CIO Council Webcast outlines e-gov efforts

The federal Chief Information Officers Council aired its first-ever Webcast Thursday. It focused on the federal government's electronic government initiatives.

A large part of the Webcast was devoted to an update on FirstGov, the federal government's Web portal. To date, citizens have visited FirstGov more than 3.5 million times. On a typical day, the portal delivers over 180,000 page views, said Jim Flyzik, CIO at the Treasury Department and vice-chair of the CIO Council.

The council envisions "state and local government sites being integrated into the entire FirstGov site and the search index," Flyzik said. Currently, FirstGov has signed agreements with 35 partners and has sent applications to more than 300 interested parties.

According to Flyzik, several agencies have reported increases in traffic at their Web sites since FirstGov was launched.

The rest of the Webcast was devoted to discussing the council's efforts to document the multitude of e-gov projects currently under way in the federal government.

John Dyer, senior advisor to the commissioner of the Social Security Administration and co-chair of the council's committee on electronic government, reported on a survey of agencies about their customers, the services they deliver and the ways they interact with customers. The survey showed that a third of the federal government's customers are citizens, while the rest are evenly divided among other government entities, businesses and federal employees.

Dyer said agencies are moving away from providing Web sites that solely offer data to sites with transaction capability. Thirty percent of government agencies currently have some form of transaction capability on their Web sites, Dyer said. The figure rises to 50 percent for agencies that deal mostly with the nation's businesses.