Andrea Di Maio
VP Distinguished Analyst
12 years at Gartner
25 years IT industry
Andrea Di Maio is a vice president and distinguished analyst in Gartner Research, where he focuses on the public sector, with particular reference to e-government strategies, Web 2.0, the business value of IT, open-source software… Read Full Bio
by Andrea Di Maio | May 18, 2012 | 4 Comments
Yesterday I attended ForumPA, the largest government technology conference in Italy, which draws every year a crowd of 30 to 40,000 people from government, industry and academia to discuss how IT can help transform service delivery and operations. Attendees and exhibitors come from all tiers of government (city, provincial, regional and national) and from many IT product and service vendors.
Hot topics this year were open government, open data and smart cities, with a somewhat less strong emphasis on cloud computing – despite Telecom Italia’s advertisement about the “Nuvola Italiana” (or Italian Cloud) all over the place. These are all themes that feature the emerging digital agenda, which was also represented with a shared booth with the three or four ministries that participate in its planning and operation.
My presentation’s title was “Open Government: The Reality Behind the Myth“‘ and its aim was to highlight the dichotomy of open government as a means to increase transparency or to achieve greater efficiency, especially in a context where governments are under severe budgetary constraints.
Although the session was in parallel with four of five others and was being streamed live, I was still disappointed with the low attendance. When addressing similar audiences in other countries I use to have a packed room.
Even more interestingly, before starting I was approached by a university professor who has been for many years and still is a well-known consultant to local and central government and a lobbyist for everything open (source, standards, data, you name it). As we were chatting about our back and forth on social media where she pushes for “open by default” and I call for “open for a reason”, she said that my negativity was probably the consequence of me going through a midlife crisis. I had to remind her that in this case my midlife crisis had started at least a decade ago, when I was younger and still cautioning clients from the over-enthusiastic advice that both she and her colleagues at the time were delivering about e-government, innovation and the likes.
The lack of attendees and the somewhat nasty reaction to criticism makes me believe that, despite the many genuine efforts to innovate, Italy has been stuck with the same innovation patterns and the same players and attitudes for too many years. University professors and other consultants take alleged best practices from other countries, add some flavor that shows how their specialty or position is essential for success, and package this all to public sector executives and political leaders who are eager to do something. Of course mentioning Brussels, Washington DC or London as examples of where something has been done or tried out always helps. On the other hand, there is little effort spent to look at (1) what makes a best practice elsewhere applicable to the Italian situation, and (2) whether all those practices are really as good as they look like or whether they are already showing sustainability problems. After all, also in other, more mature countries the lobby of technocrats, be they vendors, consultants, technology press, bloggers, academics, has a big stake in how open government is being shaped.
It would be great if technologists took a back seat in all his, leaving the front seat to people who know the business problems that need to be solved. Technologists can help understand and select tools, support training, give examples of how innovation can take place, but should not pontificate on open government strategies. Open government, e-government, social media are all tools to meet the strategic goals of a government organization: they are a means, but not the end. What many technologists do instead is to turn this upside down, putting technology (and technology spending) at the center, and often looking for a problem that their pet solution can solve.
I do understand why the usual suspects react so strongly. They are incurring the same risk as their colleagues in communications and public affairs, whose role is more and more perceived as a commodity, due to the pervasiveness of social media that is turning everyone into a potential communicator. Likewise, consumer and commodity IT can help employees become more effective, productive, innovative without expensive consulting and handholding.
In reality neither communications and PR nor IT will ever become a complete commodity, but parts thereof will. It is time for long-time advisors and consultants to realize that they can still provide a lot of value but in different areas of the technology stack. They should help their clients become personally more innovative and capable of making the right technology choices, rather than sell packaged solutions that are often the ill-fated result of copy-pasting from a different country or industry sector.
Category: open government data Tags: open government
by Andrea Di Maio | May 14, 2012 | 6 Comments
Over the last four years open government and open data have been at the forefront of the debate on how governments can become more transparent, participative and efficient. The theory is well known: rather than (or alongside) providing the government’s interpretation or packaging of public data, this data should be made available in raw, open format for people to build their own views and applications.
