Low-tech Congress finds a way to answer e-mails

By JOHN BALZ

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 7, 2001

WASHINGTON -- An institution as old and decorous as Congress has a difficult time adapting to the latest technological wizardry. So it is a matter of real significance that the Senate is about to take advantage of an innovative computer software that sorts, reads and responds to constituent e-mails without a human being touching the keyboard.

The system known as EchoMail, which became available to Senate offices this year, represents a major technological breakthrough for Congress and a belated recognition by congressional leaders that more than 10-million e-mails are being sent and received on Capitol Hill each month.

Of course, some taxpayers might be offended to learn that their e-mails to members of Congress will get an automated answer.

But the surprising truth is that many legislators don't respond to e-mail because they lack the staff or the inclination. Thus many Senate managers reason that an automatic response is better than none.

Dennis Johnson, an associate dean at George Washington University's graduate school of political management, says Congress is four or five steps behind the best private companies on this front and will have to beef up its technology just to keep pace with the average American household.

"The electronic communication of choice today is e-mail, and members will have to realize that anything online is of vital importance," Johnson said.

Testing of the EchoMail software began a year ago in the offices of eight senators, including that of Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla. Developed by Cambridge, Mass.-based General Interactive, the service was expected to be ready months ago, but minor bugs delayed it.

Already used by large corporations like Nike and General Electric to handle customer service questions and complaints, EchoMail sorts incoming e-mails according to various keywords and then sends back appropriate responses.

If a constituent were to send an e-mail to a senator with the words "prescription drugs," "can't afford," and "must have," the software would interpret the writer to be in favor of a low-cost prescription drug program and promptly e-mail an automatic response.

V.A. Shiva, founder of General Interactive and a member of the 1979 Rutgers University team that transmitted the first e-mail, says EchoMail is 95 percent to 97 percent accurate in responses.

Although Congress might have been slow to adopt the software, the pace is typical. In matters of technology, as in so many other things, Congress is made up of 536 separate fiefdoms, with each member of the House and Senate making decisions about computer equipment, Web page design and e-mail. As recently as six years ago, these fiefdoms were so technologically insulated and incompatible that sending an e-mail to the office down the hall was more difficult than sending one to eastern Asia.

Congressional staffers mark 1995 as the dawn of the e-mail era on Capitol Hill, when the sergeant-at-arms installed a central server to make intra-office e-mailing a cinch.

But when messages began arriving from citizens around the country, congressional staffers weren't quite sure how to treat them. Were they like letters or were they a new form of communication? Were they more or less important?

Chris Casey, president of CaseyDorin, a Web design firm and author of the book The Hill on the Net, says members of Congress quickly appreciated a technology that allowed them to hear from more people, but they wondered how their small staffs would handle thousands of new messages. They also fretted about whether to answer non-constituents' comments.

Still, e-mail remained a minor portion of constituent mail until the House voted to impeach President Clinton, when e-mail traffic became so heavy that all servers had to be shut down temporarily. The Senate was averaging 500,000 messages a day; the House, 800,000.

Constituent e-mail is a low priority in most offices. Many offices that bother to respond to e-mail are following what looks like backward logic: If the e-mail includes the correspondent's home address, a response is sent via regular mail.

Critics question this continuing preference for old-fashioned mail.

'There is no logical reason why we shouldn't respond to everything with an e-mail," says Rep. Vernon Ehlers, R-Mich., who was entrusted by House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1994 to help usher Congress into the information age.

To help Congress modernize its communications, George Washington University and the Congressional Management Foundation, a non-proft organization that helps Congress improve its managerial practices, have obtained a $1-million grant to study how offices can improve communication with their constituents.

But even with help, nobody expects congressional communications to undergo a rapid transformation.

"Congress is an entrenched tradition where things change slowly," noted Diana Owen, a government affairs professor at Georgetown University. "I know members of Congress who are not encouraging (e-mail). They have a hard enough time keeping up with the hard letters."

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