Saturday, October 01, 2005

No. 1 Lesson Learned From Katrina: Government Failed to Meet Minimum 21st Century Standards of Effectiveness

Our current paper-based bureaucracy has completely failed and Katrina made this fact glaringly obvious. Mayor Nagin has taken quite a bit of heat, but in his defense, he is the first mayor of New Orleans in my lifetime that is not corrupt and he has done a lot to install e-government in what is otherwise a pretty third world city. As a former CEO, he has approached city management with a private-sector management model that emphasises accountablity, convenience and choice. Just have a look a http://www.cityofno.com/. To this end, I would encourage everyone to study the futurist and historian Newt Gingrich's post-Katrina lessons-learned. What follows is a small excerpt...

Government Failed to Meet Minimum 21st Century Standards of Effectiveness

  • It is the nature of a science and technology based entrepreneurial free market to provide more choices of higher quality at lower cost.

  • Citizen's everyday experience is UPS, Fed-Ex, the Internet, blackberries/treos, camera cellphones, Google, ATMs, Amazon.com, e-ticketing ala Travelocity and Expedia level of knowledge and choice. Citizens expect this same standard from government.

  • Government at the Federal, State, and local level totally failed this standard in responding to Katrina.

Download, view, study and advocate THIS PDF if you never want to see this happen again.

This not an issue of party politics in the sense that any particular party is the answer to these problems. Democrate Congressional leader Nancy Pelosi would have us believe that if her party was in charge, everything would be fine -- an excerpt from an article on her website -
The priority of Republicans has been to help their friends at the expense of helping people. They are out of touch with the people of the Gulf Coast region who struggle to find housing, jobs, and schools for their children.

Lousiana politics has historically been democrat-controlled AND infamous for chronyism.

Does Pilosi wake up in the morning and think of how to best serve the American people or how to stick it to Republicans?

It's pretty clear that the problem is systematic and way beyond the scope of any particular party. The federal government should contract Google to develop an open API and set of standards for electronic local and federal government. Private sector software is built to meet ISO 9000 standards...why is it that public sector systems don't have to meet this standard? Anyway...I could go on and on but until we recognize the source of the problem and demand change as a people we'll have more of the same.