Understand the e-Government Act of 2002
From 1995 to 2001 is considered to be the "dot com era." During this time, the world saw a record surge in information technology (IT) deployed globally. Most importantly, many of the commercial industry companies that participated in the "dot com era" were providing ecommerce and other services over the Internet.
The US federal government, state, local, and tribal governments began to realize that they needed to modernize themselves and take advantage of these new technologies. Not only were these government entities maintaining decades of older buildings, but they were also maintaining decades of paperwork and legacy processes.
In 2002, the US Congress passed the E-Government Act of 2002. The act is a U.S. statute to improve the management and promotion of electronic government services and processes.
Federal CIO
The act establishes the role of a Federal Chief Information Officer within the Office of Management and Budget. This action is very significant because for the first time, it provides a single office with a lead to oversee Information Technology across the entire Federal Government.
Learning from the private sector
The act creates a framework that requires US Government agencies to use Internet-based technology to improve citizen access to government information and services. This action is important because if the government mandates that agencies must begin to pivot to offerings services through the Internet, they must also provide those agencies with the tooling and knowledge to do so.
FISMA
The act recognizes FISMA, or the Federal Information Security Management Act, as Title III. FISMA officially identifies the importance of information security to the national/regional security and economic security of the United States.
FISMA requires each agency to develop, document, implement, and maintain a program to provide information security to the systems that support the operations and assets of the agency, even those that are provided by other agencies, contractors, and outside sources.
CIPSEA
The act also establishes CIPSEA, or the Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act, as Title V. CIPSEA provides uniform confidentiality protections for information, specifically statistics, and provides for data sharing between the Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Bureau of Economic Analysis.
This action is important because it standardizes how data should be shared, and also protects citizens from having the information they provide be used in an inappropriate way. It also allows the citizen to opt-in by providing “informed consent” that the data can be put to another use other than statistical analysis.
Cost reduction
The act focuses on reducing costs and financial burdens for small businesses and US Government entities.
This action is important because federal, state, local, and tribal governments are fairly large in size. At this time, it was known how much IT was driving costs in the U.S. economy. The act attempts to ensure that as the U.S. Government is modernized, it does not have duplicate spending or multiple efforts to achieve the same goals.
Unquantified goals
The act also includes a number of unquantified goals, such as promoting better informed decision making; access to government information across multiple channels; better government transparency and accountability; utilizing best practices from industry; providing access to services in a way that addresses personal privacy, national/regional security, records retention, accessibility, and other relevant laws. While these are unquantifiable, they do set the vision and intent for what the government is hoping to achieve.
Importance
The US Government’s strategy toward the cloud, largely laid out by the E-Government Act of 2002, frames all efforts under the four categories of
- Governance
- Technology
- Security and
- Compliance (Privacy, Accessibility, Transparency, Records Retention, Procurement)