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States' motor vehicle departments may be in for a treat: Incorporating a national standard for screening applicants in state and federal sex offender registries before issuing driver’s licenses.

The Government Accountability Office released results of a study this week that looked at the impact that such a requirement would have on states, noting that while 22 states use some form of driver’s license-related process to encourage registration or provide additional monitoring of convicted sex offenders, none have screening processes that compare driver’s license applicants’ information against both the state’s sex offender registry and the FBI’s national registry.

The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 requires states to collect information about resident sex offenders and submit that information to the attorney general for inclusion in the National Sex Offender Registry (NSOR), maintained by the FBI. Most states’ sex offender registries are centrally maintained by a state criminal justice agency and need to be routinely updated – a challenge because sex offenders move and fail to comply with self-reporting requirements. Screening individuals against a state’s sex offender registry database when applying for or renewing a driver’s license would help solve that problem.

Fair enough, but what kind of burden does that place on states? A substantial one, according to the study. Most of the motor vehicle agencies in the 26 states surveyed said that “moderate to major modifications” to current IT systems would be needed, with major expense accrued from changes to software in particular. Officials in one state said that seven of the motor vehicle agency’s interrelated systems would need extensive software modifications, and officials in another state said that the types of software used to issue different types of licenses and collect fees are governed by complex rules and procedures – all of which would be impacted by additional screening processes.

So, just as state governments and their motor vehicle departments try to comply with the just released REAL ID requirements, yet another expensive, complex and controversial process requirement has been placed on the table. At least they know what they may be in for.

It’s been more than 10 years since President Bill Clinton described the 21st Century classroom as a place in which “computers are as much a part of the classroom as blackboards." Since then, schools -- and parents -- have spent millions of dollars on computers for students and their children under the assumption that the computers are directly related to improved learning and higher test scores. The problem is that no national study has proven those claims.

Now, more than a decade after the fact, the federal government wants to find out what the link is and has awarded a grant to education researchers at Indiana University to study how teachers and students use computers to learn. This seems a bit late.

For sure, the study could shed light on just what value computers give students in the classroom. But this fact has been debated for years. As Todd Oppenheimer pointed out in his article (subscription required) that appeared in the July 1997 issue of The Atlantic, computers’ value to education is questionable. An excerpt from the article:

… Alan Lesgold, a professor of psychology and the associate director of the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, calls the computer an "amplifier," because it encourages both enlightened study practices and thoughtless ones. There's a real risk, though, that the thoughtless practices will dominate, slowly dumbing down huge numbers of tomorrow's adults. As Sherry Turkle, a professor of the sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a longtime observer of children's use of computers, told me, "The possibilities of using this thing poorly so outweigh the chance of using it well, it makes people like us, who are fundamentally optimistic about computers, very reticent."

Oppenheimer compares the computers-in-the-classroom phenomenon to film-strip technology students used 40 years ago: “‘Computers in classrooms are the filmstrips of the 1990s,’ Clifford Stoll, the author of Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (1995), told The New York Times last year, recalling his own school days in the 1960s. ‘We loved them because we didn't have to think for an hour, teachers loved them because they didn't have to teach, and parents loved them because it showed their schools were high-tech. But no learning happened.’”

There's no reason to believe that these arguments are outdated -- especially given the fact the federal government just issued a grant to find out if they are. Besides, the rush to introduce computers in the classroom before researching whether they would, indeed, increase performance is part of a long string of similar information technology investments that organizations of all kinds have made, an act of chasing the hottest technology under the assumption that technology, in and of itself, will allow us to work faster and be smarter. “It’s technology, after all," goes the argument. "It must provide value."

For years, IT managers in federal agencies and in the Office of Management and Budget have tried to head off such thinking before it gets too far down the IT investment road. OMB's requirement for agencies to write business cases are just one example of this. A technology may seem like it would create efficiencies and add value, but the results from an IT investment are typically hard to measure – if an organization ever measures them at all. Or, which is more likely, the added value many times falls far short of the expectations managers had when the technology idea was first dreamed up.

