Vernon Ehlers: “In 1994, when I first arrived in this Congress, I was absolutely astounded. I went to my office and, first of all, found…”

“In 1994, when I first arrived in this Congress, I was absolutely astounded. I went to my office and, first of all, found that I did not have a computer in my office, but when I tried to use staff computers to send e-mails, I discovered that I could send an e-mail more easily and more rapidly to Moscow than I could to a colleague 20 feet down the hall. Why was that? Because in the House of Representatives, we had allowed a system to develop that did not have standards for the whole House of Representatives, and each Representative had a kingdom where they had set their own standards for their computer systems. Each individual system could not talk to each other. When the Republicans took the majority, then Speaker Gingrich put me in charge of standardizing the system. Today, we have a system that seamlessly allows over 10 million e-mails a month to flow between offices in this Capitol, saving us a lot of money and a lot of staff time. That is an illustration of what we can accomplish with standards.”