Promising New Technologies

or each of the top issues that turned up in our survey, the information technology industry is developing products that could mitigate the problem. Here is a sampling of emerging products, many of which have not yet been installed on a large scale.

Information Mapping

Organizations need new tools for organizing voluminous and unstructured information, such as electronic mail messages. Several agencies, including all three military services, have used software, training and consulting services from Information Mapping Inc. of Waltham, Mass. This company's main product is a methodology that can be used in many different kinds of projects, not just technical ones.

A newcomer to this field, NetViz Corp. of Rockville, Md., sometimes describes its product as business graphics software and sometimes calls it "a communication and problem-solving tool," illustrating the difficulty of even discussing these issues. NetViz software users, who need not be IT specialists, can diagram relationships between data, organizations or systems, as one would with an organizational chart or flowchart. Then they can link a symbol to an underlying database or spreadsheet or another chart with related data.

The result can be a single picture of complex information relationships, giving the viewer the opportunity to "drill down" through layers of data as needed. The company calls these diagrams "intelligent drawings." Army and Marine Corps units are using the software to package information with varying degrees of detail for different audiences, ranging from colonels to communications technicians.

Another start-up company, RAF Technology Inc. of Redmond, Wash., is helping the Postal Service with its massive paper flows. RAF custom-builds systems that scan incoming data in paper and other formats, edit the information for processing and correct some errors. The company was founded by ex-NASA scientists specializing in pattern recognition.

Meanwhile, a flood of document management products continues. Most of these combine the power of electronic mail with forms and databases to route information, facilitate action and store files for future retrieval.

Collaboration

As agencies shrink, outsource some of their operations, and reorganize, the need for better internal communications and collaboration tools intensifies.

One such tool is videoconferencing, which for most organizations hasn't yet delivered on a long-standing promise to enhance business communications. That situation is changing, according to Craig
Reichenbach, vice president of federal sales for PictureTel Corp. of Andover, Mass. After years of relying on telephone lines with inadequate capacity for heavy-duty video transmissions (just like home connections to the World Wide Web), PictureTel now offers systems that communicate via office networks and the Internet.

With the video capabilities on today's PCs, Reichenbach says, PictureTel customers not only can see the people they're talking with, but they can share data on their screens-spreadsheets, for example, or PowerPoint slides.

Besides holding video meetings, he says, agencies can use videoconferencing for employee training and other purposes. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories is using off-the-shelf videoconferencing systems so that engineers can collaborate regardless of the NASA center where they are located. And the technology will be a good fit with kiosks for public access to government services, Reichenbach adds.

Reichenbach stresses the new affordability of desktop videoconferencing. For less than $4,000, PictureTel will supply all the hardware (including a tiny camera) and software to get two PC users videoconferencing over an office network. Group videoconferencing systems, the kind normally found in a conference room, are becoming less expensive too. For example, Polycom Inc. of San Jose, Calif., is selling its ViewStation systems for less than $6,000.

Digital Signatures

If agencies are to streamline their operations, they need to move away from the paradigm of moving paper from one desk to another as the means of getting their work done.

But going paperless means going without signatures to approve and authorize actions-and signatures are central to the government's culture, as well as the laws and rules that agencies live by.

After becoming bogged down for years in ideology-driven debates over encryption technology, the government is now moving toward the use of commercial products and services to keep electronic transactions secure and authenticate their legitimacy. Two small companies are offering desktop products that allow officials to sign online documents electronically.

Silanis Technology Inc. of Dorval, Quebec, has sold its ApproveIT software for Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. With ApproveIT, users can sign an on-screen document using a pen-based digitizer pad on the spot or can recall a stored digital signature. In either case, the document is stored online in a protected file that keeps it from being altered after signature.

The IRS is accepting digital signatures generated using PC software from PenOp Inc. of New York City. This system does not use stored signatures but captures unique information about the signer's use of the digital pen.

It's often said there's no magic bullet to get millions of lines of old software ready for the century change. But one small Framingham, Mass., company is offering a hard-to-find service that gets high marks from customers, including some in government.

The Source Recovery Co. LLC regenerates missing COBOL or Assembler source code-the programming that underlies old mainframe software in many government agencies. Up to 5 percent of all source code is missing, according to experts at the Gartner Group, a consulting and market research firm. Sometimes it has been misplaced over the course of a couple of decades. In other cases, the agency did not get all the source from the contractors who developed its systems, or the code was not preserved by in-house programmers once the program was running.

Without the source code, programmers may have to rewrite the software to fix faulty date references that won't work after Dec. 31, 1999. Under such circumstances, it may be cheaper to scrap the program altogether and create a new one that carries out the same functions. But the Source Recovery Co. can recover the lost code "for a fraction of the cost" of those alternatives, company officials claim. Their services are faster than re-creating code, they say, and source code recovery means no new problems will be introduced along with the new code.