Sitemapping provides you with new partners

Customized RSS for jobs data

For a long time, I was hoping that our Department of Workforce Services (DWS) would provide RSS feeds of new jobs as they were added to the jobs database. Now it's not really necessary. By sitemapping the data and making it available to search engines, DWS has freed the data and doesn't have to worry so much about the presentation layer. In a previous post, I mentioned how companies like Indeed.com take care of that. I can do a search for any job title and location using Indeed's search engine and it will provide me with the data, much of which is gathered in near real time. Even better, Indeed provides me a custom RSS feed for any search combination of jobs that I might be looking for.

Woopra
I was checking Carlos Guadian's excellent K-Government blog this morning when out popped Carlos in a Woopra chat window. Woopra had notified Carlos that I was reading his blog, so he just initiated the chat. Very cool and surprising.

From Nebraska to Singapore

Just finished our latest Architecture Review Board meeting. Our architecture process is nimble and enabled through a technical architecture wiki that is hosted in the cloud (wikispaces). We have been adding database functionality to it a little at a time using Zoho Creator in order to track the architecture requests and potential exceptions. It all seems to be working well together.

We've been discussing the cloud a lot lately. Last week I had the chance to speak about our cloud strategy at the Nebraska Digital Summit and then later via videoconference with a FutureGov conference on cloud computing in Singapore. Casey Coleman of GSA also shared information on how the federal government is implementing apps.gov. In Utah, we are working on a very similar approach to provisioning apps and services in our hybrid cloud.

I have been thinking a lot about how various aspects of augmented and virtual reality can be effectively applied in government. Then I had send someone send me this video of Pranav Mistry speaking at TEDIndia. Phenomenal!



I finally received my invitation to Google Wave a couple of weeks ago and have been trying it out. It certainly has a place in the overall mix of collaboration tools so I was interested when Novell announce their new Pulse product which integrates with Wave.

Cathilea Robinett from the Center for Digital Government was here yesterday to present the Best of the Web award to Governor Gary Herbert. The Governor said some very encouraging things about the importance of our digital channel and online citizen services. Lt. Governor Bell is also reaching out with his new website which includes a Facebook site, YouTube, RSS...

Layar and Augmented Reality

Layar is a new free app for iPhone 3GS and Android that is essentially an augmented reality browser. There are quite a few potential applications for this technology using government data. Sunlight Labs put together a very cool layer using ARRA data.

Here's a review of the technology that might help as you begin envisioning how to use it:

Boyd Webb is starting to post other examples of augmented reality on the Investigating Augmented Reality blog.

Creating Utah's Hybrid Cloud

In 2005, the state of Utah began testing server virtualization and provisioning server slices for LAMP dynamically. More recently, a decision was made to move all 38 data center and server room servers into two primary data centers, one in Salt Lake City with a secondary location in Richfield where it could be in a different earthquake zone for business continuity purposes. In August, Utah's CIO announced that Utah is preparing a private cloud in an interview with Government Technology magazine. Utah's private cloud is a critical piece of our overall deployment of a hybrid cloud environment which will include infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and, of most interest to me, software as a service. The goal will be to enable dynamic provisioning of all of our important services. Here's a little more detail on our plans.

Government as a Platform

O'Reilly is putting on a phenomenal conference today in Washington DC, the gov2.0 Summit. Utah's Jeff Nigbur was able to participate as a presenter in the Gov 2.0 Showcase which featured presentations in several categories. Jeff's presentation was a winner in the "Government as a Protector" category. I believe that you will be able to view it online at blip.tv. His presentation was about the new Public Safety media portal which uses Twitter, Google maps and a variety of other services to keep the media and the public aware of incidents as they occur throughout the state. A new html 5 mobile app is completed this month which will meet the needs of reporters especially as they are mobile and need real-time information.

I have been thinking a little about Tim O'Reilly's statement that government is a platform. Government does not need to provide just neatly packaged applications and services like we have focused on in the second phase of the egov revolution, but can provide information and services that can be built upon and leveraged by others. This was part of our thought when we developed http://data.utah.gov which rolled out earlier this year.