Open data evangelists say that this is an essential component of any open government initiative, and they must be right, given the number of jurisdictions that are pursuing this around the world. I do agree with the principle that making data equally available to everybody creates a level-playing field and helps overcome some of the most evident problems with information not being available or carrying a spin that precludes it from being really transparent.
The downside is a deluge of data. People can easily drawn in raw open data that is either too much or simply meaningless unless some processing takes place.
But who is supposed to do the processing? It can’t be government. Or – better – it can be, but this would bring us back to square one, with suspicion of government cooking its data to prove a certain point or to hide some uncomfortable reality. Then you have the so-called “civil society”, made of voluntary and advocacy groups, activists, as well as lobby groups, corporations and the mythical “application developers”.
It is reasonable to assume that each of these groups has a vested interest in packaging open data. “Vested interest” should not be read as a negative term. The interest may just be to increase transparency for an activist, or to provide people with better information about a particular noble cause, if you are an advocacy group, and just make a name for themselves. But less optimistic scenarios are also plausible: businesses trying to influence consumer behaviors, supporters of less noble causes “torturing” data to make their case, and so forth.
What is interesting, though, is not to try to foresee which of these trends will prevail. Let’s agree that there will be orders-of-magnitude more good than evil coming out of this: this is not the point. The point is that there will be people and organizations that are able to use, package, leverage masses of open data, and people who don’t. There will be people who rely on the way in which other people and organizations package data to take important decisions for their lives.
One might argue that this is not different from the past: information has always come through few sources, and open data cannot but broaden those sources, hence creating a clear opportunity for diversity and transparency. My contention is that this may turn to be an illusion. The more the data, the more sophisticated the analysis and presentation tools, the more specialized are the skills and resources required to process that data. Although consumer technologies become increasingly powerful and massive processing resources become available as a commodity, making sense of big, open data is not for the faint of hearth, and will require significant investments for the times to come.
Every time I suggest that there might be a darker side to open data, some of the evangelists and supporters come after me as if I were a scaremonger or just in denial of the great future that open data will help create for us all. I do sincerely hope for the open data potential to be fully realized. But this will require more people to play devil’s advocate, to scrutinize what infomediaries and application developers are doing, to provide people with ways that allow them to both benefit from and critically review open data packaging and analysis.
The open data train is in motion and there is no way that calls for cautions like mine can slow it down. They are meant to make sure that more than a few benefit from this “transparency spring”, to prevent a new divide to be created between those who have skills and resources to interpret open data and those who don’t. In my humble opinion, such a divide would be far more insidious than the one between those who access technology and the Internet and those who don’t. In fact, after almost two decades of positive actions to provide access to all, after major broadband deployment programs in several countries, now that we may be close to bridging the gap, it would be very sad to fall prey of a new, less evident but equally (if not more) pernicious divide.
Category: open government data Tags: government 2.0, open government
by Andrea Di Maio | May 3, 2012 | 11 Comments
Open government initiatives are either aimed at providing greater transparency, usually as a reaction to an accusation or perception of excessive secrecy, or at engaging citizens in specific problem solution as well as service delivery. It is probably fair to say that the US federal initiatives are closer to the former, while UK initiatives are closer to the latter.
In both cases, though, there is a fundamental lack of confidence – or blatant distrust – in the government workforce. This is rooted in a mixture of reality and perception: laziness, risk aversion, self-preservation, lack of incentives, low salaries, a culture of job security, and so forth, do not contribute to creating a pretty picture of government employees. In countries that are struggling with their finances and economy, civil servants are seen as a cost to be reduced in order to recover resources that should help reignite the economy. At the same time many agree that the retirement or dismissal of experienced government workers may make the situation even worse in areas where government services will be in greater demand going forward (think about education, social care, health care, public safety).
So are government employees an asset or a liability? I am sorry to say that most of the open government and open data ethos seem to suggest the latter. Open government advocates claim that citizens, communities, enterprises know better, that people cannot trust government to get the “whole story”, that the government workforce cannot be made more productive and effective unless slashing it.
