为什么政府需要“电脑狂人”？

为什么政府需要“电脑狂人”？

尽管有少数一些政府部门采用了最新的技术，但大部分联邦机构的科技水平还处在上个世纪，是时候让“电脑狂人”们来帮忙了。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

nugget金属块，珍品，珍闻['nʌɡɪt]

finalise使结束['faɪnəˌlaɪz]

hitherto到目前为止，迄今[ˌhɪðər'tuː]

limbo丢弃废物的地方，过渡状态['lɪmboʊ]

digitisation数字化[dɪdʒaɪtaɪ'zeɪʃən]

archaic已不通用的， 古老的[ɑːr'keɪɪk]

streamline使……简化， 使……合理化['striːmlaɪn]

entourage随行人员，周围的事物['ɑːnturɑːʒ]

incendiary放火的，煽动的，教唆的[ɪn'sendieri]

Why the government needs geeks（837 words）

By Gillian Tett

There has not been much good news coming out of Washington lately. But here is one nugget: a few weeks ago, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it had finalised plans to introduce a new integrated electronic health-record system.

This marks a big leap forward for the VA, which has hitherto kept its records in a fragmented manner. For the first time, it will be integrating its systems with those of the Department of Defence. This will ensure that, instead of sitting in limbo for months, records will be transferred as soon as servicemen and women leave the military.

“For almost two decades, Congress has been imploring the Department of Veterans Affairs not only to deliver on our promise to veterans, but also to innovate and modernise,” declared Jeff Dunham, a Republican congressman from California, writing in The Washington Examiner recently. “Now under new leadership, following years of frustration, corruption, scandal and abuse, the VA is taking the initiative to deliver the care and services that our veterans [need].”

I dare say some readers' eyes are glazing over at this point; the finer points of government digitisation don't normally provoke media headlines or voter passion. But it is worth pondering this story — or, more accurately, the fact that it wasn't much of a “story” at all for our current Trump-obsessed media.

That the VA announcement passed without much notice says a lot about what is wrong with our concept of what matters in government today, and the way we are increasingly treating Washington as an entertaining reality-TV show, without noticing the things that government actually could — or should — do.

In any rational world, it would seem entirely sensible for the VA to create integrated healthcare records. Many observers might consider it odd that the department has not already done so. After all, America is a place of cutting-edge technology and digital entrepreneurial skills — just think of what Amazon, Facebook and Google have done. It is also a place where companies have been using digital technology for years; where the healthcare system accounts for a sixth of all economic activity; and where there are some 21 million veterans (equivalent to the entire populations of Norway, Sweden and Denmark combined).

For the past two decades, however, the VA has repeatedly failed to implement an integrated record-keeping system (never mind that it has spent about $2bn on feasibility studies in recent years). While these delays can be blamed partly on mismanagement, the issues go well beyond that.

Much of the US's civilian healthcare system is fragmented too: while it is easy to transfer healthcare records between doctors in a country such as the UK, it is very difficult to do so in much of America. And the VA is certainly not the only one with archaic practices: although there are corners of the public sector that are using the latest technology — such as the City Halls in New York and Chicago — most federal agencies have been almost as slow as the VA to introduce 21st-century ideas.

The good news is that moves to change this are under way. Various private-sector entrepreneurs are launching innovations in healthcare IT, and there are campaigns to upgrade public-sector digital know-how. The non-profit “Code for America”, for example, is campaigning for computer geeks to volunteer to spend a couple of years working for government, in much the same way that the better-known “Teach for America” encourages graduates to work for a time in the country's public schools.

What's more, some White House officials, such as Gary Cohn and Jared Kushner, now seem keen to bring better management and tech skills into government. This week, for example, President Trump, Cohn and Kushner convened a meeting of tech CEOs to discuss how to launch a revolution in the way the federal government uses computers — and claimed this could deliver a trillion dollars in cost savings over 10 years.

“We are here to improve the day-to-day lives of the average citizen,” Kushner said, pointing out that the federal agencies are so fragmented they currently maintain no fewer than 6,100 data centres. These, he argues, could be streamlined to create a more efficient structure, just as the VA is now attempting to do.

This is sensible stuff — exactly the type of common-sense action that governments should take (and that businesses do take every day). But even at the best of times it is hard to get voters — or media consumers — particularly excited by this sort of basic but important reform. And right now it is doubly hard.

That is partly because the media are mesmerised by the investigations surrounding Trump and his entourage, including Kushner. But it is also because Trump himself keeps creating distractions with his own deliberately incendiary tweets, making it difficult for voters to pay any attention to the sensible reforms that advisers such as Kushner want to promote.

Therein lies a huge missed opportunity. It would be comic if it were not so tragic; we'd better just hope those VA reforms fly.