Two years ago, Utah and three other states partnered with Google on a project to increase access to government information. A key part of this project was sitemapping key data sets, one of which was the Utah jobs database. Users can now access new jobs directly through any search engine as they become available in the state's database. Several weeks ago, I noticed that Indeed.com was one of the top referrers to the Utah.gov domain so I spent a few minutes to see what they were doing. Indeed has become one of the top job search sites on the web and I could see how effective they were at mining the information that we had made available. Then I discovered that Indeed has an iPhone mobile application that is extremely effectived at finding jobs based on location. A lot of the jobs available through the Indeed service locally are those that are available from Jobs.Utah.gov which Indeed discovers! Jobs.Utah.gov has done 4,109,869 online referrals just through August this year! Only 172,641 referrals have been done through the offline traditional channel. Shows what can happen as information is made available. By the way, Utah unemployment this year has averaged about three percent less than the national average. I'm not sure what other ways people are leveraging the jobs data to add value, but it certainly has been effective.

From the Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center:

A recent EU report says that Europe has more broadband subscribers and better mobile Internet penetration than any other nation on earth. The 114 million subscribers of the 27 EU member countries comfortably exceeds the 84 million broadband subscribers in the U.S. and 88 million broadband subscribers in China as reported by UK research firm Point Topic.

I'm glad that the US has rebooted their broadband and wireless strategies. We shouldn't be lagging in this area and although huge progress has been made, I don't think we have exactly quantified what that progress is and identified where the gaps remain. Continued progress will be important for us to implement new augmented reality, virtual reality, and other kinds of immersive and semantically integrated services.

Twitter Outage

Twitter is down this morning. So far, it has been down for 58 minutes in August and I think all of that is this single outage, longer than any I can remember with the service. Over the last six months, Pingdom reports uptime of 99.79% for Twitter, but any outage seems like a long time. Our emergency management people view Twitter as a critical component for their public communications. Unfortunately, there is rarely a failproof communications method, that is why we have backups and alternatives.

Update (8:12 am MDT): outage is now an hour and 5 minutes.

According to the latest update (8:49 am MDT) Twitter is defending against a denial of service attack. Apparenty, this attack has had some impact on other services, including Facebook.

Thinking about ROI on a State Website

The last month has flown by and I haven't had a chance to respond to many of the comments that I have received via email, Twitter, etc. We have made a number of changes to the Utah.gov website based on feedback that we have received. At the same time, we are moving forward now with new services and many other interesting initiatives. I also tend to pay a lot of attention to quantitative data to help determine how to proceed with things and it is no different with our egovernment initiatives. In 2007, we put together a strategic egov plan for the state of Utah with input from across the state. That plan was designed to go through mid-2009. We began putting together the 2009-2012 egov plan over 6 months ago and it is now quite robust. We just haven't had time to put it into a publishable format.

The goals and concepts laid out in the plan have been shared internally with key personnel in state agencies. That gets to the ROI question. How do we determine that the value goals that we set up for our egovernment initiatives are being met and that we continue to move forward, rather than treading water or worse, move backward? We have learned that putting up a nice website is not a guarantee for increasing its use, or more importantly, increasing the use and utility of the services and information associated with it. Here are some things for managers of government websites to ask and measure:

• Is your web initiative aligned with the policies and goals of elected leaders?
• What are the utilization trends for your overall domain?
• How many services do you offer? What is the adoption rate for those services? (percent of the total transactions performed - online and offline) How are the adoption rates trending?
• Is your site optimized for search engines? Are you using sitemaps and metadata that helps external sources direct traffic to your domain?
• Do you understand you user demographics? How are you using that information to improve what you offer?
• Are we making business process adjustments to fully leverage potential efficiency gains?
  

