" the public -- much like Y2K did -- in its support for improving online services.
Nick Pattakos, a vice president at Oracle, offered the example of the post office. In a time of anthrax scares, he said, there should be an online service to find out whether your local post office is open, and where you can collect your mail.
He said that in the past few weeks, he's spoken to many "public safety officials who want to make sure their systems work in a time of crisis."
But Pattakos also said that the most important thing for e-government at the early stages was "integration." Before agencies jump to get their services online, he said, they should make sure that various services within a government work well with each other.
This is the "heavy-lifting" portion of e-government that few talk about, the panelists said, but is probably as vital as an online ticket-paying service.