For quite some time now I have been of a different opinion. Since when I started talking about employee-centric government, as opposed to the common wisdom of citizen-centricity, I have tried to highlight how the challenges ahead of us all were – and still are – of such a magnitude and severity that we need to work collaboratively to tackle them. This implies leveraging rather than challenging the considerable expertise that exists in the government workforce. Technology, including open data, can provide a formidable toolset to make that happen, and there are countless example where great initiatives and innovation start from inside the civil service.
Then, why is it so difficult to recognize the government workforce as one of the most relevant sources of public value, and look at how to deploy technology to unleash this value rather than to allegedly replace them?
My working assumption is that this is due to a combination of what politicians and technology suppliers want us to believe. For a politician facing voters challenged by a recession, who have lost or risk losing their jobs, it is easy to say that resources can be recovered by cutting public spending, which in turns lead to workforce reduction (since salaries are one of the highest if not the highest cost item for most departments). For technology suppliers, who face declining government budgets and often a less-than-stellar reputation about how IT has helped create public value, it is easy to say that government must spend more on self-service technology and automation to increase productivity.
Of course both claims have some merit: it would be unruly to allow public spending to run of control just to preserve civil service jobs. On the other hand, they do not support any effort to make employees not only more productive, but more innovative.
Case in point, the many idea contests that are being run to ask citizens how to address certain problems. Over the last few months even my country has been taken by an open government frenzy, and citizens are being asked about ideas for a digital agenda, or suggestions about how to reduce public spending. However it is not clear whether and how employees get involved in these discussions, either as contributors or animators. Every time I raise this is the local open government circles I get referred to the (rather stale) literature about wikinomics, wikicracy, and the likes.
Now, let’s think for a moment. Who knows best about teaching: parents or teachers? Who knows best about nursing: nurses or relatives? Who know best about public procurement: purchasing officers or technology consultants? Who knows best about policy making: cabinet staff or open data entrepreneurs? And the list goes on and on.
Yes, we can all provide input to these processes and we can help government be better and more transparent. But we cannot replace those whose job is to work for us all.
After all, isn’t this is the essence of representative democracy? We do elect individuals who will take care of the common good for all of us. Let’s help them, but let them also do their job.
Category: open government data web 2.0 in government Tags: employee-centric, government 2.0, open government
by Andrea Di Maio | May 2, 2012 | 5 Comments
While I was thinking about this post, I have seen Tom Slee’s one titled “Why the Open Data Movement is a Joke”, which has raised some discussion and understandable outrage in the open government circles.
Tom’s argument starts from underlying an inherent conflict between the Canadian government’s decision to join the Open Government Partnerships (see my earlier post) and some of its behaviors. Then he postulated that
the Open Data Movement is more focused on formats, digitally-accessible data sets, free access to postal codes, and so on than it is focused on actual government transparency around issues that matter. It’s a movement that has had no impact on government accountability
I would argue that he is being a bit unfair to the many who fight for greater data availability as a means to increase transparency and accountability, although he is probably right is saying that sometimes is geared too much about the “religion of open data”. To some extent, this reminds me of old discussions on open source software: everybody would agree with the principles of less vendor lock-in and greater openness in government procurement, but the open source purists would not concede that the right battle to fight was the one on open standards and not necessarily on open source.
Despite its excessively aggressive tone, Tom’s criticism may serve as a a useful wake up calls to those who are heads down on open data initiatives of all sort. Recently I have witnessed a spike of interest in my country too, where consultants and activists are up in arms around open data.
Those who have been reading this blog know that I have been often critical of the open data movement (see here for an example), for several reasons. I do believe it is a very useful and important move but:
- It needs to be less obsessed with creating new businesses and business models, and more concerned about how it can be used internally, by government themselves
- It needs to be less obsessed about transparency per se, and more concerned with how it can help solve concrete problems and challenges
- It needs to be less obsessed with data availability and more concerned with data usability – and not by specialists but by the masses.
In fact, the current imbalance (what I provokingly called “obsessions” above) is such that open data remain the realm of specialists – such as journalists, bloggers, activists, lobbyists – and its value does not get to the people yet.