The computers-in-the-classroom policy seems to have followed this same line of reasoning, although, at first, some research showed computers raised achievement. Years ago supporters pointed to the study “Connecting K-12 Schools to the Information Superhighway,” conducted by McKinsey & Co. for a Clinton task force formed to study technology and education, as the reasons why the federal government should support a policy that made computers a big part of curriculums. It concluded:

Many schools have experienced significant improvements in student performance after introducing computer-assisted instruction. For example, the Carrollton City School District in Georgia established a computer lab, among other changes, to reduce the failure rate in 9th grade algebra from 38% to 3%. In New Jersey, the Christopher Columbus Middle School saw student performance rise from well below to above state averages on standardized tests in reading, language arts, and math after the school implemented reforms that included extensive use of networked computers. The academic literature confirms technology's role in these improvements: a review of 254 controlled studies concluded that appropriate use of computers in the classroom reduces the time needed to master certain types of knowledge by as much as 30%. Put another way, in three school years, students benefiting from computer-assisted instruction can learn almost a full year's worth of material more than students who do not have access to the technology.

But Oppenheimer, in his article, refutes many of these findings.

Back to today. Now Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy will try “to figure out how teachers use technology in lessons and how students learn from that technology,” according to the Indianapolis Star article. “There have been some larger efforts, but it's mostly been a study here, a study there,” Jonathan Plucker, director of the center, told the Star. “It's a critical question that has never been answered. That's just so exciting.”

It might have been a good thing to ask that "critical question" more than a decade ago before schools and parents spent billions of dollars on computers without knowing for sure if they do indeed raise student achievement or how the computers could be used to do so.

The study is due to be completed in April 2009.

This news item certainly will heap more suspicion on the Bush administration’s tactics for fighting terrorism.

A law firm in Vermont, which represents a client in Afghanistan and a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, is accusing the federal government of tapping its phones and hacking into a computer used by one of the firm's partners, according to an article posted by the Burlington Free Press. Three partners in the law firm Gensburg, Atwell & Broderick recently sent a letter to clients telling them the firm "can't guarantee their communications were confidential," according to the article. The firm said it had found its phone lines crossed and that a computer forensic examination of the computer used by Robert Gensburg "found an application that disabled all security software and would have given someone access to all information on the computer," according to the article.

Gensberg said there may be an innocent explanation for the problems -- such as he may have accidentally downloaded some malware from the Internet -- but "we are quite confident that it is the United States government that has been doing the phone tapping and computer hacking," the lawyers wrote in their Oct. 2 letter to clients.

According to the article, there's no comment from U.S. officials or Verizon, which operates the phone lines for the law firm and is one of the telecommunication firms named in the Bush administration’s wiretapping program after 9/11:

U.S. Attorney Thomas D. Anderson, the federal government's top law enforcement official in Vermont, said Thursday that he couldn't comment. Verizon has consistently refused to comment on whether it is involved with national security issues, spokeswoman Beth Fastiggi said Thursday.

An article on a Web site operated by the Detroit Free Press about a driver's license fraud scheme in Michigan's Secretary of State's office raises an interesting question.

This month, a pair of Michigan state employees was caught selling fake driver's licenses, license plates and vehicle registration tags. The employees would identify a customer interested in obtaining the fake licenses and registration, would take the person's photo and then "use the name and personal information of an unwitting person already in the Secretary of State computer system" to produce the fake documents, according to the article.

This is the unnerving part: "The case broke after a sheriff's deputy noticed a fraudulent temporary license plate during a routine traffic stop," according to the article. The two employees' illegal activity on the state computer system was never flagged by the network. With the knowledge that most computer crimes come from within an organization, not from outside hackers, why wasn't the state system programmed to flag this unusual activity?