Once you have the answers to these questions, there are many more that could, and should, be asked. But if you can optimize on these, you will be progressing. And you can't just do it and stop. In 2008, with support from many state agencies, our traffic and adoption both climbed dramatically. In the first few months of 2009, it has declined from 2008. We're not even sure yet what caused that, there are perhaps too many potential factors to completely understand. On the other hand, we are still significantly better than we were in 2007 and know that there are things we can do to improve the statistics.

Here are a few of the tools that we use:

• Compete.com
• Google Analytics
• Quantcast
• Alexa
• Utah.gov custom service satisfaction surveys
• Social media feedback
• Press releases
  

Absorbing comments on the new Utah.gov

In the process of developing a new design for the state government portal, we spent many months analyzing how the citizens and businesses of Utah were using our site and our services. We have done this each time we have made significant changes to the portal with several objectives in mind.

1. Increasing utilization. We want as many people as possible using the website. That is why we want it to remain alive and vibrant. We want citizens to realize that when they come back, they will find something new. We wanted a portal that will remain in people's memory. There is much competition for attention on today's internet and we believe that Utah.gov offers something important for our citizens. By 2007, we had plateaued at about 800,000 users so we made a lot of enhancements. We noticed a significant growth in users in 2008 as a result as our average unique users climbed to just over a million. Our growth seems to have leveled at around a million unique users on average. We hope that the new portal and many new services introduced in 2008-09 will generate enough interest to increase the number of online users.
   
2. More efficient government. As use in the portal grows, we have observed commensurate growth in the use of our online services. As adoption of online services grow, the average cost of providing that service drops. We have been able to document and demonstrate that repeatedly over time. Many services on Utah.gov are approaching 80-100% adoption rates. Utah now has over 860 online services and has been able to make many efficient business process changes as a result. We want them discoverable from the portal. Long lists of services no longer suffice.
   
3. Usability. We want all citizens to use and appreciate their state portal. We have long included an assessment of user communities in the process of building our portal. Through analytics, we observed that 97% of our users had Flash installed when they visited Utah.gov. We also noted the growth in bandwidth available to the majority of site visitors. The new site is an attempt to benefit from those changing demographics.
4. More open government. Utah seeks to be responsive to its citizens. Many of our new features (Data, Multimedia, Connect) have that goal in mind, along with our participation in social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
   

Based on the vast majority of the feedback we have received, we assume that the changes we have made to Utah.gov have been very well received. We have never received as much response as with the current upgrade. We have already made several changes to the site in response to the feeback such as slowing our Explore Utah carousel, adding a pause component, etc. We have processed the site through several automated accessibility checkers both before and after launch and made a few changes to ensure accessibility for our users.

Perhaps the most challenging comments came from a couple of Wisconsin state developers (I'm assuming they are developers from the nature of their comments) on Paul Taylor's blog. I'm not going to spend a lot of time debating the merits of our approach vs. theirs. I haven't done an assessment of their user base and our site at one time looked a little more like theirs. I can say that we will continue to try to provide the very best digital government product possible to our citizens in Utah.

Images of Utah's State Capitol

New Utah Travelwise Videos

Utah.gov Acknowledgements

Day One for our new Utah.gov portal is now history. That's always a little challenging, especially when you make the kind of dramatic changes that this effort has meant for us.. Even though lots of testing and analysis was done in advance, it's never possible to predict how something new will be received. Overall, the response was very positive. We are also learning in the process and will apply what we learn to future activities.

The efforts that resulted in the new portal really began in 2007 when we put together our new state egovernment plan. That plan was intended to take us through this summer and we have used it regularly as a mechanism for progress. We have now achieved much of what was outlined in that plan and have a lengthy draft of the 2009-2011 egov plan ready to complete.

In developing our plans, we have sought to learn from the best minds in the business. I can't mention them all, but I will mention a few.

• Tim O'Reilly - like the hundreds of thousands of people who follow Tim on Twitter, we track his vision for the web and for society. We have tried to integrate some of that vision into what we are doing with Utah.gov.
  