It is also important to highlight that government certainly is a key provider of open data, but not the only one. Until when we start looking at the broader ecosystem of open data providers, which include several industry sectors (media, retail, financial services and more) as well as citizens and consumers themselves (through social networks), we will keep missing several avenues for value creation. Governments can use other industries’ and communities’ open data as much as those can use governments’.
It is unfortunate, though, that after over four years of open data discussions nothing seems to have changed. As Tom says, unconferences, hackatons, application contests, data.gov.name-your-country, keep dominating the debate, and each time somebody dares doubting the accomplishments of open data movements he or she gets accused of being a luddite or an enemy of transparency.
Reality is that open data alone does not make either governments nor the world as a whole as open as we wished to, Is it better to have zillions of raw data sets in an open format that the average citizen has not clue what to do with – and a bunch of businesses and other interest groups packaging that , or fewer data that governments package in a readable and accountable way for everybody to read?
After all, in most of the world governments are democratically elected to represent us, the people. Why should a newspaper, a groups of hacktivists or a private enterprise be any better at giving us access to and understanding of data?
Category: open government data Tags: government 2.0, open government
by Andrea Di Maio | May 1, 2012 | 1 Comment
Lately I am coming across more and more cases where public sector clients are thinking about, or being pushed to join or implement shared services supporting some form of cloud service delivery. The case for shared services has been around for many years and is quite solid: what’s the point of duplicating IT assets or services – be they hardware, software licenses, or anything-as-a-service – across different agencies or local authorities? After all, they have a bunch of similar process and application needs, but just tend to manage them in silos because of legacy reasons and because of how the budget process works.
Shared services have been around for quite some time and have their pros and cons. One could rarely argue against the case for a shared services, and the main causes for failure or “suboptimal” performance is in the inadequate governance structures and processes, which don’t properly anticipate and address turfwars and other conflicts.
Today, though, the case for shared services is made more complicated by the increasing availability of cloud offerings from commercial vendors. On the one hand, whomever is thinking about shared services these day assumes that they will deliver a cloud-like experience. On the other hand, with potentially competing offerings from commercial vendors, shared service clients ask themselves why they have to use those as opposed to potentially larger-scale commercial offerings. This is something I have raised recently, but keeps popping up in conversation with government clients, both on the consumer and the provider side.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that the most compelling shared service is a procurement service. What the GSA has done with apps.gov and what the UK Cabinet Office has done with the CloudStore are examples of a procurement shared service: departments, agencies, local authorities can purchase independently through a common procurement vehicle, and the vendor qualification – based on servcie levcel agreements, pricing and accreditation – is centralized.
There is still room for shared service delivery organizations in other areas, such as business processes, applications, and also infrastructure where compliance and financial considerations call for those. But governments really need to take a fresh look at where shared services can add value, challenge the common wisdom that took them to certain sharing and consolidation decisions just a few years ago, and embrace the market trend toward industrialization and commoditization of IT services.
Category: cloud shared services in government Tags:
by Andrea Di Maio | April 25, 2012 | Comments Off
Yesterday I was one of the keynote speakers at the Microsoft’s Government Solutions Forum in London. The speaker before was Liam Maxwell, recently appointed as Deputy Government CIO and already Director of ICT Futures.
Liam gave a compelling speech about the current ICT strategy for the UK government, stressing how radical they need to be to achieve considerable cost reductions. He mentioned that the current spending is around 26 billion pounds and they should aim at something around 8 billion pounds. Although he did not commit to a particular timeframe, he clearly indicated that this would take place over time as individual contracts with suppliers (be they product licenses, or other kinds of IT services) come to an end and get either renegotiated or retendered or just not renewed. The weapons they plan to use are a combination of procurement consolidation, open standards, open source (although he made clear there won’t be any preferential policy), engagement of smaller suppliers, as well as the CloudStore (previously known as G-Cloud).
The UK government has been on a long journey toward greater IT efficiency for a long time, but – as Liam observed – savings have been modest at best, and so have been impacts on productivity, unlike in the commercial sector. Therefore being more aggressive and radical is in order.
The approach seems to be strongly based on centralizing control in fewer hands: Cabinet Office or CIOs from large departments being part of the Delivery Board. This is in line with what others, like Canada, are doing, although slightly more nuanced.
