Made to Order – Using technology to shift power from government to citizens.

The lofty old rhetoric about how digital technologies will fundamentally remake government is notably absent from most public CIOs’ mouths these days. The public CIO job seems to have morphed from a visionary role to a more tactical role. The current line: steady, incremental improvement — not transformation.

E-government has also virtually disappeared from governors’ State of the State speeches — a far cry from just a few years ago when not talking about it meant announcing you were a political dinosaur. Columnist Tom Davies summed up the prevailing mood: "From the beginning, e-gov was never really on track to produce a revolution in state and local government performance."

The new conventional wisdom is just as wrong as the early e-government hype.

February 2005 By William D. Eggers

Full Story: http://www.govtech.net/magazine/story.php?id=92875