In addition, the article quotes Wayne County Sheriff Warren Evans musing about how "it is incredible in a post-Sept. 11 world that a government employee would provide anyone with picture identification under a false name." Maybe it's not that incredible, as illustrated by this Washington Post article. (As was the situation in the Michigan fraud case, this case was not broken by the state Department of Motor Vehicles but by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security.)

In the end, this Michigan case is what the Homeland Security Department can point to in its ongoing effort to enforce Real ID.

Wisconsin, which has suffered some high-profile government IT project mishaps (and here and here), is debating whether to elevate its chief information officer to reporting directly to the governor. An independent group called the Task Force on Information Technology Failures spent this year investigating the state's troubled IT management. Among its recommendations in its report released this summer, the task force suggested the state legislature elevate the state CIO (a position now held by Oskar Anderson) to report to the governor. (Right now the state CIO is head of the Division of Enterprise Technology, which is deep within the state's Department of Administration.)

An editorial yesterday in the Wisconsin State Journal argued that elevating the CIO position "should be one of the prime elements in a reform plan responding to a series of costly foul-ups that has plagued efforts to improve the state 's computerized data systems."

Although a good idea, it is not the answer to what ails Wisconsin IT. Plenty of public agencies and private-sector companies have a CIO reporting to the head of the company or agency, but IT projects at these organizations still regularly go off the rails. Wisconsin suffers from project management problems, not how much power the CIO has. (Still, elevating the CIO is a great idea if Wisconsin wants to create the management environment in which IT can become a strategic player in helping state agencies meet mission goals and improving state government performance. But that's a totally different discussion.)

What would help state IT projects become more successful, as the editorial points out, is to re-establish the two groups that oversee IT project management. "The reform should encompass an array of other solutions, including re-establishing two dormant oversight panels -- the Legislature 's Joint Committee on Information Policy and Technology, and the Information Technology Management Board -- and improving technology project specifications and standards," according to the editorial.

But the recommendations are headed no where. The Journal reports that Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle (D) is cool to the idea. After all, Doyle killed the cabinet-level IT agency that former Wisconsin Gov. Scott McCallum (R) created and operated from 2001 to 2003. Doyle thought the agency was inefficient.

Much was made of Homeland Security Department Secretary Michael Chertoff's comment last week that residents of states that fail to follow the Real ID Act's requirement to issue more secure driver's licenses will be required to show a passport to gain entry into state parks, to board airplanes, or to enter any federal building. According to a CNN article:

"This is not a mandate," Chertoff said. "A state doesn't have to do this, but if the state doesn't have -- at the end of the day, at the end of the deadline -- Real ID-compliant licenses then the state cannot expect that those licenses will be accepted for federal purposes."

Just how serious DHS is about requiring these residents to show passports, or how much power the department has to make it happen, is highly questionable, points out security expert Bruce Schneier. In his blog last week, Schneier wrote that Chertoff's threat is "a lot of bluster." Schneier explained, "The federal government just can't say that citizens of -- for example -- Georgia (which passed a bill in May authorizing the Governor to delay implementation of REAL ID) can't walk into a federal courthouse without a passport. Or can't board an airplane without a passport -- imagine the lobbying by Delta Airlines here. They just can't."

Seventeen states have passed legislation opposing the law and other states are considering similar bills. Washington, Vermont and Arizona have already found some common ground.

It's one thing to have a hacker stealthily navigate past your firewall, slither by your intrusion detection software, and fiendishly gain access to a database to steal customers' personal information. It's another to have your operations department just send the information out through the mail.

That's exactly what the California Public Employees' Retirement System, better known as CalPERS, did this month when it sent about 400,000 brochures containing members' Social Security numbers clearly visible through the address window. A CalPERS spokesman downplayed the incident, saying the Social Security numbers printed on the brochure did not have hyphens, making it more difficult to identify the string of numbers as a Social Security number.

