Agency progress toward automating federal business processes is "pathetic," according to Emmett Paige, formerly the Pentagon's top executive for information, communications and command-and-control systems.
Paige, now the president of OAO Corp., an information technology contractor in Greenbelt, Md., said last week the government has spent millions of dollars on new electronic commerce systems but has few results to show for that investment.
In a keynote speech at E-Gov 98, a Washington IT conference, he called for more high-level attention to federal agencies' failure to implement a functional electronic commerce system. Although agencies have been trying at least since 1994 to do business with suppliers online, most of the projects they have started "won't do the job," he said, adding: "Somebody should kill those projects."
Paige, who retired as an Army general in 1988, then returned to the Defense Department as a senior political appointee from 1993 to 1997, included himself among those who failed to deliver functional electronic commerce systems. He spearheaded development of the FACNET system, which was supposed to be a single commercial channel between federal and military agencies and their suppliers. "We went out and wasted the taxpayers' money and built this network," he said.
FACNET, which Paige said was "terribly undersized," never found favor with most of its prospective users. It relied on intermediary networks called value-added networks (VANs). "VANs are costly," Paige said. "I believe that the technology of today has made VANs obsolete."
Cost-effective alternatives based on the World Wide Web are available, he said. "It's not a technical problem" that has stymied electronic commerce, Paige maintained, but a lack of incentives for agencies to change their ways. "The incentives should be coming from above," he insisted.
He suggested that an individual with clout should be made responsible for implementing electronic commerce, with the necessary budget to get the job done. Although both DoD and the General Services Administration have electronic commerce offices, Paige said that "just putting an organization together isn't very much" of an accomplishment.
"The federal sector is going to have to take the lead" with its suppliers and contractors, Paige said, because many of them do not believe the government is serious about doing most of its buying and paying electronically. Under the 1996 Debt Collection Improvement Act, the federal government must pay all its bills electronically by Jan. 1, 1999.
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