However there are reasons for concern that I expressed in a previous post: is greater control the best way forward or should governments explore choice as a complementary means to reduce costs? For sure there are areas where sharing and centralizing is the best way to go, but in other areas the availability of inexpensive consumer technology as well as the increasing commoditization of IT services (and in particular application service) offering raises doubts about whether the best buyer of such services is somebody at the center, or people who are closer to the specific problem they are trying to solve.
But, more importantly, for how attractive a huge reduction of government IT spending might be, is an order of magnitude realistic? For how suboptimal contracts and for how inefficient the use of IT resources might be, I have a hard time at believing that there is such a vast room for improvement without compromising the sustainability of government services. Of course if one looks at the broader picture, with concepts like the Big Society and Open Public Services, which assume increased engagement of the private and voluntary sector in government service delivery, then the cost reduction takes a different meaning: but still it is predicated on the yet-unproven assumption that a market of mixed services will develop and thrive.
Actually this is also one of the fallacies of open government, another theme that is very close to the Cabinet Office and its Minister’s heart: pushing open data out will create value for citizens. In fact, in his speech Liam mentioned quite a few times the concept of citizen engagement and the whole idea that services need to be built to serve citizens: this is absolutely correct, but haven’t we heard the same story more than 10 years ago, in the early days of e-government and then joined-up government? And, more importantly, after quite a few years of open government and open data, aren’t we still asking questions about its real value?
The National Audit Office gave a great contribution, as well as wake up calls, on both shared services and open data. Let’s hope the Cabinet Office listens, and focus some of its attention on how individual government employees and not necessarily citizens themselves can be the critical resource to increase productivity and innovation. Because what matters is not how much less government spends on IT, but how much less government costs as a whole.
Category: cloud Europe and IT IT management Tags: cost cutting, UK government
by Andrea Di Maio | April 20, 2012 | 6 Comments
The IT world has embraced the concept of cloud computing. Vendors, users, consultants, analysts, we all try to figure out how to leverage the increasing commoditization of IT from both an enterprise and a personal perspective.
Discussions on COTS have turned into discussions on SaaS, People running their own data center claim they run (or are developing) a private cloud. Shared service providers rebrand their services as community cloud. IT professionals in user enterprises dream to move up the value chain by leaving the boring I&O stuff to vendors and developing more vertical business analysis and demand management skills. What used to be called outsourcing is now named cloud sourcing, while selective sourcing morphs into hybrid clouds or cloud brokerage. Also personally, we look at our USB stick or disk drive with disdain, waiting for endless, ultracheap personal clouds to host all of our emails, pictures, music.
It looks like none of us is truly reflecting about whether this is good or bad. Of course, many are moving cautiously, they understand they are not ready for prime time for all sorts of security, confidentiality, maturity reasons. However it always looks like they have to justify themselves. “Cloud first”, some say, and you’ll have to tell us why you are not planning to go cloud. So those who want to hold to their own infrastructure (without painting it as a “private cloud”) or want to keep using traditional delivery models from their vendors (such as hosting or colocation) almost feel like children of a lesser God when compared to all those bright and lucky IT executives who can venture into the cloud (and – when moving early enough – still get an interview on a newspaper or a magazine).
Let me be clear. I am intimately convinced that the move to cloud computing is inevitable and necessary, even it may happen more slowly that many believe or hope for. However I would like to voice some concerns that may give good reasons not to move. There are probably many others, but it is important to ask ourselves – both as users and providers – tougher questions to make sure we have convincing answers as we approach or dive into the cloud.
If data is the fuel of the 21st century, why should I fill somebody else’s tank?
Social data, open data, big data: I think it was UK Minister Francis Maude who said yesterday that open data is the new raw material, and Gartner’s head of research Peter Sondergaard used the expression “oil of the 21st century” almost two years ago at one of our symposia.
One could argue that it does not really matter where your data is hosted, as all you need is cheap storage and powerful analysis tools. But is that true? Why do countries build their own oil reserves? Do I risk to concede a competitive advantage by letting my data being hosted somewhere else?
