As I left the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, less than 500 of the agency’s machines had been upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007. No machines had been upgraded to Windows Vista, while Windows 7 is scheduled to debut sometime this year. The decision to not upgrade to Vista is not alarming but the continued use of Internet Explorer 6 as well as development of applications specific to this web browser puts our state agencies behind the 8-ball.
I left the DNR at the end of June and the use of any web browser except IE 6 was not supported. There was also an effort to block those of us who installed and used modern browsers like Mozilla Firefox, the Chrome executable blocked at the administrative level through content management software. Along with security issues surrounding the continued use of IE 6, the officially supported version of the Java Runtime Environment continues to be 1.5.10, which is in its End Of Life transition period.
The point of this is our state is outdated and completely outpaced by new technology springing to life. This has a direct relationship with Washington state having vendor-driven architecture. The best example is the Department of Personnel’s Employee Self Service page which only works 100% in IE 6 because its development was tailored to obsolete standards instead of open standards. Even Microsoft has seen the light and is on board with open standards, yet there are those in state government who stiffen whenever the word “open source” is mentioned. Unfortunately, those reacting like this are often the decision-makers, managers, and supervisors. Their fear is based on a misconception of open standards being an open door to those who would do harm.
What is the source of logic behind continuing to use a browser created in 2001?
Along with the previous statement, I want the next factoid to linger so I’m also leaving it to stand on its own.
There isn’t a single agency within the Washington state government who is a leader in technology.
Vendor-driven architecture is shared throughout state agencies. Since the Department of Information Services is suppose to provide technology leadership for government organizations across Washington, perhaps the fault lies with them. The list of DIS Products and Services is lacking. Development architectures like Drupal and Ruby on Rails are nonexistent as are OSR (open standards requirement for software), SaaS (Software as a Service), and cloud computing.
It might take baby steps but a change of course towards progression must be made. It can start by completely eliminating Internet Explorer 6 and all outdated software from the computer systems in use throughout state agencies. Representatives Carlyle and Dunshee are doing what they can to move our state towards cloud computing and SaaS. I encourage you to support their effort and to also join the web citizens trying to end the use of IE 6:
http://www.ie6nomore.com/
