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All That Glitters
By Cristina McEachern In the private sector, companies can snag headlines for pioneering IT endeavors. Think Wal-Mart and RFID or Ford and VoIP. But for the government sector, caution reigns supreme when tax dollars are in play. So while margins for selling emerging technologies can be attractive, selling controversial, risky or unproven technologies in the public sector presents some unique challenges for integrators. The city of Tampa, Fla., for example, was on the cutting edge of facial-recognition software when it deployed a system in preparation for the Super Bowl in early 2001. The Tampa Police Department tested the solution for about a year, comparing facial snapshots against a database of criminals before the project was eventually scrapped. One of the project's biggest critics was the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which pointed out that, among other things, the software turned out to have difficulty distinguishing men from women, and it even gave false-positive IDs. No single arrest was made with the aid of the software, which wound up on the scrap heap of doomed IT projects. But before you give up entirely on cutting-edge technologies like the aforementioned, consider David Sullivan, CIO of Virginia Beach, Va. He sees his city's use of facial-recognition software as an integral part of what makes the popular tourist spot a Top Digital City. In fact, he's willing to be on the cutting edge in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of his jurisdiction."It's our willingness to test innovative technologies that has set us apart," Sullivan says. So, how can you make it worth your while to embrace emerging or controversial technologies? To help avoid failures, it's important for integrators to educate themselves and realize that government agencies might be more cautious than their commercial counterparts, but they are still apt to embrace emerging technologies. Below, GovernmentVAR takes a look at four controversial technology areas. In particular, we look at open-source software, facial-recognition technology, security and data-management, and examine what the pitfalls are and what to keep in mind when selling these technologies to the government.
Advancing With Open Source But wait. As with any disruptive technology and hint of controversy, open source demands caution. Government CIOs, just like their private-sector contemporaries, worry about reliability and suffer the same apprehensions about using software that is not tied to the engineering and support arms of a commercial company like Microsoft. There are also the red-tape issues; for example, all software used by the federal government must meet specific (in some cases, arcane) technical certifications. Most open-source offerings are way behind their commercial counterparts in this regard. And yet, a surprising number of agencies are either dipping their toes in the open-source waters or actually putting major open-source projects, many of them Linux-based, into real-world production. The Department of Defense hasn't shied away from considering open-source code, and, notably, the U.S. Navy is incorporating open-source software into a number of the mission-critical development projects it has contracted out to integrators. If you are going to sell the government on open-source software--anything from well-known Linux to the JBoss application server to a whole host of tools and individual components--the experts have some words of advice. For one, don't buck the system. Government agencies will listen, but you have to bend to their requirements (the aforementioned technical certifications being one) and protocols. If you do that, you have a better chance at selling them on open-source code as the basis for a software project, says John Weathersby, executive director of the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI), a non-profit organization devoted to promoting the adoption of open-source technologies by federal and state governments. OSSI works in conjunction with integrators and major vendors, such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, to educate government agencies about the benefits of using open source in their IT projects. It also helps open-source projects meet some of the stringent government certifications, and guides integrators trying to navigate the internal workings of government agencies. "The government is not an early adopter. They want mature stuff because they are playing with your money," Weathersby says. "But as open-source programs mature and more entities offer it as their standard offering, government will get more comfortable." ETS Development Group, a Colleyville, Texas-based integrator, has made significant open-source inroads with its government clients. The company is currently developing an all open-source jail-management system applications suite for Mississippi law enforcement (it is a federally funded project in conjunction with OSSI and the University of Southern Mississippi). The system incorporates Novell SuSE Enterprise Linux 9.1, JBoss application server and Postgres database. Once finished, the software will be made available to other law-enforcement agencies nationwide at no licensing cost. That's one of the beauties of open source, says Chris Turrentine, president of ETS. "Financial reasons are driving a lot of open-source projects inside the government," Turrentine says. "But we are also trying to provide open source to communities where it is possible to share the software among a number of municipalities." That's not possible with commercial applications, where each new user requires a software license, which can run projects well into the millions of dollars. Turrentine says one of the biggest hurdles to selling government on open source is its wariness about reliability. Most agencies have no problem piloting a project with open-source code, but get skittish when it comes time to really pull the curtain up in production. That's a key hesitation point where groups like OSSI can come in and educate, he says. OSSI's approach is a pragmatic one, according to Weathersby. "You really need to integrate open-source and proprietary software where it makes sense and works. Anything else is fanatical." |
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