Quad Council salutes cutting-edge initiatives

The government has a reputation for lagging behind the private sector when it comes to technology use, but at least five e-government projects are on the cutting edge of information technology, a senior administration official said.


Mark Forman, the Office of Management and Budget's associate director for IT and e-government, March 20 honored the five initiatives with awards from the Quad Council, which is made up of the CIO, Chief Financial Officers, Procurement Executives and Human Resources Managers councils.


"At the level of spending we do with IT, we need to be on the leading edge," Forman told the audience at the luncheon at FOSE 2002 in Washington. "These projects exemplify that leading edge, and with these we are catching up and passing industry in using technology."


The winners were:


*Small Business Administration's www.Businesslaw.gov. The site, launched in December, helps small businesses find, understand and comply with federal, state and local laws and regulations.


*Defense Department's Common Access Card. The card combines an identification infrastructure with public-key infrastructure and physical access into a single platform for electronic business functions and to improve security and communication.


*Interior Department's Recreation One-stop, one of OMB's 24 e-gov initiatives. Interior will build on Recreation.gov to develop a national database of recreational information, provide transactional services and a searchable map.


*Transportation Department's Virtual University. The site, which was folded into the Office of Personnel Management's electronic learning e-gov initiative, promotes distance learning and makes taking courses easier and less costly for employees.


*Environmental Protection Agency's Natural Language Interface to Web Content project. The project merited a new award for innovation. It lets EPA's chemical emergency preparedness prevention office disseminate real-time Web content to local emergency planning committees and to less equipped groups by standard telephone.


Projects were chosen from 16 initiatives nominated by members of the Quad Council.