CalPERS sent a letter to members apologizing for the mistake and is conducting an investigation to find out why the SSNs were printed on the brochures. The organization also is providing privacy security awareness training for employees.

Hat tip: Pensions and Investments

Police departments nationwide continue to push their local jurisdictions to provide more surveillance cameras mounted throughout cities to capture images of crowds and traffic in hopes of solving crimes. The latest request comes from Alameda Co., Calif., where the county seat is Oakland. County police chiefs have asked the Alameda County Congestion Management Agency to begin recording the traffic from about two dozen cameras that stream images of traffic on San Pablo Ave., a major thoroughfare through the county, according to an article in The Oakland Tribune.

The police say if the traffic on the avenue had been recorded (the congestion agency does not store traffic video streams), they could have identified cars used in crimes and then worked from there to identify suspects. Police Chief Scott Kirkland in El Cerrito, Calif., in Alameda Co. says the footage could have helped the police department solve the 2005 killings of a gas station clerk, a customer of a hamburger joint, a teenager, a restaurateur in 2007, and a robbery victim last month.

Ever since cameras in London helped police there identify and arrest in June the suspected plotters of the foiled car bomb attacks, many public policy experts have argued for more cameras in U.S. cities. Here's a recent Tech Insider post on the subject.

But privacy advocates have raised concerns, similar to the objections raised in Alameda Co. Privacy advocates there say that if the county's cameras stored the footage, and if the cameras were upgraded so that license plates and other details of the cars and traffic could be viewed, the police may be tempted to use the information for other purposes that infringe on our right to privacy.

An interesting note about the Oakland Tribune article is that no one in the article made the argument against the privacy advocates' position by saying that drivers and pedestrians who have nothing to hide shouldn't worry about the cameras. I bring up again a recent post about a compelling paper (access to paper here) written on that very subject by George Washington University law professor Daniel J. Solove. The paper, "'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy," is worth a read and its arguments are too detailed to go into here. One quick quote, however: "The key misunderstanding is that the 'nothing to hide' argument views privacy in a particular way – as a form of secrecy, as the right to hide things. But there are many other types of harm involved beyond exposing one’s secrets to the government."

To find out what those might be, read the paper.

What is it with computer systems designed to serve the most vulnerable children?

From The Columbus Dispatch, comes another story of a computer system that was poorly developed and puts at-risk kids at even greater risk. The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services last year turned on a new computer system -- the Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System -- to better track children in foster homes. But when the state began using the system, the foster families who did not have children in their care at the time the system went online were not placed in the foster family database. When children were placed in those families, case workers could not add the family to the computer system. That makes it more difficult to track children put in the care of those families.

As a result, the state runs the risk of losing track of foster children, according to the article. Counties are still being added to the system, but child welfare advocates have called for the state to stop adding counties until the problem can be fixed. The state says an electronic fix is not expected to be available until January, and it doesn't want to stop adding counties to the system because the system already is far behind schedule and over budget. The system has cost $93 million to develop and has had a history of problems and missed deadlines for the past decade, according to the article.

Numerous state and local jurisdictions have been upgrading child welfare systems -- without much success. New York and Philadelphia have reported similar problems with new computer systems developed to better track cases for state child protective services agencies.

Boston is the latest government organization to join Second Life, an animated online world where individuals can create virtual alter egos and interact with others. Boston officials plan to build a virtual Boston in which residents can visit virtual government buildings and chat with other Bostonians online, The Boston Globe reports.

Boston joins other public-sector groups that have done the same, including the Swedish embassy, the Vancouver Police Department, NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (and reviewed here), and Ohio University (see below), to name a few.

Ohio University's YouTube promo for Second Life site.

Boston officials say they developed the Second Life site to encourage more people to participate in local government, and the city may use the site to promote tourism, collect public opinion about proposed developments, and, as Bill Oates, Boston’s chief information officer, says, just to keep up with what other cities and government organizations are doing.

