Blog

Now that I’ve actually used the Nexus kiosks on a quick trip to Boston, I have three more things to say.

First, one of my readers mentioned that he applied to the Canadian Government and received his card in 4 weeks, which was a week or two faster than my application to the US Government. The US program is more convenient - completely on line - and less expensive ($50, rather than $80) but the Canadian program delivers faster. Take your choice.

Second, the kiosk was easy to use. A female voice - call her Iris - tells you how to position yourself so that the iris recognition camera gets a good picture. I wore my very soft and flexible bifocal contact lenses, which are a pale blue and have the numbers “123″ printed lightly to help the wearer ensure that they are not inside out, and Iris still had no trouble recognizing my irises.

The third point concerns the economics of the Nexus program. In a competitive market, the long run cost of production should equal the value of the product to the marginal user. The Nexus program, of course (or at least we should hope) is a monopoly, so the relevant question is what it should charge. As it now stands, for $50 you get the cost of the application (processing your information, an in-person interview, and the production of a high-tech RFID card) as well as 5 years’ use of the kiosks to short-circuit immigration queues going into the US or returning to Canada from anywhere.

That strikes me as a great bargain. Likely $ 50 doesn’t even cover the cost of the application process, making some allowance for contributing to the cost of the technology. Yes Nexus does reduce the operating costs of the Canada Border Services Agency and US Customs and Border Protection by diverting trusted travelers from the their agents’ queues, but how much cost saving would that diversion represent?

In a world where both the Canadian and US governments will be looking for ways to increase user fees to reduce the deficit, I can’t imagine that they won’t target Nexus. Conclusion: get your Nexus card while it’s still a great deal.

I travel to the US fairly frequently and, as a result of the lengthy delays after the foiled terrorist incident last December 25, I decided to join the Nexus program. Nexus is a voluntary program in which travelers who are qualified and willing to provide an iris scan can avoid lineups at both Canada and US immigration. They do this by checking in at an electronic kiosk that does an iris scan and matches it with the data on record.

When I googled Nexus, the first two sites that came up were immigration consultants who will handle the process for you. One charges $157 for enrolment in 6-8 weeks and $ 262 for enrolment in 1- 3 weeks. Thank you, I’d rather do it myself.

Since Nexus is a joint program of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and the US Department of Homeland Security, one can enroll through either. The process involves completing and submitting an application form and then, if the application is approved, going to an interview to have the iris scan. It turns out that enrolment through the Department of Homeland Security costs $50 US and can be done entirely online through the DHS Government Online Enrolment System (GOES) while enrolment through CBSA involves downloading the form and then submitting it in the mail and costs $80 Canadian. Cost and convenience trumped national identification, and I enrolled in GOES.

The GOES online application was easy to complete, with a form that was clear and a helpful error-correction function at the end. The entire process can then be handled online through the GOES website. I received an email informing me that my application had been accepted 2 ½ weeks after I submitted it, and I was then able to book an interview at Pearson Airport two weeks later. My Nexus card came 2 weeks after the interview. The entire process took 7 weeks, with no consultant fee. I could have completed it a week or two faster, had I been able to make the first available interview.

All told, my conclusion is that the GOES system provided excellent service. As a Canadian, I was very disappointed, if not embarrassed, that the Canada Border Services Agency is still stuck in the paper age and doesn’t provide comparable service. And I hope this blog finds its way to both DHS and CBSA.

In my co-authored book Digital State at the Leading Edge (www.digitalstate.org), my co-authors and I accepted the consulting firm Accenture’s claim that the Government of Canada was at the world’s leading edge in providing eGovernment services. In this particular case of a precisely-matched program, it is clear that the Americans are ahead. Of course, a broader based study would be required to see if that is the case in other areas of online service delivery. But people make inferences from their personal circumstances. In this instance, the US has the online goods, and Canada doesn’t.

A little over a year ago, I wrote a paper entitled Digital State 2.0 reviewing the major developments in the use of IT in Canadian politics and government between 2006 and 2009. It is being published in a festschrift - due for release any day now - in honour of the retirement of the eminent public administration scholar G. Bruce Doern.

I’ve been asked to contribute a paper to another edited book about IT in politics and government, so I will be looking at developments during the last year to update the previous paper under the new rubric of Digital State 2.5. Here is my plan for the new paper.

In the area of IT in politics, the main driver of change is general elections. In Digital State 2.0, I referred to the federal election of 2008, Ontario election of 2007, and - because it represented such a transformative change - the US election of 2008. There haven’t been elections in any of these jurisdictions, so there is little to update. I will, however, have a look at the mid-mandate sniping going on among the major parties in the federal and Ontario governments, in particular online attempts by the Liberals to demonize Stephen Harper and online attempts by the Conservatives to trivialize Michael Ignatieff.

Economic recovery has been a key government priority, which will lead to an examination of the online presence for the federal government’s Economic Action Plan (www.actionplan.gc.ca). Its natural comparator will be the US government’s website for the Economic Recovery Act (www.recovery.gov). It appears that the US site is both more detailed in the information made available and less partisan in how it presents it.

