IT mentors will identify best practices for e-gov

In six weeks, 10 of the Office of Management and Budget’s 24 approved e-government initiatives will each receive what could be a road map for success.Teams of government and industry experts met for the first time this month to start collecting public and commercial best practices and will outline refined strategies for the 10 projects in white papers.“These teams really are acting as consultants to the e-gov teams,” said Debra Stouffer, co-chairwoman of the CIO Council’s Best Practices Committee. “The concentration of thought, leadership and resources is really needed to ensure success.”Stouffer, who is on detail to the OMB e-government and IT office from her job as deputy CIO at the Housing and Urban Development Department, tapped members of the Industry Advisory Council to fill out the teams. The government can learn from industry’s experiences and make use of its technical expertise, she said.The participating vendors include American Management Systems Inc. of Fairfax, Va., IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp., PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP of New York and Unisys Corp. Between 80 and 100 industry executives are taking part in the exercise.The council chose the 10 e-gov projects based on suggestions from OMB and their potential for far-reaching impact. Later, OMB will form teams for each of the remaining 14 e-gov projects, Stouffer said.“We picked those projects that we felt would benefit early from collecting best practices, and those we could quickly and easily collect best practices on,” she said. “This is quite an ambitious list.”Before the e-gov project leaders apply the suggestions of their mentor teams, OMB will review each team’s white paper.The CIO Collective, an association of industry CIOs, also will review the reports.Although this is not the first time commercial and public organizations have collaborated on best-practices reports, the time frame of the e-gov efforts is unique.Stouffer said previous efforts have taken six to nine months and looked at broader issues.IAC members BroadVision Inc. of Redwood City, Calif., PricewaterhouseCoopers, Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego and Sprint Corp. also created a password-protected Web site for communicating, sharing information and announcing upcoming meetings.