July 2002

Dear Friends,

The events of the past year have prompted us all to re-examine our fundamental principles and goals. As we watched our colleagues in New York City and New York State government respond with resourcefulness, determination, and heroism to the attack on the World Trade Center, we could see more clearly than ever the power of trust and collaboration to meet a common need. We witnessed the spirit of public service in countless actions across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. We saw the importance and resilience of our laws, policies, and plans, even as new challenges emerged to test them. And we reaffirmed the importance of information, communication, and technology to the ongoing life of our government and our society.

At CTG we are honored to have a role in supporting effective government. In the past year we've reaffirmed our founding principles of public service, problem solving, partnership, and knowledge building. These principles play out in projects like "E-Government: Creating Tools of the Trade," where we've worked with many state and local officials to create practical tools for building electronic government infrastructures and applications. Federally funded research grants allowed us to focus on broad questions of interorganizational collaboration, information integration, and knowledge sharing. And a new grant from the National Science Foundation is giving us the privilege of learning how the response to September 11 might bring us long-term improvements in government in more ordinary times.

As always, government, academic, and corporate partners are essential to our program. They continually strengthen our foundations and make it possible for us to apply leading- edge thinking to important public problems. We look forward to 2003 with great confidence in both the spirit and the reality of public service.

Sincerely,

Sharon S. Dawes

Director