The management of large IT projects is always a major concern, and in the last year we have had one that has gone seriously off the rails, namely Ontario’s eHealth initiative. Claims of project mismanagement have led to the resignations of the Project Manager, Chairman of eHealth Ontario, Deputy Minister and Minister of Health. Forensic analysis of troubled IT projects is a complicated matter, and it’s not clear to me that the official analysis has been completed, but I’ll try to say something about the causes and state of play.

The many facets of social networking referred to as Web 2.0 continue to be evolving in the public sphere as well. While outside the geographic purview of my article, I couldn’t help but laugh at a recent article in the New York Times by Scott Sayare about how the gaffes of French politicians, including even M. le President, are being caught digitally and circulated on YouTube.

More substantial is the US Government’s initiative to make public sector data widely available to applications developers on www.data.gov. The background here is that Washington DC did this and received considerable public recognition, including winning a prestigious Innovations in American Government Award in 2009. Vivek Kundra, Washington, DC’s chief technology officer has jumped up two levels of government by moving around the block to become the US Government’s CIO. Thus the US Government is virtually overnight scaling up a local initiative, and the results will be fascinating to see.

Looking back at what I’ve just written, the title of the book that started this line of research comes to mind: Digital State at the Leading Edge. In the book, we were referring to the Government of Canada. No longer. I think that honour now goes to the US. Stay tuned for more in coming weeks and months.

I’ll be taking the next two weeks off posting, and I’ll be back in early January. Happy holidays and best wishes for the new year to all.

After going to the Rogers Centre en famille to watch the Jays defeat the Red Sox 5-3 yesterday, I’ll take a break from the serious business of narrative to write about the way American national pastime is now presented in Canada. While aging undoubtedly reduces tolerance for loud noise and bright lights, I think the Rogers Centre’s use of both is radically diminishing enjoyment of the game. The Centre - a concrete echo chamber, especially when the roof is closed - pulsates with incessant generic rock music, interrupted only for the few seconds between the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand and the play concluding.

The Jays - and I don’t know if this is common practice in Major League Baseball - have little signature tunes, also rockish, played when each batter comes to the plate. In addition to all the valuable electronic billboard information (the count, individual stats, playbacks) there is lots of extraneous stuff, such as exhortations to make noise or names of fans celebrating birthdays.

All this son et lumiere defeats what I remember from the days of the Triple A Maple Leafs or even Blue Jays prior to Skydome, as it was first called, as one of the enjoyable aspects of the game, the chance to chat quietly between plays about strategy or share baseball lore. This is particularly important when bringing young children - mine are nine and six - and trying to explain as much inside baseball as they can absorb.

If the Jays insist on signature tunes for their players, why not be more creative? One day they could do jazz signature tunes or another they could do Beatles or a third they could do classics, even hooked on classics style (which I am playing on Youtube as I write). There are some great possibilities here such as “Norwegian wood” or perhaps “Yesterday” for a designated hitter, “a little help from my friends” when a pitcher comes up to bat (under National League Rules), or ethnically motivated choices such as Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony or Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Ode to Joy? Take Five? Take the A-Train? Caravan? Blue Rondo a la Turk? The possibilities are endless.

In any event, despite the excesses of son et lumiere, a good time was had by all, and our six year old son stayed interested to the last out in the top of the ninth, and told me that now he wanted to see the Yankees. We will.

After three weeks, here is my initial assessment of the Obama administration online.
Where they’ve made progress:

• The President keeping his BlackBerry
• Moving the weekly address to YouTube
• Introducing a more modern look and feel and more transparent whitehouse.gov
• Continuing to use mybarackobama.com and barackobama.com (now retitled Organizing for America and linked to the Democratic Party) to contact his followers

Next steps we’re awaiting:

• The White House Office of Public Liaison establishing some sort of Web 2.0 capacity for dialogue on whitehouse.gov, comparable to what exists on mybarackobama.com and what existed on change.gov
• Launching the website for the economic recovery program, recovery.gov

Big question for the future:

• Will the Obama constituency, using the tools on Organizing for America, be able to move the center in American politics? To do so, it will have to start changing the votes of moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats. The vote on the recovery package - no Republican support in the House and only three (Snowe, Collins, Specter) in the Senate - suggests this hasn’t happened yet.

Some questions about the public management implications:

• Now that Obama has cleared the way, will other senior administration officials go online?
• Will the departments copy the new look and feel of whitehouse.gov and begin using Web 2.0 approaches with their constituents? (One of the difficulties the sprawling US administration has had is adopting a common look and feel for its websites. The Government of Canada has been more successful here.)
• Are a host of new media positions being created in the departments as well as the White House to bring in IT-savvy members of the Net Generation to manage the Obama Administration’s new Internet and, increasingly, Web 2.0 infrastructure?