Headfirst into high tech

Salt Lake City Councilman Dave Buhler was a volunteer on a political campaign in the early '90s when, for the first time, he saw a computer laptop.

"I had heard of them, of course, but I actually had never seen one," Buhler said.

The laptop was being used by gubernatorial hopeful Mike Leavitt, who would go on to win three terms as governor and establish the importance of being "wired" as a focal point of his administration.

More than a decade later, many of what were once Leavitt's "out there" ideas about tapping into technology have become reality. They were driven in part because technology evolved and grew on its own, but they were also fostered by an admitted "computer geek" who's had 11 years to nurture his vision of getting Utah plugged in.

Leavitt is gone now — off to Washington, D.C., to head the Environmental Protection Agency — but his impact on high tech in Utah will linger for years to come.

"What the governor has espoused is creating linkages among groups — education, industry, technology. He has done that effectively as anyone in the country," said Mark Renda, the state's director of strategic business analysis.

While certainly not the "high-tech" capital Leavitt so boastfully proclaimed Utah could be, the state has made its imprint in the technology arena under Leavitt's prodding:

• In the past three years, Utah has ranked in the top 10 in various technology surveys or received national awards at least 15 times.

• Utah, for all its rural hamlets and wide open spaces, has 99 percent of its schools hooked into the Internet, earning it the No. 2 spot in the nation for wired schools.

• And while Utah's economy — like the rest of the country — has faltered the past couple of years, the state has managed to hang onto a respectable information technology job market.

Leavitt's technology vision was incubated in the mid-1980s, in the offices of the family insurance business, where he had access to something fairly uncommon back then: a computer bulletin board for inner company use.

It was, he said, an expensive tool of technology he wanted to bring to state government to make it more efficient once he became governor.

Once in office, Leavitt turned his technology focus to three main areas: making government accessible, creating high-tech jobs and getting schools hooked up.

"It was early-stage thinking. . . . At the time, I wondered if we were really out there on all of this. If we were taking the ideas too far out on the edge," he recalled in a recent interview. "Now, 10 years later, it turns out that we were moderately bold."