Just how much Second Life will encourage Bostonians -- or for that matter, any citizen -- to become more involved in civic life remains to be seen. But as "istarr" commented on Planetizen, it's likely going to be a hard sell. "Expecting people to attend 'neighborhood meetings' in second life is unbelievable -- how many people do you know that attend neighborhood meetings in their first lives (where it might count)?"

An increasing number of local governments are getting into the business of providing Wi-Fi service to residents who want to access the Internet throughout a city or county. About 385 cities, communities, and counties in the United States have a wireless networking project, with most intended partially or wholly for residential use, according to a recently released report by Forrester Research. (Requires a subscription.)

But Forrester researcher Sally Cohen questions if the investment is worth the cost. Only 27 percent of all U.S. online households use Wi-Fi, and the majority of these users (76 percent) connect to a private Wi-Fi service in their home, not to a municipal or county network provided in, say, parks, libraries, commercial areas or other hot spots.

To make wireless networks a better investment, Cohen advises local governments to do some homework. This includes determining what percentage of residents want a wireless service, how much they may be willing to pay for certain services available on the network, if other services can piggyback on the network such as remote parking payment systems and traffic control video surveillance, and educating residents abut Wi-Fi to increase usage.

The Forrester report, however, doesn't discuss the controversy of local governments providing what telecommunications companies argue is a business that government has no place competing with the private sector.

What's the deal in Maryland and Virginia when it comes to information technology and government? In its 2007 list of the most advanced digital counties, which the Center for Digital Government and the National Association of Counties released this week, 11 counties in Maryland and Virginia made the list. Together the states' counties account for 23 percent of the 47 positions in the rankings. (Some counties tied for spots on the list, which divides counties into four categories based on population.) Counties were ranked on more than 100 measurements including online service delivery, IT infrastructures and architectures, and governance models.

The two Mid-Atlantic states had quite a showing. Maryland and Virginia have only 158 counties or county equivalents (such as independent cities) between them. That's only 5 percent of the total number of counties and equivalents in the United States, far less than the 23 percent representation on the list.

What gives? Could it be that proximity to Washington, D.C., provides some influence on local governments' willingness to invest in technology? Or maybe the ocean air has some influence. Non-coastal states placed only 17 counties (18 percent) on the list, despite the fact that the vast majority of counties are in non-coastal states. Texas, which boasts the largest number of counties (254), didn't place one county on the list.

We've asked the Center for Digital Government to speculate on why some states had a larger representation than others, but we have yet to hear back. We'll let you know when we do.

But while we wait, we can provide this reason: As is the case with most things in life, money plays the biggest part. The counties in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area are wealthy, as are most of the counties in California, New York and in the Mid-west that made the list. While a good rule of thumb, the reason is not universal. Yuma County, Ariz., with a fiscal 2006-2007 budget of $82 million, made the list. Maybe that county has some insights to show other governments.

This shouldn't come as too surprising:

Schools are not adequately protecting students either in cyberspace or in their buildings, and more money is needed to improve the situation, according to a report released by a leading government supplier of IT products and services.

In a survey of 381 school districts, CDW-G found that schools tend to rely too heavily on technology to protect students from cyberthreats. Out of a possible 110 points on the CDW-G cyber safety index, CDW-G gave districts an average score of 55.3. On the positive side, most districts monitor students' Internet activity, block Web sites and place computer monitors in view of adults. On the negative side, fewer than two out of five districts close their network to provide more control over communication and content access (although many students know how to circumvent the networks by using proxy sites), only about a third update their acceptable use policies once a year (an unacceptable trend now that social networking sites such as Facebook are available), and only 8 percent of districts provide cyber safety training to students, such as including awareness training on identity theft and "the potential impact that inappropriate content can have on a student's college and career plans," according to an accompanying press release.

As for physical security, districts scored an average of 44 out of a possible 160 points. While 63 percent of districts use security cameras to scan school property, "only 24 percent of districts report having real-time access to sex offender databases," according to the report.

