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Federal agencies increasingly load their shopping carts with the latest, greatest desktop web-based technologies to sift, sort, track, analyze, and socialize, however those buying decisions can decide the fate of entire branches of government. Information technology has gone mainstream and in the Year 2000 will affect nearly all business processes.

For example, last year, approximately 24.6 million taxpayers used an IRS e-file option to file their Federal income tax return electronically. While thought of as standard fare in today's electronic world, making the right software and hardware choices plagued even the IRS, forcing reconsiderations before the public could benefit from faster refunds and electronic payment options via IRS e-file. Increasingly, agencies in the millennium will turn to metrics measurements to assist in the right purchases, says international technologist Stephen Arnold of Arnold Information Technology, a division of Manning & Napier Advisors (www.mnis.net). This year, Arnold has addressed federal government agencies on what he calls "Critical Choice: Intelligence Management and the Bottom Line." In May he spoke publicly at the military intelligence community at Open Source Solutions Inc. (www.oss.net) in Washington, D.C., espousing key metrics that now govern appropriate buying decisions.

The primary intelligence process problem in recent years has been repeated in many circles: "There is too much information from too many unfamiliar sources." These issues are becoming complicated by concerns surrounding budget cutting, and a rapidly changing price point for new hardware and software.

Arnold defines the number one metric for consideration by federal agencies the rising need for data analysis. Federal agencies can't just hit a target number for technology spending on budget. A real analysis of people to machines must occur. Questions will include:

1. What was spent on the information technology staff, in the current year and the previous year?

2. What was spent of telecommunications alone, current and previous?

3. How much is already being outsourced, what are the arrangements with outside subcontractors, in the current year and previous?

"There has been a shift from 95% in-house services to a focus on outsourcing. This allows agencies to be more flexible and respond to real-time demands. Most of the programming at the Department of Defense was done by regular army, navy, air force, and marine personnel--up to 80% of the activity in 1970. However, this year we are seeing numbers more like 60% outsourcing, with 40% remaining in the agency environment. Information technology is affecting all business processes," Arnold explained. The key is to therefore, maximize the ratio of intangibles to tangibles, he says.

Standard computer decisions even five years ago in government could take up to three years to receive funding, but now there is a migration to entirely new computing environments in that time," Arnold points out. In recent years, the Department of Defense has moved its entire procurement process to the web-centric world with eCommerce, for example.

So, the second most important metric has become performing What-if Scenario Analyses as "real time" needs now are the focus in government and corporations serving those agencies.

This entails reviewing within an agency the basics:

1. Will staff reductions save money?

2. What are the future costs of replacing staff functions with contract employees or performing work via telecommuting?

3. What additional costs are necessary to support an infrastructure that is lightened?

"This is a back-to-basics approach, not rocket science. Sometimes invention is useful, but the primary business planning principles are more critical," says Arnold. Expenditures therefore should get allocated to human resources still amounting to 70%, and rocket science, while rising in values, will be about 30% of costs.

When it is time to look at the plethora of software solutions and hardware add-ons, the third metric comes into play: Function Identification/Engineering Analysis. "Agencies need to think of the immediate paybacks first, and move quickly to solutions that speed up process. The misnomer comes into play when the tool is expected to double the gain in timesavings. This simply is not true. The ideal scenario would be a 80% increase in forward-thinking activity creating a 20% time savings."

Arnold says in his consultation work he notices that during the final buying decisions comes the attention to details in analyzing pivot points between important relationships--such as the internal staff and the constituency being served, the vendor to the agency, and so on. Ideally, the payoff of new technology is a better response time, fewer errors, reduced costs for inventory trading, and the automation of the entire supply chain. For exampling, bar coding inventory in certain agencies made great strides in eliminating supply chain mistakes, and gave a better tracking system for all packages.

A number of high-end software tools for information access and analytic technologies exist with expenditures topping well over $1million in true implementation. For example, the mission of TextWise LLC (textwise.com) in Syracuse, N.Y. is to develop leading-edge information access and information analytic technologies that meet the needs of government and commercial customers. Many of these technologies come from product development focused on information retrieval (IR) and artificial intelligence (AI) in information retrieval (IR) and artificial intelligence (AI), including natural language processing (NLP), information extraction, agents, link analysis, question-answering, data visualization, data fusion, knowledge discovery, knowledge management, genetic algorithms, neural nets, and cross-language information retrieval (CLIR).

KNOW-IT from TextWise (http://www.textwise.com) shows two concepts linked by the kind of relationship that binds them. The system can potentially indicate what caused an event to occur, in a visual format. The user can grasp the significance of that relationship much more readily than if he had to plow through 10 documents himself. Trends in tools and tactics for governmental use now include entity extraction, like Textwise, but also intelligent agents that act on the user's behalf to elicit that certain procedures or steps occur, and even, cross-language retrieval. Still, the more technology-ready a federal agency is, the more specific requests for implementation must be.

Today's web-centric environments will require the application of yet another metric to be successful, according to Arnold. An agency must first test and then build. A variety of computerized systems must be integrated for a desirable result. Testing should occur within data sets, process changes, and within select groups of users.

Once the top four metrics have been applied, only then can a federal agency move to its final expenditure with deployment.

The keys to a successful deployment, according to Manning & Napier Advisors include:
--evaluate pilot
--make changes
--plan deployment
--prepare/train staff --deploy
and
--monitor costs and payback.

Arnold emphasizes that the ultimate goal of a new computerized process is that when staff changes, the knowledge stays. Technology that works in practice does eliminate some paperwork that slows process down. Status reports to analyze and track behaviors are not available in real time. Software and hardware decisions will continue to grow in complexity, but the "new school" of thinking goes beyond budgetary considerations to core issues of testing, taking ownership, deploying technology that makes sense, and fixing problems as they occur.

According to Arnold, "There is no such thing as buying new software and forgetting about it anymore. Work flow integration and the rapidly changing landscape of technology in government requires sound judgment, and follow-through."