If IT is a key driver for economic development, why should I let vendors in another country thrive?
The cloud is already displacing traditional roles in user IT organizations, and will progressively hit smaller IT providers (including cloud ones) through an inevitable process of market consolidation. The few large remaining vendors will be headquartered and operating in certain countries and not others. So what are we going to do with all those IT specialists that many digital agendas say we need to modernize the country? Will they all find a job in technology, maybe moving up the value chain or inventing uses of IT that we cannot even imagine now, or will they be underemployed or unemployed? Should a state or a nation or a province maintain local infrastructure, local software development, local data management as a way not to lose its technical edge?
If large cloud provider become target of terrorist attacks or just go out of business, should I put all my eggs in their basket?
Many debate the actual or perceived reliability and security of cloud providers. But as they grow bigger and we rely on them for more and more of our IT needs, they become a possible target for physical or cyberterrorist attacks. In the past enemies would try to neutralize your manufacturing and transportation capabilities, but in the future they may simply coordinate attacks to cloud providers to hurt multiple countries at once.
Even in a more peaceful world, events over the last few years have shown that no organization is “too big to fail”, actually do. Could a series of incidents or a financial crisis affect the viability of cloud service providers? And even if we could manage to retrieve all our data, would we ever have enough space to store it all, after years that we have relied on cheap and apparently limitless storage? Would we have the bandwidth to transfer petabytes of data when everybody else is trying to do the same?
What if the Internet becomes way more expensive in the future?
When looking at the business case for cloud, very often people forget the cost of the network. That’s seen as a real commodity, so it does not make a great difference on how much we pay per employee per month. But, in reality, we are assuming that the current model is sustainable, while – with the explosion of remote access due to wide cloud adoption as well as due to market and regulatory changes – it is not impossible that the pricing structure changes when we are already stuck with our virtual assets in the cloud.
Category: cloud Tags:
by Andrea Di Maio | April 18, 2012 | 2 Comments
Right in the middle of the Open Government Partnership conference, which I mentioned in my post yesterday, the UK National Audit Office (NAO) published its cross-government review on Implementing Transparency.
The report, while recognizing the importance and the potential for open data initiatives, highlights a few areas of concern that should be taken quite seriously by the OGP conference attendees, most of which are making open data more a self-fulfilling prophecy than an actual tool for government transparency and transformation.
The tone of the review is well represented by the first paragraph of its conclusions:
The strategic case for greater transparency is strong . It is to do with more than satisfy public rights to public information, however, and contribute fully to objectives set for it including accountability, service improvements, and growth, then the Government needs a firmer grip on measuring the success of the initiative
The areas of concern highlighted in the review are an insufficient attention to assess costs, risks and benefits of transparency, the variation in completeness of information and the mixed progress. While the two latter can improve with greater maturity, it is the first time that requires the most attention.
To the risk of sounding self-referential, I have been saying this for a long time (see previous posts about risks, costs and benefits), often getting annoyed replies and reactions by open government supporters who have often challenged my skepticism and even the rigor of my analysis.
I hope that people will take the UK NAO review more seriously than my blog (and rightly so) and start asking themselves fundamental questions about how the most value out of these initiatives.
For Gartner clients, a few reminders to prior research (login required) that may help navigate through some of these issues:
Category: open government data Tags: open government, UK
by Andrea Di Maio | April 17, 2012 | 4 Comments
On April 17 and 18 Brasilia hosts the first Open Government Partnership conference. With an impressive line up of dignitaries and experts, this conference aims at solidifying an initiative started last year and aimed at coalescing support and activity for open government around the globe.
The overall goal is a noble one, and aggregating interest from such a diverse range of countries on the topics of openness, transparency and accountability is a remarkable achievement. The agenda of the event is very rich and combines regional breakout sessions, which can explore similarities among neighboring countries, and topical breakout sessions, which look at information access, legislative aspects, lessons learned. There is a fair balance of government and non-government speakers, and certainly a great opportunity for attendees to exchange their experiences.
However there is a danger is that this important initiative veers toward the best practice model that has been – and still is – so pernicious for e-government. Usually few countries that happen to be more advanced in their thinking provide a blueprint of maturity models, business cases, strategic plans, and other countries follow suit.
