E-government still a mixed bag

Agencies have yet to fulfill President Bush's electronic government initiatives, according to the White House's latest and last management score card.

Comment on this article in The Forum.The score card, released on Monday, gave 14 agencies a yellow, or having mixed results, on the e-government initiative, one of five categories in the President's Management Agenda. The administration gave six agencies a green, a score that signifies the agencies have fulfilled the e-gov initiatives, and six agencies received a red, or an unsatisfactory grade.

The Homeland Security and Interior departments raised their scores to yellow from red, while the Housing and Urban Development Department slipped from yellow to red. The Energy Department declined from green to yellow.

The grades reflect agencies' status as of Sept. 30, the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008. It is unclear whether the next president will continue the e-government initiative in its present form. The Office of Management and Budget, which releases the score card, was not available for comment when this story was posted.

Ray Bjorklund, senior vice president and chief knowledge officer for Federal Sources, a marketing research firm in McLean, Va., said the next presidential administration likely will continue the practice of grading agencies' progress on managing information technology, though the format could change.

"As long as the next administration embraces the concept and the principle of those initiatives . . . they can pursue them and develop measures to see if the desired objective is being reached, kind of like the score card," Bjorklund said. "My gut says regardless of who gets elected, there will probably be some sort of management oversight and scoring to measure how the government is doing."

Bjorklund also credited the scoring process with spurring progress in e-government. "Because the White House put a significant amount of emphasis on measuring progress in the e-government initiatives, progress has been made," he said. "We wouldn't have seen quite as much progress if it was just a stated initiative."

He added that the scoring system was useful for the administration and the public, despite the fact that most citizens never heard of it.