CDW-G reports that half of all districts say that a tight security and IT budget is the primary barrier to improving security. CDW-G, not surprisingly, offers this advice: "The School Safety Index can help IT and security directors make the case for additional funding by helping district leaders understand the tools and resources that may prevent or mitigate security breaches, thereby lessening the long-term impact that a breach can have on a district. CDW-G also recommends that districts turn to peers and the vendor community to understand their options regarding new security technology and best practices."

More money may be the answer, but citing a vendor report may make school information security managers' argument for a bigger budget actually a tougher sell to the school board.

The steady stream of stories about computer projects gone bad continues.

The latest story of a computer system not meeting expectations comes from New York. Social service case workers there are "fed up" with a state network that was supposed to make filing regular case-work reports easier and give case workers more time to spend in the field, according to an article in the Times Herald-Record, a newspaper covering the Orange County New York area north of New York City.

The system, launched in 1996 under then-Gov. George Pataki by the state's Office of Children and Family Services, is still being worked on and case workers' complain that the amount of time they spend at their desks filing reports has more than tripled compared with the "pen-and-paper days," according to the newspaper. An excerpt from the article:

The pent-up frustration is almost palpable as a group of case workers and supervisors at the Orange County Department of Social Services let loose on the computer network that has confounded them for so long. They say it's slow, confusing, difficult to learn, difficult to edit and unable to perform functions most computer users take for granted, like copying and pasting blocks of text.

The cost of the system has increased from $113.6 million to $389.3 million -- with more work scheduled to be completed by next year, the paper reports.

The list of states rebelling against the Real ID Act continues to increase. The Tennessee legislature last night voted to not comply with the Real ID Act of 2005 unless it is fully funded, according to a press release issued today by the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee.

Tennessee becomes the 16th state to pass a resolution saying it will not comply with the law because the act requires each state to spend millions of dollars on upgrading computer systems to meet the law's requirements, which include adding security features to driver's licenses such as bar codes and digital photographs to make it harder to obtain a fraudulent driver's license. The federal government will eventually require that Americans use the new licenses to gain entry to federal buildings, nuclear power plants and commercial airlines.

The resolution "urges the Tennessee congressional delegation to support measures to repeal the Real ID Act, and states that 'there be no implementation of the Real ID Act until full funding is provided by the federal government,'" according to the ACLU press release.

California tends to lead the nation in many instances, signaling trends that can eventually head east. The state was the first to enact a security breach notification law, which required organizations to notify customers if a security breach could have exposed personal information such as Social Security, credit card and driver's license numbers.

Now California is considering a bill that would require organizations that accept credit and debit cards to follow some of the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard or face paying the costs associated with any security breach. The standard, developed by the five big credit card companies, are rules organizations should follow in protecting credit card transactions, such as installing a firewall and encrypting the transmission of sensitive information across public networks, among other requirements.

The rules are not mandatory, although credit card companies can levy fines or suspend the credit card processing services for merchants who do not follow the rules. Still, the vast majority of organizations that accept credit-card payments do not fully comply with the standard. Visa reported last month that of the largest merchants in the United States (those accepting more than 6 million credit-card transactions a year), only 35 percent are compliant. That's why the California legislature is considering a bill, known as AB 779, which would make the standard mandatory.

The bill has the support of the California Credit Union League. Banks typically have to shoulder the financial cost of notifying customers that their credit card numbers could have been stolen and the cost of replacing the cards -- all of which can cost more than $1 million per breach, according to a California State Senate report.

The bill would apply only to California residents, but because one out of 10 Americans live in California, the law would become a defacto standard for the nation. If any organization wants to do business with a California resident (and in today's online business world, the chances are high that that would happen), then they would have to follow the law. Minnesota passed a similar law earlier this year.

