Last Wednesday I had two very illuminating conversations, one with the CEO of a large government IT service provider and the other one with the division head of a state-owned research center. Both told me, although in different terms, that they don’t believe government 2.0 will happen without citizen 2.0, politician 2.0 and officer 2.0.
What [...]
Entries from May 2009
Government 2.0 Won’t Happen Without Officer 2.0
May 30th, 2009 · 16 Comments
Tags: social networks in government
Why EU-funded R&D Fails
May 29th, 2009 · 5 Comments
I’ve been pondering about this post for a long time, actually even before I was one of the Gartner bloggers. This position of mine has developed over almost 20 years, since when I started being involved in cooperative research & development projects funded by the European Union under the so-called Framework Program for Research and [...]
Tags: Uncategorized
The Four Facets of Web 2.0 in Government
May 29th, 2009 · 15 Comments
Over the last week or so I’ve had a number of clients asking me to summarize the impact of Web 2.0 in government.
I’ve come up with four different but interrelated areas:
Internal (intra or inter-government) collaboration.
Institutional presence on external social networks
Open government data
Employees on external social networks
Internal government collaboration. This is where most of our earlier [...]
Tags: web 2.0 in government
A Reality Check for Linux on PCs
May 28th, 2009 · 1 Comment
While discussions about the relevance of Linux as an alternative platform for client devices continue (and indeed it has established itself in several corporations and government agencies) two events from yesterday should serve as a reality check for all those who believe it should (and will) replace Windows.
At an ASUS product showcase in Sydney, Australia, [...]
Tags: open source in government
The Twilight of Government–Wide Enterprise Architecture
May 26th, 2009 · 1 Comment
I hadn’t had a government-wide enterprise architecture (EA) conversation for while, and this is why earlier today I welcomed a meeting with a client from the e-government office of a regional government, to discuss about their attempt to use an EA approach to identify commonalities across departments and help rationalize processes, data, applications and infrastructure.
Large [...]
Tags: e-government
Could the cloud kill innovation? So what?
May 25th, 2009 · 1 Comment
Today I had an interesting conversation with a government client who – over ten years ago – architected a domain-specific integration broker supporting mission-critical applications running across jurisdictional boundaries. After having been detached to another agency for several years, he came back to his old agency at the beginning of this year, and discovered that [...]
Tags: cloud
Data.gov Goes Live: What’s Next?
May 22nd, 2009 · 3 Comments
With a lot of anticipation, data.gov, the “one-stop repository of government information and tools to make that information useful” (as defined in the relevant White House announcement) has been launched on May 21st.
As one may expect, there are still few data sets, but the approach is quite clear. Data are provided in raw form (in [...]
Tags: open government data
White House Misses The Mark On Participatory Policy Making
May 22nd, 2009 · 2 Comments
Yesterday the Obama administration took important steps toward open government.
The first one was the announcement of how the citizen engagement process in policy-making will work.
As explained on the White House Open Government Blog:
“…Beginning today, we will have a brainstorming session for suggesting ideas for the open government recommendations. You can vote on suggested ideas or [...]
Tags: social networks in government
The Growing Appetite for Open Source in Government
May 21st, 2009 · 2 Comments
Earlier today I had an interesting conversation with a vendor that supports an open source product in the area of application infrastructure. They started from Australia, where their product was deployed several years ago across multiple agencies, and have since moved to Europe.
We were discussing whether emerging government policies around open source, such as the [...]
Tags: open source in government
U.S. Government’s Flavors of Cloud Computing Need More Clarity
May 20th, 2009 · 8 Comments
On May 13th the General Services Administration (GSA) with the IT Infrastructure Line of Business (ITI LoB), issued a Request for Information for capability statements and responses from vendors who provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings.
This RFI contains definitions of cloud computing, its characteristics and delivery models, taken from recent work done at the [...]
Tags: cloud