If asked to describe what constitutes ‘federal government information technology,' some might jokingly suggest it refers to whatever was hot five years ago in the Microsoft world. Luckily for those IT innovators who would otherwise fly under the recognition radar, Government Computer News magazine's GCN Awards recognizes outstanding IT achievements each year.

A panel of GCN senior staff, government executives and academic technology experts selected ten agency winners from 132 entries this year. The panel based their selections on each agency's "overall accomplishments, innovative use of technology and the benefits of the program to their mission and constituencies." GCN also recognized five government executives for their contributions to information technology in the federal workplace.

The work of the 2008 GCN Award winners vary widely, ranging from making geospatial information more available for emergency personnel, to creating a one-stop shop of national security, to using radio frequencies to keep track of maintenance equipment. The three most interesting winning technologies came from the Alabama Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Directory of National Intelligence, and the 78th Communications Group of the Robins Air Force Base.

Alabama Department of Homeland Security

Imagine the time-intensive and gas-consuming process of having to drive across the state to see if a building had been damaged, whether a road is still accessible or if an emergency shelter is completely full. Alabama state officials performed these tasks regularly to conduct state business or manage a state disaster before the advent of their virtual database.

Jim Walker, Director of Alabama's Department of Homeland Security, said that Alabama "like every other state, [was spending] hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars trying to capture imagery either for revenue or other purposes." The major problem was that images being collected by various agencies throughout the state were not being sent to those who needed it most, especially during emergencies. Whenever the state had a natural disaster, they couldn't find the imagery needed to aid their emergency efforts.

Eventually Alabama's Governor Bob Riley ordered Walker to find a solution. The solution was the creation of ‘Virtual Alabama,' a topography database for state employees to retrieve and enter data for general use or emergency responders.

Virtual Alabama was built on an application that makes use of Google Earth as its "visualization engine" so that over 1,000 state and local officials such as firefighters, policemen, healthcare providers and social service personnel can load, view and retrieve visual data on the state's infrastructure. The data allows government personnel to view evacuation routes, availability of emergency shelters, locate disaster survivors, find gas stations, track power lines, and assess private/public property structural damage.
Walker believes that Virtual Alabama's ability to make "accurate disaster declarations" so that FEMA has the info "within days or hours as opposed to weeks" along with being able to do property searches without driving all over the state makes the system a technology breakthrough.

Two state employees and two employees on loan from the Army Space and Missile Defense Command collaborated to build the system.

Office of the Directory of National Intelligence

The federal government's intelligence agencies were roundly criticized for their lack of an integrated response to the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, specifically in the area of intelligence sharing. In 2003, the Office of the Directory of National Intelligence (ODNI) was formed to help the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies "pool their information." To accomplish this task, ODNI launched a web-based platform utilizing technologies for online collaboration called Intellipedia.  

Intellipedia is a "600,000-page-and-growing" Wikipedia-like website which analysts across 160 agencies use to share and retrieve information about, well, bad guys to speak plainly. Intellipedia allows agencies access to information that was routinely kept in-house amongst the individual agencies. As a result, FBI analysts can find out about foreign communications posted by National Security Agency analysts; civilian agencies can retrieve info from the Defense Department; and State Department employees with the appropriate clearance can read info from the CIA.

Over 3,000 analysts now use Intellipedia, and each month, federal employees conduct more than two million searches through the system. Richard Russell, Deputy Associate Director of National Intelligence at ODNI, put the magnitude of this technological breakthrough into context when he said that Intellipedia has helped the intelligence community make "more progress [with its intelligence gathering] in the past two years than in the 20-some years before that."

Robins Air Force Base

Prior to the launch of their new tracking system, Aircraft workers constantly hunted and searched for equipment or tools for maintenance, according to Barbara Buller, project manager for the 78th Communications Groups' Automatic Identification Technologies' (AID) office. In response to this colossal time suck, which could potentially keep planes grounded hours longer than expected, AID developed the Air Force Global Enterprise Tracking (AFGET) system.

The technology relies upon use of a radio frequency identification device (also used on prisoners in Britain). All equipment, tools and vehicles are now tagged with a radio frequency identification code that can be tracked using a hand-held device or a computer to access the web interface. Essentially, they did for lost tools what UPS and FedEx did for tracking packages.

Jeffrey Hunter, a mechanical engineer for the 402nd Aircraft Maintenance Group applauded the system because the workers are no longer "wasting time now on [manually] tracking down equipment." An that equates to savings in man-hours for mechanics and pilots alike.

The 2008 awards were sponsored by 1105 Government Information Group, a provider of information and media for the government information technology market. For over twenty years, the GCN Award s has honored federal, state and local government employees and agencies for their "extraordinary" achievements and contributions in information technology.  

GCN Editor-in-Chief Wyatt Kash called the annual GCN Awards a tribute to the "innovation and exemplary efforts to use IT to better serve the public and improve agency performance."

Other 2008 agency awards winners included the:

• General Services Administration for the Office of Acquisition Systems' Integrated Acquisition Environment
• Agriculture Department for the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service's Phytosanitary Certificate Issuance and Tracking system
• Health and Human Services Department Information Collection Request, Review and Approval System
• Housing and Urban Development Department National Housing Locator System
• Labor Department for creating GovBenefits.gov
• Environmental Protection Agency for their GeoData Gateway and EPA Metadata Editor
• Navy Enterprise Resource Planning Program

In addition to the ten agency awards that were distributed, GCN gave awards to five individuals for their outstanding achievements. Karen Evans, administrator for e-government and information technology at the Office of Management and Budget, and Charles Croom, former director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, both received GCN Hall of Fame Awards. Meanwhile, Molly O'Neill, CIO at the EPA earned the title Civilian IT Executive of the Year.

Also included on the list was Defense IT Executive of the Year Ken Heitkamp, a former Air Force assistant chief information officer for life cycle management, and Industry IT Executive of the Year Curt Kolcun, vice president of Microsoft's Federal Division.

Past winners of the GCN Awards have included NASA for its work on the Columbia supercomputer project; Maine Department of State for implementing online services for its constituents, Oakland County, Michigan for its secure, web-based video arraignment system for its court system; the Federal Aviation Administration for its cyber security management system which provides network security for the Department of Transportation; and the U.S. Coast Guard for its mobile identification system to combat  the repatriation of undocumented migrants with criminal records.