Another point from a panel I attended this morning…

Apparently, justifying IT and infrastructure spending is difficult, especially given that budget requests come up through administrative structures, themselves anathema to inter-agency coordination.  This is probably why e-government spending in the executive branch is inefficiently distributed among agencies and generally resented.

If those people selecting spending priorities and making spending requests make justifications on the basis of technology that is always being developed, and should be coordinated among departments, agencies, and even branches of government, then doesn’t it make sense that that spending case could only be made by a larger collaborative effort?  If meaningful communication is usually grounded in practical circumstances, then what practical circumstances (either natural or imposed) exist to force administrators to coordinate their technology spending and development priorities?  If administrators aren’t even efficiently communicating with each other, we shouldn’t expect policy experts, academic researchers, industry voices, or especially the public to have a chance to offer meaningful input.

What are the options to staff, organizers, or appropriators who want to fill this coordinative hole?  Some extra-agency coordinative bodies exist already, like the Council of CIOs, or NASCIO, and these functions are certainly being addressed to some degree by the GSA, OMB, and the good example of some agency information-policy setters.

The coordination, however, isn’t nearly enough.

The public’s ability to affect public information administration may be even more limited than their ability to affect public policy creation (Congress), since there’s at least an expectation of representation from elected officials.  That doesn’t mean there’s not a similar public stake in administrative and executive information, however.  The same coalitions that exist around congressional information presumably exist for the executive, where strong network effects should magnify the benefits of effective information distribution for both public and governmental agents.

Some models for coordinative and advisory committees are outlined in these CRS reports (rls 22725 and 33313) on advisory committees, although this description doesn’t nearly take into account the potential offered by the broader public in playing a technological advisory role.

The degree to which conferences, universities, non-profits, blogs, the media, and other citizen groups will fill this coordinative gap is uncertain, but if the government doesn’t coordinate better within itself, pressure and expectations will only grow from the outside, perhaps making the ultimate adjustments less comfortable, and the lag between the private and public sectors only more glaring.