Opening Remarks by
Glen Shor (Secretary of Administration and Finance)
Our goal is to use technology to make it easier for citizens
to interact with government. Also, to
make more data-driven decisions. Deval
Patrick has committed to technology even in bad financial times. We’ve been more inclined to use off the shelf
software rather than building applications in-house. Developing it in-house, you have a 100%
chance of getting what you want but only a 50% chance of success. With off-the-shelf, you get 85% of what you
want with a 90% chance of success.
Trends in Mass IT by
Bill Oates, Massachusetts CIO
Three areas of emphasis have been data management, expanding
broadband, and collaboration with cities and the educational system. He showed a video about the Massachusetts
Innovation Challenge in which $50,000 in prizes were awarded in a competition
among 25 startup companies. The goal was
to take the creativity inherent in the IT business and apply it to state
government.
CIO Panel Discussion
Moderators:
Bill Oates, Chief
Information Officer, Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Chief Information Officer, City of Boston
Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Chief Information Officer, City of Boston
Panelists:
Craig Burlingame, CIO
City of Boston, 2000-2004
Louis Gutierrez, CIO Commonwealth, 1996-1998 and 2003-2005
John Letchford, CIO Commonwealth, 2010-2013
David Lewis, CIO Commonwealth, 1998-2002
Anne Margulies, CIO Commonwealth, 2007-2010
Louis Gutierrez, CIO Commonwealth, 1996-1998 and 2003-2005
John Letchford, CIO Commonwealth, 2010-2013
David Lewis, CIO Commonwealth, 1998-2002
Anne Margulies, CIO Commonwealth, 2007-2010
This was a loosely structured question and answer session in
which the panelists gave wide-ranging answers to issues raised. Below are some of the more memorable points
that were made:
Y2K gave state government something that had to be done on
time; the deadline couldn’t slip. This
was a very different dynamic. The
procurement process is difficult but if all of these procedures were not in
place, the system could very easily be corrupted. Be careful about relying too heavily on consultants. Remember the essence of consulting: if you
can’t solve a problem, there’s good money in prolonging it.
In cities, especially, there’s often a losing struggle
between funding things that are visible like parks and paying for back-end
things like computers that are largely invisible.
The future? Because IT is the backbone rather than the
backroom, CIOs will become more like COOs.
IT is part of everything an organization does. One of the tasks of a CIO is to make very
compartmented offices work together to improve the customer experience.
At Harvard, they refer to the future as SMAC: social,
mobile, analytics and cloud.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” because the pace of
change in technology is unbelievable and the future is very nebulous.
You have to spend half your time dabbling in stuff.
Fail early and fail often.
CIOs have to lead major change in organizations because
technology is disrupting the current way of doing things. You have to be good at explaining how new
things work otherwise the new things will never succeed.
Patience and persistence are key traits. Obstacles are inevitable. Don’t be distracted by minutia.
IT and Operations are morphing together into the same
thing. END
Day Two Opening
Remarks
Jascha Franklin-Hodge,
CIO, City of Boston
The role of the CIO is changing greatly. It’s not just technology anymore but also
includes operations. Technology doesn’t
solve anything by itself but nothing in government gets done without
technology. However, government isn’t meeting
customer expectations. They want
government service to be as fast and efficient as buying something from
Amazon. Government doesn’t have the
resources to compete with business so we have to be more agile and innovative
to succeed in the world of limited budgets.
The best way to avoid a big failure is to have a lot of
little failures early in the process. A
good way to do this is to develop in-house expertise on today’s
technologies.
Relentlessly focus on end-users. Design systems for them, not for the
employees who will be using the systems.
We have the power to change the perception that government
is inherently wasteful and inefficient.
We can show our constituents that government can work well. Great customer service sends the message that
government cares. END
Specific Topics
Mobile/Government
– Jim Upton of AT&T Mobility and Agnieszka Ilnicka of City of Boston IT
(Upton) Citizens are going more mobile but government is
not. Government is losing touch with its
constituents. Government needs to catch
up.
Successful mobile apps are fast and “on point” meaning that they
do a specific task very well and don’t try to do too much. It’s better to deliver apps in pieces than it
is to try to create a single one-size-fits-all product. Creating apps for the government has extra
challenges such as making them multilingual or protecting privacy. The apps that get most widely adopted are
those available in an app store which should be a consideration in your design
decisions.
Apps take a variety of forms from a programing
perspective. Native apps are those
written in the mobile operating system’s code (iOS or Android). Other apps are written in HTML5. These are probably easiest to write but they
can’t be put in the app store. The most
common type of app today is called a hybrid which is written in HTML5 and then
“wrapped” in iOS or Android.
What does the future hold?
Hyperlocal will be big. He
anticipates the widespread use of iBeacons which emit signals that communicate
with your telephone and tell you where and how far the beacon (destination) is
from you. The other big thing he expects
is “augmented reality” in which you would point your phone’s camera at
something (a particular building, for example) and have information about that
building automatically appear on your phone’s screen, overlaying the image produced
by your camera.
(Agnieszka): Is the manager of “constituent engagement
tools” for the city of Boston. She
described the methods citizens of Boston have to interact with their
government. In 2008, there was the
mayor’s 24 hour hotline which is staffed by humans around the clock. Also, there was email, US mail and contact
through the city website. We knew mobile
was the next step.
