MARTY WAGNER: "HOW I USE THE WEB" Marty Wagner's career path has taken him in many directions * economic analyses of regulations for the EPA, * communications issues for the OMB * Director of Telecommunications Management for the Treasury Deptartment * acting Deputy Commissioner for the Information Resources Management Service * work with Dean Irwin on the Electronic Commerce Acquisitions team to implement the Presidential memo on electronic commerce within government. Wagner currently serves as Associate Administrator for GSA's Office of Governmentwide Policy, where he rethinks and recreates policy framework to manage government assets -- determining how government buys, manages, and disposes of items. EG interviewed Wagner in his GSA office to get his views on how the Web has developed in government agencies. EG: How long ago would you say that Web technology became prominent in the government? Wagner:The beginnings of Web implementation resembled a guerrila approach, with people coming out of the woodwork two years ago, with NSF and NASA as two of those early Web adapters. I personally saw government agencies beginning making concerted efforts to use the Web about a year and a half ago. A few years ago, while working on electronic commerce, we had developed the FACNET, in order to hand RFQs to the public instead of just to the standard known entities. The FACNET was essentially a private virtual network -- an intranet -- that worked out of Ogden and Columbus, but it had some problems. And even as we were testing it, we were watching the Web develop and prove itself as a great way to disseminate information. Taking advantage of that technology, we eventually created a system called GSA Advantage, which now allows government agencies to search for products, compare prices, and purchase items from vendors, all via a centralized Web location. EG: Has implementing Web technology been a strong concern of GSA over the past year? Wagner: Things have been moving ever since Mr. Barram became Acting Administrator about six months ago. Originally from Silicon Valley, and having worked for Hewlett-Packard and served as Chief Financial officer for Apple Computers, he's very much interested in using technology effectively, and changing the way we do business as a government. One of his favorite phrases is "It's not your father's GSA [anymore]". It's his idea to load up everything we've got. He also believes that having Internet access is part of every GSA employee's job. Even if you can't figure out right now why you might need the Web, we'll give it to you anyway because in the future you WILL need it. In general, we consider Internet access to be a valuable government resource, and it should be treated as such. You're not supposed to use it for non-businesses purposes during the workday, or to download things such as pornography. Individual actions should be governed at least by common sense, although many agencies including ours are currently examining actual Internet policies. But the bottom line on the Web is that it should definitely be used, and that it should be used to support our work. EG: How do you personally find yourself using the Web while in the office? Wagner: Well, besides the GSA intranet, I also use the internal phone book to locate names, numbers, and addresses. And there are opportunities for internal collaberation as well. For example, I was just looking at Hungary through the browser. I recently attended a conference over there, and they sent me some material inviting me to look at their Web page, so I did. As far as world telecommunications go, time zones matter more than actual distance today. EG: Does the government currently harbor any reservations about the Web or the Internet in general? Wagner: OMB recently wanted a way to communicate with the entire user community -- not just inside-the-beltway groups -- so they ran meetings video-linked aross the country, and I represented the GSA at one roundtable. Our audience was open to anyone, although it consisted primarily of information technology folk and a few reporters. The attendees were allowed to ask questions, and based on some questions, I think that many government people are having problems getting to use the Internet, due to some security concerns. Yes, there's some dangerous people online, and there are risks in being accessible via the Internet, and sometimes employees do abuse the technology. But that type of thinking will soon seem silly; after all, we're not taking phones off the desks so that people won't be tempted to call home. One good analogy is that, when a porcupine rolls into a ball, it's safe but it can't eat. The fact that security is an important issue is not an excuse to completely avoid dealing with the electronic world. We need to go in with our eyes open and with our firewalls installed and monitored, and then take advantage of what's out there. Still, I'm not saying that the security issue can be ignored. Dependable security is necessary before electronic commerce can truly become a reality. EG: What sort of problems do you see with the way that Web technology is currently being used and treated today? Wagner: Well, to start with, technology is interesting, but used for its own sake it's quite dangerous and seductive. We must find the best way to implement it, instead of just paving over the cow paths. We should not just use technology for its own sake but to accomplish our mission, which means using the Web in the way it's designed rather than mimicking the familiar linear paper model. For instance, Web sites are often set up to resemble books. However, home pages are different animals than books, and if you try to make them act too much like books, you're not making good use of Web capabilities. If I wrote a 1000-page book, FTP would probably be the best way to deliver the entire document to you at once. But if I want the book to be easily available on the Web, I would need to break it into bite-sized chunks first. We have many tools today that convert documents into HTML but none that break down large texts into manageable sizes. And then you change your perspective and consider the purpose of your information as well. While writing the book, you might have looked at it as twelve large chapters, rather than 250 subsections that can fit together in many different ways. But slamming a 50-page doc on the Web isn't doing much for the reader; you need to implement cross-indexing, so that the reader can find the parts she wants. Effective Web use involves thinking long and hard about indexing and crosswalks. You want to describe an item in as many ways as possible, and that's something we're still feeling our way through. Another concern is that not everyone has a high-speed link through a LAN to get online. In that case, you need text-browsing support, and even if you do have graphics, you need an efficient and quick way to download them. EG: What are some of the actual problems of information transaction via the Web? Wagner: Well, in the print world, we have this concept called an "editor," and maybe we need something like that in the Web world as well, not just to determine structure and format but to have someone just read the stuff before it's posted online. Our normal paper reports are all routinely scrutinized: numbers are checked, people look at word choice, a traditional process has been set up to proofread our work. We never just have the document's drafter ship the information out immediately to millions of people, like what happens today on the Web. I think that it's currently too easy to put information online. Even the most innocent mistakes can cause some very serious problems. About two years ago, a mishap occurred involving bidding in the futures market with italian lira versus dollars, where the company's employee accidentally rearranged some digits on their bid, pushed the button, and ended up losing something like two million dollars. In the old world, the bid would have been reviewed by the president and other managers -- it would have been extensively examined before being submitted -- but in this case someone just typed in some numbers and hit "Send". What we need to do is build procedures into our transmissions that will make hasty postings more difficult, that will make people ask the right questions and examine their work before sending it out. Our Per Diem document (which compares hotel room rates across the country) is widely used, and we know that we have to carefully edit our work, to get the numbers right, or we'll cost people a lot of money. We perform extensive research around the US just to create the document, and Legal carefully examines the finished report to make sure that it's correct. And when we finally post the book up on the Web, we load it directly onto the site rather than keypunching it back in, which avoids the introduction of new errors. Other kinds of electronic information are being developed that need the same kind of care, and we must work out how to do that. EG: So what's the bottom line as far as communication goes? How has the Web impacted the relationship between the government and citizens? Wagner: The Web makes it easy to get information out to the citizens and taxpayers, as well as provide answers to routine questions. Anyone with Web access can easily locate pertinent government information. Of course, the ease of unearthing information is balanced by the fact that the reader needs to be able to place the information in context. Having access to data is not enough: People need to be able to properly comprehend what the data means. ----------------------------------------------------- (c) 1997 by Fed Services, Inc. Electronic Government, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp.2-4 Material to be used solely in regards to examining my credentials for employment.