Earlier today I had an inquiry with a regional government in a developing country, and the issue of the e-government maturity model supported by the UN came up, Such a model – like many – favors citizen-facing services and is not too helpful for the kind of services delivered by non-citizen-facing agencies, but yet the question was about how to comply with it , even if it makes little sense.. We have seen in the recent past how running after benchmarks have made countries waste some of their resources by e-enabling services that were not of a high priority or at the right level of maturity, to then face significant sustainability issues going forward.
The purpose, orientation, urgency of open government varies across different jurisdictions. It is important to preserve such diversity, while making sure that the basic principles stay the same. However the risk is that, in order to find the broadest possible common ground among participants, the debate focuses on the “how” rather than on the “why”.
Just take a look at the top ten commitments that participating countries claim in their plans. The vast majority is about increasing transparency, very few are about actual service delivery and almost none is about using open government principles for sustainable efficiency.
Even the template for country action plans contains some self-referencing wording when describing how countries should relate their open government commitment to some “grand challenges”:
Each commitment should have its own short paragraph identifying what the commitment is, how it will contribute to greater transparency, accountability and/or citizen engagement, who will be involved in implementing the commitment, and what the government hopes to accomplish by making this commitment. There should also be a brief discussion of how the specific commitments respond to public feedback generated through consultations.
The very problem is the reversal of cause and effect. Rather than showing how a commitment contributes to transparency, accountability and engagement, the plan should show how transparency, accountability and engagement can support a commitment to solve a “grand challenge”. Only by using open government to solve government problems rather than for the sake of openness will it stick and become part of the normal course of business.
It is probably too early to say, but both the line up and the tone of the event look more self celebrative, with people preaching to the converted. There is an interesting session on building the business case, and I hope it triggers a serious conversation about how to measure the real impact and success (or lack thereof) of open government.
Category: open government data Tags: open government
by Andrea Di Maio | April 17, 2012 | Comments Off
In this blog I have covered the research that we have been doing on a possible euro crisis, including the development of alternative scenarios and comments about readiness of enterprises and widely different approaches to preparedness (or lack thereof).
I have been saying that we do not do predictions about the outcome, but just urge our clients to explore different options, in order to be prepared either way. Actually, between me and David Furlonger, who has been spearheading our euro crisis research effort, I am supposed to be the optimist, while he tends to explore the doom and gloom side of the problem.
However last Sunday I had an experience that made me think for the first time that we may be heading for something worse that a little bump on the road or a “simple” recession. I went to one of the largest malls in Italy, close to where I live. It was quite difficult to find a spot to park the car, as the whole place looked like being more crowded than during Christmas shopping time.
When I finally parked and walked into the mall, I could see a huge crowd going through the alleys and doing window-shopping. However, when I entered the supermarket – the largest single shop in the whole mall -I was shocked to see entire rows of cashiers with nobody queuing. Since when I was a kid the rule was: queues in the parking = queue at the cashiers. Also looking inside the other shops I could see people browsing, but very little activity at the cashiers.
As a partial consolation, I thought that people can still afford to fuel their car despite the outrageous gas price at the pump. But then I realized that driving to a mall and wandering around for a few hours is probably the least expensive way of spending a rainy weekend for a family hit by the economic crisis.
In Italy, most baby boomers and the generation after them have never gone through anything like this. Unlike our parents, we have not experienced wars or huge crises, we have seen our average wealth steadily increase over time, even if some of that was based on the shaky foundations of a huge public debt.
I assume the same applies to most of Europe and I wonder whether we are capable of dealing with what may happen. Certainly empty shops, quiet roads, fewer people going out for the week end or going out for dinner combined with increased taxes and tough austerity measures do not make for a bright future. As the news from stock markets show, we are not out of danger and any of the scenarios we developed may still unfold.
It is definitely time to take this euro crisis much more seriously than most of us have done so far. Join our free webinar (Euro Crisis: Plan Now to Minimize Impact on IT and Business) on May 3rd to discuss what this means for IT
Category: Europe and IT IT management Tags: euro crisis