Because so few private-sector companies follow the PCI standard, it is most likely that government agencies that accept credit-card payments do not follow the standard as well. As it has happened with past state information security and privacy bills, a similar federal bill that could apply to federal agencies may be in the future.

As expected, New Hampshire will soon join a dozen other states that refuse to comply with a federal law requiring security features to driver's licenses, Reuters reported last week.

New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch says he plans to sign the New Hampshire law that the state Senate passed last week banning implementation of the Real ID Act of 2005, which will require states to invest billions of dollars into upgrading information systems to add security features to driver's licenses such as bar codes and digital photographs. The federal government will eventually require that Americans use the new licenses to gain entry to federal buildings, nuclear power plants and commercial airlines.

In March, the New Hampshire House Transportation Committee, in passing the one-page bill opposing the Real ID Act, called the federal law "repugnant." New Hampshire estimated it would cost the state $10 million to comply with the Real ID Act, of which the federal government would have paid $3 million, according to a ComputerWorld report.

The strong opposition has Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Judiciary Committee, considering introducing legislation to repeal the provisions of the Real ID Act pertaining to driver's license requirements.

Problems with systems managing voter registration databases continue to pop up. This time it's in Texas, where a database of stored voter registration data did not respond quickly enough to queries and rejected eligible voters during local elections this month, ComputerWorld reports.

In addition to Texas, Sarasota County, Fla., as well as the Dutch have had problems with either voter registration systems or the actual electronic voting machines.

States have less than 18 months until the next Big Election to work out the glitches.

If you needed a reminder that government information technology does have an impact on the daily lives of the public, consider what has been playing out in Maine for the past two plus years.

The state, along with contractor CNSI, have spent the past six years building a computer system to process Medicaid claims that doctors, hospitals and other health care clinicians submit for payment. Right from the start, however, the system had numerous software problems, which caused many Medicaid recipients to not receive health care and which delayed payments to health care providers, creating serious financial problems for many. After spending more than $70 million on the system (the original cost was $15 million), the state decided to kill the system and seek to outsource the claims processing. (I wrote about the problems in a feature for CIO Magazine last year.)

Despite the system's improved performance and the fact that Maine plans to outsource the work, Maine health care providers, advocacy groups and citizens still are expressing anger, as a sharply worded editorial that appeared last week in the Kennebec Journal illustrates. "Discredited functionaries" is how the editors described the state's public managers. That editorial drew an equally strong response today from the commissioner of Maine's Department of Health and Human Services. "Perhaps hyperbole has no bounds," Commissioner Brenda Harvey fired back.

Maine plans to contract with a private firm to manage the claims processing work and to provide a system that can expand as the federal government's Medicaid program demands increase. That contract should be awarded in about three more years.

The following item was posted by Editor at Large Bob Brewin

post A consequence of the Real ID Act to make driver licenses more secure – beyond its $23 billion estimated cost -- is the fact that it will increase by as much as 75 percent the already painful long waits at states’ departments of motor vehicles, the National Governors Association told the Homeland Security Department in comments it filed on the proposed Real ID rules and regulations.

Since I wished I had packed a lunch for my last excruciating visit to the New Mexico Department of Motor Vehicles (the wait took three hours), I imagine I also will have to pack a light snack too to tide me over through what may turn out to be nearly a five-and-a-half hour process if Real ID remains on the books.

The long wait times will increase because Real ID requires, among other things, that every applicant for a license have a photo taken. Currently, DMVs take photos for licenses only after an applicant is approved. But under Real ID, everyone must have a photo taken whether they are approved for a license or not.

The wait times also will increase because all of the nation’s 242 million licensed drivers will be required to bring multiple documents to prove they are who they say they are. DMV clerks will have to check two utility bills for each applicant, a birth certificate and a passport, if you have one. (The utility bill section may put me in a Real ID limbo. All the utility bills in my household are in the name of my wife, the responsible member of the family.)