The mayor’s office of New Urban Mechanics worked with a
company called Connected Bits to give us Citizens Connect, a mobile app that
allows people to report infrastructure and service problems. Simplicity was the key to this app and it was
very successful. We soon discovered that
the most frequent users of this app were city workers. This led them to develop a City Worker app
which was a beefed up version of the citizen app. This has been very successful too. A new app they’re testing is called “Street
Bump” which uses your phone’s GPS and accelerometer to make note of when you
drive over a bump like a pot hole. The
citizen doesn’t have to do anything other than turn the thing on at the start
of a trip. They continue to fine tune
this app. Her advice was to keep
development costs low by partnering with universities, non-profits and
businesses. END
Analytics in the Age
of Big Data
Four major trends in IT today: (1) cloud; (2) mobile [we’re
always connected]; (3) Internet of Things [gadgets that generate data; and [4]
Big Data. “Big Data” is a very ambiguous
term. It means data of all types and
formats. It can be text files,
spreadsheets, databases, video, audio, images, and machine created data such as
that emitted from things like cars, thermostats and sensors. The challenge is to find a way to store and
query all of this stuff even though it remains in its native format. (there’s no clear answer). The big payoff will come when mashing up all
of this data.
Keynote Speaker (Day
Two) Chad Vander Veen, editor of a new “media platform” called Future
Structure which is described as “the intersection of ideas, infrastructure and
technology.”
Because everything is connected today, we have to
fundamentally change the way we look at how government operates. He compares it to how fantasy football has
transformed how (some) people look at the game of football. It’s still the same game but it’s viewed in a
way that breaks down all the old boundaries and practices.
By 2050, 70% of the world’s population will live in
cities. This is a fundamental shift in
the history of human civilization. We
have to look at a city as a deeply connected system (or system of
systems). Infrastructure and public
health are deeply connected (clean water, working sewers). Don’t think of roads as being only for cars. Consider subways, trolleys, bicycles and
pedestrians. A big challenge is how do
we move people around our cities more efficiently.
The five pillars of the city are (1) water; (2) waste; (3)
energy; (4) transportation; and (5) built environment. There also a lot of bad ideas out there.
How will technology influence cities of the future? With the Internet of Things, everything is
connected. By connecting all of our
infrastructure, we generate better data which lets us make smarter decisions. Value pricing for parking.
He then talked a lot about “connected autonomous vehicles”
which are cars that drive themselves. By
the end of this decade, auto makers will be offering “semi-autonomous
vehicles”. The technology exists today
to make this happen but our “soft infrastructure” like law and liability have
to catch up. END
Digital Engagement by
Nigel Jacob of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics
Boston is using technology to better engage its
residents. We want to make citizens more
central to how we govern. A big issue is
trust of government.
The way we operate is to try a lot of smaller projects, see
if they work, and if they do, we scale them up.
If they don’t work, we shut them down quickly. It’s important to fail fast. Two examples of this are related to the
Boston Public Schools. One app is called
“Discover” which took the existing school department website that shows each of
the 100+ schools in the city and redid it to closely resemble a “hotels.com”
type of site. The other app is “where is
my school bus” which tells a parent where the bus is in real time.
The other thing we do is blend online with offline. You can’t separate online from in person
engagement. They created a “City Hall To
Go” which is like a food truck for government services. It drives to where the people are and offers
a variety of services rather than forcing them to come to City Hall. The other app is called “Community Planit”
which is a planning app designed like a game.
Information about real projects and problems are made available
online. Before attending an in-person
meeting, people can educate themselves on the facts and the issues so when they
do finally come together they are much more productive because a lot of the
preliminaries are already done.
This
promotes more civic involvement.
The third thing to remember is that real engagement is
hard. Experiment to find what
works. Experimentation is the key to
civic engagement. END
Education
Technologies Today and Tomorrow
By Mark Racine, Chief Information Officer of Boston Public
Schools (and a former 5th grade teacher)
Started by saying that classrooms haven’t changed much in
100 years. Goes through classroom
technology timeline:
·
- 1890s – handheld slate tablets
- · 1900s – pencils (affordable but paper isn’t yet so slate tablets continue in use)
- · 1920s – radio comes to classroom. Education programs widely broadcast
- · 1930s – reel-to-reel projectors
- · 1940s – slide projector (permits efficient distribution of non-book materials by publishers)
- · 1950s – overhead projector
- · 1960s – calculators and photocopiers
- · 1970s – computers in classrooms (but almost exclusively for admin purposes)
- · 1980s – educational software – students begin learning from computers
- · 1990s – wired to the Internet – slow but at least they’re connected
- · 2000s – WIFI
Every one of these technologies is still in use in our
schools today. None have left. Why are we doing things the same way we
always have done? Why haven’t we
evolved?
To change the way we teach we first have to change the way
we think about learning. The old model
of learning was linear. The teacher
stood at the front of the room, delivered a standard lesson on a tight schedule
whether the students got it or not. It
was like requiring the students to drink 8 glasses of water each day.
Instead, think of learning as a swimming pool in which the
student immerses him or herself. How do
you do this? Technology can surround the
student with learning opportunities.
Technology permits this kind of immersion. But immerse the child in technology, not the
teacher.
Another point: school districts strive to standardize
technology which from an Information Technology perspective, is the proper
course since it provides economy of scale.
But this type of exclusivity is completely wrong from an education perspective. Students should be exposed to all types of
technology because when they are looking for jobs they will need to know all of
these technologies. If they’ve only been
exposed to one in school, the school has missed an opportunity. Schools should also teach students how this
stuff works so that when it doesn’t work they know how to fix it. This allows students to discover stuff on
their own.
The motto should be “failure is not an option, it’s a
requirement.” Failure (of technology) is
a learning opportunity. Teachers and
students should prepare for it, deal with it, and learn from it. One reason teachers rely so much on paper
handouts is that it’s a reliable technology that they know is going to
work. That’s not necessarily the case
with computers. But when a computer
doesn’t work as planned, it presents a learning opportunity that should be
embraced.
Empower the students.
Learning should be personalized even if the technology is not. And always remember, learning happens
everywhere. END
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment