February 7, 2000

Members Present

Dr. Wendy Gramm (chair), Tom Loeffler (co-chair), Hector De Leon (co-chair), Gerald Smith, Elizabeth Lang-Miers, John Fainter, Laura Keith, Bill Hammond, Sonceria Messiah-Jiles, Massey Villarreal

Executive Summary

The commission heard presentations from Bill Kilmartin, vice president of e-commerce for American Management Services and former Massachusetts comptroller, and Maurice McTigue, visiting scholar at George Mason University and former cabinet minister from New Zealand, on e-commerce and innovative government initiatives. Bill Eggers briefed members on Friday's (Feb. 4) volunteer training program and appealed for more volunteers. Betty Ressel briefed members on the first two public hearings and John Colyandro briefed them on activities of the Legislative Advisory Group.

Discussion

Two presentations were made by invited speakers:

Using a slide presentation, Bill Kilmartin said the public sector's perspective is that government is not like business and described the differences in the areas of incentives, structure, market, innovation, and authority. He said government should emulate, but not duplicate, the private sector. He displayed an organizing model featuring e-commerce enabled enterprise, cross boundary issues, customer-focused government and added value (economic development, improved education) and stressed techniques and action plans. He said governments should analyze business and program processes, capabilities, infrastructure and architecture, policy considerations, and applications. Privacy and security are the paramount policy considerations.

Maurice McTigue said government cannot avoid changes and should not allow a smoke stack-based economy to rule in this new world. Innovation, he said, means more knowledge and deeper questions and should be used to further good and remove evil. He said citizens are becoming more aware of government shortfalls and want answers to questions such as: why is welfare failing in good economy, why haven't all the resources poured into education resulted in better education, why is the environment suffering when knowledge exists to avoid pollution? He said government needs to address causes of problems and not measure results and that the role of senior management should be to facilitate the needs of those working in the "store front." When considering government services leaders should ask: why do it, who should do it (government or private sector), and who should pay (taxpayer or consumer)?

Status of Task Force volunteers:

Bill Eggers reported 45 volunteers attended Friday's training session and that 71 people have been signed up as volunteers so far. He said the goal is to have 100-150 volunteers and that more are needed for the Workforce, Resource Management and Government Performance task forces.

Public hearing update:

Betty Ressel described public hearings held in Corpus Christi and College Station. Both, she said, provided lessons about process and both provided valuable information. For example, community college representatives expressed frustration defining their role between K-12 and higher education and that higher education faculty are neither using nor teaching technology.

Legislative Advisory Group:

John Colyandro said Sen. Robert Duncan has agreed to head up the 19-member Legislative Advisory Group and that Colyandro and Jesse Ancira were briefing each member on e-Texas. He said nine members have been briefed so far and that the others would be briefed in the next month. He asked Emmett Coleman of Dell Computer to help assess costs of e-government.

Other: Responding to a question, Eggers reminded the commission members of the timeline, said so far everything is on schedule and that a draft set of recommendations is expected in June. He said the public hearing schedules are posted on the e-Texas web site.