Working for housing and community development agencies gave me many glimpses of health and human service agencies, both governmental and non-profits. As a result, I know many case managers, folks who’ve dedicated their professional lives to helping others through programs like homeless prevention, nutrition, vocational rehabilitation and foster care. What’s so hard about dedicating yourRead… Read more »
One thing that government tries to do is fix things that are not being taken care of by the private sector. You’ll find this happening quite often in the affordable housing department. Perfect example: The flip side of our last decade’s real estate boom was that entire segments of the population could not afford housing.Read… Read more »
Once, I was visiting a clerk of the courts when very bad news came. An individual with an outstanding warrant was not arrested as the warrant ordered, and he had gone on to commit an additional and deadly crime. The sheriff’s deputies stored their warrants in the trunk of their vehicle. This individual’s warrant hadRead… Read more »
Early in 1995 and with a new governor, the State of Maine embarked on an expansion of its GIS (Geographic Information System, for those who aren’t familiar). Then governor, Angus King had a vision. He wanted to use maps to prove that Maine had great locations for new and relocating businesses. Being that it wasRead… Read more »
I had a brief stay in county government. It turned out to be the most exciting microcosm of government that I ever worked in. Just walking from one floor to another showed amazing variation in the daily tasks and challenges of a county government worker. Counties do it all – tax collection to historic recordsRead… Read more »
I used to be a project manager in government. There were many times that I had about 70 projects in the works, and all in different stages. Some of these projects were really struggling. In the government world, a floundering project meant that the community just couldn’t get it going for any number of reasons.Read… Read more »
During my government days, the most difficult decisions I had to make were which software packages to buy and which vendors to use. Why was this so difficult? We had so many pieces and parts already – at one point, I had six different databases covering my 50-person department. And each person had to learnRead… Read more »
Recent discussion about the cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS) brought me back nearly a decade to a time when, as an IT director, I stood in the way of just such a proposal for government software…as a service. My state had selected a vendor. Their task: produce a portal website and provide farRead… Read more »
July and August used to be pretty rough times for my colleagues in community development. Each year, we would have to gather reports on projects funded with federal dollars. Some years we had a staggering 200 projects underway. In June, the information from this paper avalanche had to be manually entered into our database. OneRead… Read more »
During my government days, the most difficult decisions I had to make were which software packages to buy and which vendors to use. Why was this so difficult? We had so many pieces and parts already – at one point, I had six different databases covering my 50-person department. And each person had to learnRead… Read more »