Maybe when Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who attached the Real ID Act to a must-pass emergency war supplemental bill two years ago, goes to apply for his new Real ID driver’s license at the Wisconsin DMV, he will encounter just how slow the application process can become. -- Bob Brewin

When it comes to IT projects frequently failing, Colorado is no exception. The state's troubled $223 million welfare benefit system is just one example.

But the state legislature is trying to do something about it, according to an article posted by the Rocky Mountain News. The Colorado Senate passed Senate Bill 254 abolishing the Colorado Commission on Information Management, which was compromised of lawmakers, private-sector experts and department heads who oversaw IT projects.

Taking over those duties will be the Colorado Governor's Office of Innovation and Technology, comprised of much of the same individuals: tech specialists and department heads, who will draw "on outside experts," according to the article. "The idea is for the governor's respected Chief Information Officer Michael Locatis to forge better collaboration and expertise-sharing among information technology teams now scattered across 20 agencies, said Rep. Bernie Buescher, D-Grand Junction," the newspaper reports. "An executive with strong private- and public-sector IT expertise, Locatis won praise as Denver's technology czar for forging the city's fragmented technology offices into a strong team."

The Rocky Mountain News quotes Buescher:

This is an effort to say: Let's get our very best minds together. Let's concentrate our effort. Let's make sure that when we do a new technology program that it's driven from within one department.

Is creating another office to oversee IT projects enterprisewide the answer for failed technology projects? Or is the key to IT project success a strong central leader? Or is it something else? Let us hear how you feel by clicking the "comment" link below.

Google and four state governments have teamed up to make public documents more easily retrievable when citizens conduct online searches, according to an article by the Associated Press.

"Google plans to announce Monday that it has already partnered with four states - Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia - to remove technical barriers that had prevented its search engine, as well as those of Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., from accessing tens of thousands of public records dealing with education, real estate, health care and the environment," the newswire reports.

The way state government computer networks are programmed has made it difficult for users to find public documents stored in state databases, but Google, working with state technology officers, have built "virtual road maps" to the databases where the documents are stored, the AP reports.

But privacy experts are worried that better access to public documents runs the risk of exposing private information, such as Social Security numbers. Many public documents in state databases contain Americans' Social Security numbers and other personal information.

Federal law prohibits the sale of guns to anyone judged mentally ill, but most states are unable to share mental health records with an FBI computer network that would block the sale of guns to the mentally ill because of privacy laws or state computer systems that are incompatible.

That may change if a long dormant bill in Congress -- revived after the shootings at Virginia Tech -- is passed. The bill would provide $1 billion to states to pay for computer network upgrades and to remove privacy law obstacles, according to an Associated Press article. According to the article:

Privacy laws and lack of technical ability now prevent 28 states from sharing such information with the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System based in Clarksburg, W.Va., according to a Justice Department report.

“Every one of these records that is not transferred is the record of someone who federal law has said is too dangerous to buy a gun,” said Dennis Henigan, legal director of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Such a system should have prevented Seung-Hui Cho, the gunman who killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech, from buying guns. In 2005, Cho was declared mentally ill by a special judge's order, according to a New York Times article.

Some education experts question spending on interactive white boards and other advanced technologies that connect classrooms throughout New South Wales in Australia, according an article on the online news site The Age.

The interactive white boards are "the latest high-tech device charged with transforming the state's classrooms, along with broadband links, a student portal, notebooks and digital cameras," the site reports. "But there are doubts in some corners whether the ... resources are being wasted on political techno-daydreams rather then basic school needs, such as toilet upgrades and roofing repairs. It is claimed the whiteboards and their video link allow greater subject choice to students, let gifted pupils take higher classes in other cities, facilitate expert lectures and afford online 'field trips' for children in remote localities."

The theory that computers in the classroom raise academic scores in American schools has been debated for more than a decade. Just today, the Kansas City Star published an article debating the academic value of technology in the classroom.