We live in the world of the Singularity. All of us involved in Technology and IT know that the Haves are pulling away from the Have Nots. Exponentially.
Ninety nine percent of US cities are like Anchorage. We have some great people, but they are bogged down in supporting legacy systems, internal customers, and As-Is business processes. It is almost impossible to get the budget, resources, or time to Modernize, let alone do The Right Thing ™.
We do not have the resources in city government to evolve ourselves to where we need to be. We compete against the unreal expectations of what our citizens use at home every day.
In Anchorage we have faced record setting snowfalls and intense cold this winter. If there is one thing we are very good at, it is jump starting our cars. Blindfolded.
CfA is an opportunity to jump start both Anchorage city government and the local IT community that supports us. Rather than keep turning the key and hoping the engine catches, CfA supplies us with a high voltage charge of experts who are current in new technology, public facing Internet services, and mobile development tool sets. CfA Fellows are experts on tools and standards that are foreign to my staff, but which are absolutely critical for us to provide and maintain public services at the level our citizens expect.
In the past I would have asked the CfA Fellows to build me an App, one that we never seemed to get around to. Get a problem customer off my back.
What I’ve learned is that we really need CfA Fellows to teach us how to fish (though I am sure they’ll have plenty of time for that when they come to Alaska). We need them to teach our whole community, public and private, how to adopt the tools and standards used by The Big Boys ™ in Chicago, NYC, and of course San Francisco. The 1 percenter-ers.
When our CfA Fellows leave Anchorage they will leave us with a solid year of experience developing and deploying production services using the latest tools and technologies,
And if they happen to limit out, and leave with a trunk full of salmon and halibut, we call that a win-win.
