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The perils of federal publishing and the benefits of SaaS project management services: or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the audit.

Article Excerpt
Halfway through working on my original column last week, I received an email from the government that is most people's worst nightmare (including mine). It read:



The [insert agency name] has requested an audit of work performed since 2007.

I left out the "Dear Mr. Arnold" and "Sincerely:" niceties, but the letter was that succinct and to the point. This unnamed (by me) agency has been a client of mine for years and this request totally blindsided me. They gave me no warning and, never having had the pleasure of reviewing work completed over a year ago, it made me very nervous. However, the audit turned out to be relatively easy as a result of the SaaS/cloud computing project tools that I began using in 2007, when I made the clean break from Microsoft Project to online project management tools.

While I will leave out details of how or why the event transpired, I will say that I have been trying to educate the government on web services and cloud computing for the last few years. Most commercial companies operate within a mind-set that distinguishes an intranet (behind the firewall) and a public website (outside the firewall) and sets each with its own security requirements. Internal government applications need high security thresholds and standards and should incorporate new technologies only after a lot of planning and thought. However, once information is published outside the firewall, then another set of rules should apply--rules that focus on getting that information to the widest audience possible.

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From firsthand experience, I have seen how publishing information onto a website morphs into a major project. While the intentions are good, publishing information on a website is an application for that information. Someone in a government office has decided the format, the look and the feel, and how to present the information. HTML, PDF, and searchable databases ("deep web") are some of the most common formats.

Good Data, Bad Data Delivery

Without doubt, government agencies have good intentions in publishing their information on a website, but there are negative consequences to such an approach. Currently, the number of federal websites registered at the GSA's registry service, which handles the dot-gov domain assignments for the federal government, is estimated at 20,000. This means there are 20,000 different places for the...

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