[1st-mile-nm] State and Federal Electronic Government in the United States, 2008
Tom Johnson
tom at jtjohnson.com
Thu Sep 4 16:24:58 PDT 2008
Surely of relevance.
-tj
Resource of the Week: State and Federal Electronic Government in the
United States, 2008 By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor
http://digbig.com/4xkgk
We usually don't offer up a report as a Resource of the Week here on
RS, since posting reports is what we do on DocuTicker, our sister
site. But this report from The Brookings Institution came out just
before Labor Day weekend, when posting on both sites is traditionally
light, and we thought it was interesting enough to bring it to your
attention.
The social and political impact of new technology long has been
debated among observers. Throughout American history,
technological innovations - from the movable-type printing press
in the 15th century, the telegraph in 1844, and the telephone in
1876 to the rise of radio in the 1920s and coast-to-coast
television broadcasting in 1946 - have sparked much speculation.
Transformationalists often claim that new technology will produce
widespread consequences. Incrementalists, on the other hand, point
to the influence of institutional forces - such as structural
fragmentation within government as well as issues related to the
investment cost and organizational structures of state and federal
government - in limiting the speed and breadth of technology's
impact on the public sector.
This report assesses the nature of American state and federal
electronic government in 2008 by examining whether e-government
effectively capitalizes on the interactive features available on
the World Wide Web to improve service delivery and public
outreach. Although considerable progress has been made over the
past decade, e-government has fallen short of its potential to
transform public-sector operations. This report closes by
suggesting how public officials can take maximum advantage of
technology to improve government performance.
These key findings come from the full report:
+ Eighty-nine percent of state and federal websites have services
that are fully executable online, compared with 86 percent in
2007.
+ Three percent of government websites are accessible through
personal digital assistants (PDAs), pagers or mobile phones, up
from 1 percent last year.
+ Seventy-three percent of government websites have some form of
privacy policy available online (the same as last year), and 58
percent have a visible security policy (up from 52 percent last
year).
+ Forty percent of government websites offer some type of foreign
language translation, up from 22 percent last year.
+ Sixty-four percent of government websites are written at the
12th-grade reading level or higher, which is much higher than that
of the average American.
+ Seven percent of government websites have user fees.
+ Twenty-five percent of federal websites and 19 percent of state
websites are accessible to the disabled.
+ The highest-ranking state websites belong to Delaware, Georgia,
Florida, California, Massachusetts, Maine, Kentucky, Alabama,
Indiana and Tennessee.
+ The top-ranking federal websites are the national portal
USA.gov, Department of Agriculture, General Services
Administration, Postal Service, Internal Revenue Service,
Department of Education, Small Business Administration, Library of
Congress, Department of Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board.
See also from Brookings:
+ Improving Technology Utilization in Electronic Government
around the World, 2008
<http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2008/0817_egovernment_west.aspx>
==========================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
www.analyticjournalism.com
505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com tom at jtjohnson.com
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete."
-- Buckminster Fuller
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