March 19, 2004

The E-Gov Spotlight

Tom Pyke
Chief Information Officer
U.S. Department of Commerce

The U.S. Department of Commerce is "the voice of business in government."

Commerce has 40,000 workers, a $5.8 billion budget, and a vast mission: to promote job creation and improved living standards for all Americans by fostering an infrastructure that advances economic growth, technological competitiveness, and sustainable development.

It falls to veteran CIO Tom Pyke to ensure that Commerce makes effective use of its considerable information technology resources.

As chief information officer, Pyke oversees an annual IT budget that tops $1.5 billion. His responsibilities include IT policy, IT planning and capital investment review. Also in his portfolio: IT security and critical infrastructure protection, IT architecture, information quality, E-Government, information dissemination through the Internet and Next Generation Internet, and oversight of IT operations.

"Our priorities in IT management this fiscal year are improving the Department's IT security posture and the protection of critical assets," Pyke says. Also on tap: strengthening Commerce's IT planning process, including the increased use of earned value management, and "improving the way IT projects are tied to top level agency goals," he said.

Another big job will be completing the move toward the use of E-Government for all transactions by the Department with its customers. Pyke notes that all Commerce IT projects are on schedule and within budget. "Commerce has been a leader for several years in the use of E-Government to make transactions between our customers and the Department as effective as possible and to disseminate vast amounts of data and information through the Internet."

Indeed, a visit to http://www.commerce.gov provides quick access to information ranging from the latest national economic indicators to current population data, and from today's weather to the official time, courtesy of, respectively, the U.S. Census Bureau, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). All of these programs come under the Commerce umbrella. Pyke has been a senior manager of information technology at Commerce for over 30 years. Before assuming his role as Commerce's CIO, he was CIO and Director for High Performance Computing and Communications at NOAA and Director of the GLOBE Program. In the latter post, he led an interagency team to create an international environmental science and education program now involving over 14,000 GLOBE schools in 104 countries.

Pyke is the author of more than 40 technical papers and reports and has lectured widely at conferences and symposiums. He has received numerous awards, including the Department of Commerce Gold Medal Award and two Presidential Meritorious Rank Awards.

FirstGov Receives Highest Number of Visitors in its History

FirstGov.gov continues to attract impressive numbers of website visitors. The portal recently had its best week since its launch in September 2000. During the week of February 8 - 14, there were more than two million unique visitors, with 47,174 of those visitors returning to the site during the same week. These impressive numbers tell us that more and more citizens are learning about the portal. Also, citizens are returning to FirstGov because they know they can find trusted, accurate, and up-to-date services and information from their government on their terms.

FirstGov.gov Seeks Users' Feedback With New Feature

Continuing the practice of involving customers in improving FirstGov.gov, the site is soliciting agency and public input into ideas on how to improve all government agency websites (that is, common web content standards). This is being done as a service to the Interagency Committee on Government Information (ICGI), in support of the ICGI workgroup on web content management. The web form soliciting input is available from the FirstGov.gov home page or by going directly to the form at: http://www.firstgov.gov/feedback/WebStandardsForm.jsp

Two New Partners Sign Up With USA Services

The EPA and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) have signed agreements with USA Services to handle their misdirected e-mails and telephone calls. These two new agencies join twelve others in taking advantage of this new free service from GSA.

The CIO at the EPA is Kim Nelson, and L. Reynolds Cahoon is the CIO at NARA.

FirstGov Shines as Model for Government Collaboration

The FirstGov.gov portal is a model of successful public-private partnership, according to a recently released study by the Center for Technology in Government. The study is titled "New Models of Collaboration: A Guide for Managers." The center examined 15 projects that involved government collaboration around the world.

The study highlighted FirstGov.gov as an example of a successful public-private partnership involving multiple agencies and the private sector. "The development of FirstGov.gov introduced a number of changes in the way the federal government operates," the study stated.

According to the study, another factor that led to the portal's success has been the buy-in from the participating parties. The authors of the study did not view FirstGov.gov as "a typical government project, mired in procurement and acquisition regulations, and constrained by the federal budget," the study said. "It was much more like that of a start-up 'dot-com' fueled by the energy and engagement of its members, and their belief in the project."

New Cross-Agency Portals Listing Posted on FirstGov.gov

Cross-agency portals are gateways that bring together federal information and services from multiple agencies about a particular topic or for a particular customer group. The underlying principle of the cross-agency portals is to lead website visitors to various information areas and a range of services, based on their needs, and without needing to know the government's organizational structure. Some of the cross-agency portals are broad in scope (for example, kids.gov, seniors.gov, science.gov) and others serve smaller communities of interest working on specific topics (for example, xml.gov, section508.gov, and usability.gov). The cross-agency portal link is on the left column of every FirstGov.gov page or can be reached directly at: http://firstgov.gov/Topics/Cross_Agency_Portals.shtml