• Dion Hinchcliffe - Dion understands architecture and does a better job visualizing it than about anyone I can think of. Architecture is an important part of what we are doing in the state right now and our technical architecture wiki is beginning to reflect that.
  
• Paul Taylor - Paul has a tremendous vision for digital government. His contributions to the field, along with Cathilea Robinett and the Center for Digital Government have provided an incredible forum for sharing ideas on egovernment
  
• Steve Fletcher - as CIO of the State of Utah, he has provided an environment where we are able to implement new ideas in productive ways.
• David Stephenson - one of the more strategic thinkers about how web 2.0 can be used to improve government, particularly in the homeland security space.
  

Obviously, there are many more.

Tools of the Trade
A big part of our planning has been focused around developing more and better collaboration between agencies, citizens, and the global community. We have tried to use tools that support that paradigm, including:

• Google - Our relationship with Google has been great. The partnership that was implemented in 2006 and the use of their CSE has been phenomenal. We have also used Google Docs for sharing ideas and managing projects associated with the latest release.
  
• Twitter - this tool gives us access to interaction with and real time response from the global community. Our new Utah.gov site features over 100 state and local government Twitter feeds that provide daily interaction with Utah citizens and other interested parties from beyond our state borders.
• Slideshare - this is one of the many additional web 2.0 tools that we will continue to leverage now and in the future. We have incorporated them into our enterprise technical architecture standards. I could also mention Wikispaces, Swivel, YouTube, Ning, etc., all of which have helped make us a more collaborative state.
  

My goal in mentioning these tools is not to promote a specific product, but to give credit to companies that have helped us develop a broader vision for what we can become as a government.

Day One Commentary on Utah.gov
We appreciate those who have commented on our initial release of Utah.gov in traditional media, on blogs, and on Twitter. Here are a few I have gleaned...

• Federal Computer Week
  

• Paul Taylor: Utah.gov: This is the Portal you've been waiting for

• Ines Mergel

• Ari Herzog

• Jaimy Marie

• Paul Canning
  

Finally, I acknowledge the efforts of our development teams, state agencies, and state leadership. When we put together the 2007-09 egov plan we had 550 online services. In just two years, that number has climbed to over 850. Utah Interactive developers and designers have put in long hours to help us achieve this plateau in our climb upward and have responded incredibley to the requests made of them. Rich Olsen, Sara Watts, and Bob Woolley have been a critical part of making this a reality. Also thanks to Chris Neff and Hillary Hartley for helping us clarify our strategy. Our climb won't stop here.

New Utah.gov

Look for the new Utah.gov to go live soon. We have worked hard to create a new experience for users of the Utah.gov portal. The new website is a dramatic departure from traditional state portals with an abundance of new features. In 2007, we worked hard to create a similar kind of experience. At the end of the year, we had set the goal to achieve over a million unique visitors in a given month in 2008. It happened quickly, and in fact we average over a million uniques that year. Our purpose of course is to create a government which is more efficient, as well as responsive to its users. We hope that the new portal will have the same kind of reaction. It has much more integration with government 2.0 and social media tools, including multimedia. It also includes a data portal which will provide better access to data available from the state. The data portal is just a beginning. We will continue to add data over time which can be reutilized by citizens and businesses. I'll let you know more as we roll out the site. For now, here's an early preview of what it will look like...

Google Squared

I tried out Google Squared at the end of a long day and immediately fell in love with it. Even though it is not yet perfect, it holds tremendous potential for all kinds of things, including many that we may do in government. I'm hoping that Google will eventually provide tools to export the data, to mash it up if it has geography, etc. Here are a few examples of the kind of results you can get:

• Utah High Schools
• Utah Governors
• Utah State Parks
• Utah Newspapers

You get the idea. As Google continues to refine this tools, it could be absolutely tremendous.

Transparent.Utah.gov

Our new transparency website is now live. Lots of effort has gone into making sure that this site is the most usable and most detailed transparency site around. I just got back from the press conference where it was announced. Here it is: