County officials need to embrace technology

The United States gained its stature in the world community because the tolerance and community spirit fostered within its boundaries encouraged innovation and development. During the past century, innovation has produced waves of technologies that have changed the entire fabric of society.

The creation of the engine lead to automobiles, locomotives and airplanes. Suddenly a community that was defined by the distance a horse could travel in a day between the milking of the cows was expanded by hundreds and thousands of miles. Now, as president of NACo, I travel across the country, attending state association meetings in South Carolina, North Carolina, Maryland and Texas in a three-week period. With the innovations expanding transportation options, our country and the world has become smaller and more understandable.

Samuel Morse learned how to send pulses across wires, resulting in the telegraph and the telephone. Advances in directing signals over the airwaves now let me carry a pager and a cellular phone which allows you, my office or staff at NACo to contact me wherever I might be at any particular time. Digital machines blossomed into computers which kept shrinking in size until they are smaller than notebooks.

Each new innovation usually goes through an acceptance period during which the opportunities it offers can be explored and new applications developed. Many iterations of change occurred between the horseless carriage and the Winnebago or the wireless and the cellular phone. The counterpoint is that each innovation offers an opportunity for additional innovation and new applications.

In county government we tend to resist change. Many of our operations have not changed significantly in decades. With the information age sneaking up on us and its concomitant advances in information technology and telecommunications, our communities are changing at an unprecedented pace.

Other drivers such as devolution, new federalism, globalization and escalating citizen expectations compound the explosive growth we are experiencing. Those of us who have chosen to be in government must recognize the changing fabric of society and strategically understand how our offices must change to best serve our communities in a world significantly different from the one we knew as children or young adults.

Our citizens will demand that we keep pace with world change. We - or the successors to our offices - need to openly embrace the opportunities offered by the technologies already adopted by the business, education and entertainment communities. We need to be able to adapt the technologies of today to be able to function more effectively, forecast more accurately and make better decisions, while marshaling a reduced level of resources available to support government.

Because of my strong belief that technology offers us both tools and a perspective that will assist us in performing the duties of our offices, I have adopted information technology as one of my three presidential initiatives. In this vein, I would like counties to explore the options offered by such possibilities as geospatial information systems, smart cards, electronic commerce, the World Wide Web, imaging, and digital cellular communications. As a consequence, County News will reinstate its monthly technology column. Model county programs will be featured in articles and I , in my presidential column, will periodically discuss technologies which I consider to be exceptionally significant to county government.

County government is the governmental unit closest to the citizen, providing the greatest range of services. It can and should be the governmental leader in developing new and better ways of delivering those services to our communities. The possibilities offered by today's technologies and the promises of the technologies of tomorrow provide county government with an unprecedented portal of opportunity which I hope we can walk through together.