Technology choices are choices about the present and the future. Whatever technology is chosen for your project will have powerful long-term implications throughout your organization. New technology often comes with new business rules, practices, and processes that are very hard to change. Because of these long-term effects, every initiative needs to pay attention to three things.

• Mapping out business processes allows you to identify how well current and new technologies support them.
• Making users an integral part of planning and decision making helps a system fit well with the real work of the organization.
• Recognizing and accounting for diversity in environments and infrastructures helps ensure that technology will work wherever it is deployed.

Stay abreast of cutting-edge technologies as well. Many government organizations are now working with researchers to develop and test technologies that handle very complex problems such as environmental modeling, emergency management and response, and manipulation of huge data sets. These experimental systems may lead to future products that address a wider range of information problems.