The future of U.S. government IT systems will include a big
focus on converting old data into electronic form, two government
IT leaders said Friday.
The U.S. government's intelligence agencies are looking heavily
into technology that can quickly convert typewritten and even
handwritten text into electronic data, said Greg Pepus, senior
director of federal outreach at In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm
funded by U.S. agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA).
Intelligence agents need technology that can quickly convert
notes handwritten in Arabic or in symbols to electronic data that
can be easily shared and put into a database, he said.
"The problem is the vast majority of data in the world isn't in
databases," Pepus said during a panel discussion about the future
of U.S. government IT needs at the Gartner Inc. Government
Conference 2006 in Washington, D.C.
In addition, In-Q-Tel is looking for better search technologies
that allow wide-ranging searches across multiple databases in one
interface, Pepus said. The goal is to produce targeted searches
that allow intelligence analysts to spend less time searching for
data and more time analyzing it, he said.
The U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) is looking for the
some of the same technology as In-Q-Tel, but for different reasons,
said Kimberlee Mitchel, senior technical advisor for the agency.
The SSA has massive amounts of data still in "unstructured" formats
such as paper, and the agency wants to move that data to electronic
form, she said.
The move to electronic form will allow the agency to better
track and serve U.S. citizens who are eligible for Social Security
retirement benefits, she said. In the future, U.S. citizens
shouldn't have to file paperwork to receive checks, she said.
"We envision a future where we gather data almost
transparently," she said. "When you're eligible for Social
Security, the check shows up in your checking account."
The SSA is also looking at handwriting recognition software, and
new ways to ensure data integrity, as data moves from paper to
electronic form and is shared between U.S. agencies, Mitchel said.
"Your data is only as good as where it comes from," she said.
While the federal government looks into software than can
convert paper data into electronic form, some state governments see
open-source software as the wave of the future, said Dennis Wells,
deputy chief information officer for the Office of Information
Services at the Oregon Department of Human Resources.
Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat, has funded
open-source projects and identified open-source development as an
economic driver for the state, Wells noted. Oregon is also working
with other states to push open-source technology as a way to
generate the myriad of reports states need to file with the federal
government, Wells said.
States are looking at ways to encourage software vendors to
offer open-source packages that could be tailored to each state's
needs, instead of each state buying its own software to generate
reports to the federal government, he said. "We think there's a
smarter way to do it," he said.
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