E-gov ready to take off

Over the next four months, Mark Forman and his colleagues at the Office of Management and Budget expect to launch up to 21 first or second iterations of the 24 Quicksilver e-government initiatives.

During Quicksilver's first cycle, participating agencies put up Web sites and provided simple tools to show that the government can provide integrated customer-centric focus, said Forman, OMB's associate director for information technology and e-government. Forman spoke Sept. 4 at the Interagency Resources Management Council conference in Hershey, Pa., outlining how he sees agency projects moving over the next six to eight months.

Forman said that by next summer, OMB will give the projects' managing partners the choice of two Web service platforms that will let the initiatives more easily share similar transactional processes. He said the platforms will be the IBM Grid Computing Platform and Microsoft's .Net. "I'm very happy with the change we are seeing," Forman said. "We have to continue to focus on the Web. This is the fundamental way we are dealing with the public."