Lighting the Way

In this issue, we celebrate innovation at federal agencies: their deployment of information technologies to improve operations and provide a better return, and better services, to the taxpayers.

Reading about the winners of the 2004 Government Technology Leadership Awards, one is struck by the scale of some of the innovations and the implicitly large task that goes with their adoption-gaining acceptance in bureaucratic cultures resistant to change. It is precisely because the deployment of technologies requires rethinking organizational structures and established ways of business that technology is no longer under the control of technologists, but rather the concern of senior management, in both career and political ranks. Solving a problem is what counts, with technology as one piece of the puzzle.

One of the awards celebrates the Veterans Health Administration's adoption of a software program to guard against mistakes in prescribing drugs. So here, the VA is leading a little bit of culture change by asking doctors to step up to a computer.

Another award recognizes the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's Palan-terra project that provides an innovative visual display of intelligence data for large public events, such as a digital version of San Diego in preparation for Super Bowl XXXVII. The technology would not be effective without access to material from state and local governments as well as federal agencies-posing the intergovernmental challenge that's so important in homeland security planning.

A third, the Defense Department's myPay program, offers active and retired military personnel and Defense civilians the opportunity to view and submit changes to pay, benefits and travel accounts without filing extensive paperwork.

This program emphasizes an essential trend enabled by technology, what IBM Corp., in a new study of innovation, called "the primacy of the individual." In the government context, people want easy access to information and services no matter where they are housed, and here, government still has a long way to go.

The IBM "Global Innovation Outlook" report, available at www.ibm.com/gio, chooses government and health care as two areas of focus. In neither is innovation portrayed as easily achieved. Better care and great efficiencies would be possible in health care systems if individual records could be made electronic and analyzed on an aggregate basis. Security would be enhanced if governments likewise could gain access to personal data. But these would require a level of trust that simply does not accrue to public sector institutions.

The IBM study, the distillation of thoughts from hundreds of people around the world, begins by making a simple point: Invention is not the real key to innovation. "Innovation requires human interaction and broad-scale adoption, and is almost always more about what we do with an idea than the idea itself." That's what's happening slowly but surely in the kinds of programs celebrated by the Government Technology Leadership Awards.

This month we conclude a 10-part series by NAPA fellows on key issues for the next presidential term, with a column by C. Morgan Kinghorn, president of the National Academy of Public Administration, and William Shields Jr., vice president for administration. The essays are on our Web site, at www.govexec.com/NAPA.