While putting together three key portfolios for growth and development is a very good start, the new vision is not immune from major risks, and it is key for the new government to deal with them earlier rather than later. Here are a few personal tips.

• Spend better, not more. Although funding is required to improve infrastructures (and indeed almost 70 million euro are already earmarked for broadband development in some of the regions), the government needs to engage the private sector from the very beginning. The development of smart city infrastructures and applications is an expensive endeavor, which is going to benefit commercial enterprises, ICT service providers as well as citizens. It is not fair that only the latter have to pay the bill (through taxes and public spending). The government should pursue he establishment of public-private partnerships, where the private sector demonstrably shares both risks and rewards on most of these investments. Public funding should be focused on improving the performance of government services and operations as well as on transforming them through technology.
• Challenge the previous wisdom. In a cash-constrained environment, the government will be tempted to leverage as much as possible from previous initiatives and services. However, as it is establishing a new, longer term vision, it should also look at some of them critically enough to check whether they are sustainable or if they make sense in the future scheme of things. In particular the so-called “certified email” (PEC in Italian) as well as programs like the identity card may need to be reconsidered, given the modest uptake and the questionable value in a future where people want to have choice rather that being given only one solution.
• Learn from leaders’ mistakes. Being a latecomer to some of these themes is an advantage and not a disadvantage, as many technology providers and consultants keep saying. All areas of concern – broadband deployment, smart cities and open government – are fraught with disillusionment: understanding both the critical risks and the key success factors is of the utmost importance. Learning from the issues with existing smart city programs and better understanding why open government is struggling in many places where it has been adopted early is key to prioritize scarce resources. Unfortunately lobbies from the local technology sector and academia seem to push toward a me-too attitude, trying to mimic what others have been doing, irrespective of whether they have been successful or not. .
• Develop internal skills, without relying too much on vested interests. Over the last few years there has been a gradual loss of competencies through downsizing and transformation of relevant agencies. Such competencies need to be rebuilt, and should not be outsourced. Also, the ministers and officials who have been tasked with the digital agenda should exercise extreme care in listening to the suggestions and proposals coming from organizations that have a vested interest in greater public spending on this sector. Proposals coming with a clear risk-reward sharing component should be looked at more favorably, while the less specific requests for building infrastructure or provide seed funding should be carefully scrutinized.

The government is certainly on the right path by stressing the importance of digital technologies to support growth and dramatically improve government efficiency. However both the strategic objectives and the execution plans need to be bold enough to create a clear fracture with the past, put capable government officials in the driving seat, and push the local technology sector to share risks and opportunities rather than enjoy public funding.

This is still far from being a full replacement of the current government portal Directgov, but gives a pretty good idea of how things will develop. At face value, it doesn’t look better than many other government web sites, although it is said to provide more effective search capabilities. It provides categories to browse from, popular terms or services and then, for each category, a mixture of information people may be looking for and some services. The style of interaction does not look dissimilar from many other web sites, and it does not even provide the ability for people to tailor it to their needs (like redbridge i does for instance).

But the beauty of Gov.uk is supposed to be under the hood. As a review on the FT Tech blog puts it

Early testing on 2,000 people by civil servants cut by a third the time it took people to find information or complete a task. In some cases, dozens of pages have been whittled down to a multiple-choice process to guide users to their particular destination

If this is confirmed, it is well worth a suboptimal (at least for now) user interface. Also, what is being praised is the unusual development style, which is definitely closer to a start-up or one of the tech giants in Silicon Valley rather than a traditional government institution. The profile and resume of most developers in nothing like the usual government IT person.

There is an excellent review provided by Alex Howard, who also hints to the technology used. One thing that is missing though .- and this also pointed out in Alex’ article – is a clear path to making sure services and information on the new site can be used by multiple intermediaries.

There seems to be an inherent contradiction. On the one hand the UK government is pushing for open data and working to gov.uk as a platform. On the other hand the effort so far seems to be focused on making sure that people only use it. But wasn’t this Directgov’s initial idea? And hasn’t time proven that – especially with evolution toward web 2.0 and social media – people want to be in control of the channel and application they use to interact and transact with government?

UK politicians and government executives keep talking about citizen-centricity, and yet they seem to miss what it really means.

Case in point: In the e-government space, the UK government said many times that intermediaries are important.

The first intermediary policy that I ever saw in the world came actually from the UK in 2003. It was assuming (well before the term web 2.0 was invented) that people may wish to choose a different entity than a government organization to conduct government business (e.g. an insurance for health care, a bank for tax returns, an association for applying for school, and so forth). However their portal development strategy did not really apply that policy.

More recently (in 2007) they have been at the forefront of what would become the government 2.0 movement, and when I met Directgov executive two years ago I was told they were planning to support intermediaries and not act as the only point of contact. And yet, there has not been any visible development. A little over a year ago a Directgov review confirmed the ambiguity between being a service wholesaler or a retailer

Now, with the government pursuing more savings, there is an even greater momentum to close down existing government web sites and consolidate everything into a single web site of sort, which I assume is what gov.uk is the beta version of today.

So, what happened to the idea that people may get greater value from choosing a more natural contact point to interact with government? If there is value in allowing organizations to leverage open data to create dashboards and applications, why shouldn’t it be the same for services and information hosted by gov.uk? Why should I use it to know my council tax (this is one of the services they provide), if I’d rather use my council web site more frequently?

I am pretty sure that the techies at the GDS will tell that the gov.uk architectures supports it, that they just have to define the API, and that as everything is open source and cloud-based, it is almost a “piece of cake” (well, of course they would be more cautious, but as they are young and cool I have no doubt they would pull it out).

The problem is that this is not just a technical issue. It is a design issue. It is about asking yourself from the outset “is my web site the best way to deliver this service to a citizen? And, if not, how do I figure out the best channels and engage them?”. From what I read, there has been a lot of user involvement in designing the site: but I am not aware that there has been much effort invested into looking at a broader set of use cases and options.

So, what is Gov.uk going to become, when it grows up? A platform or yet another government single-point-of-contact?

Open government supporters insist that the movement is alive and kicking, but it is fair to say that, if it is a revolution, it is going very slow and is testing the patience of those who are fighting with shrinking budgets and financial sustainability issues in government organizations around the world.

Taking a look at the open government plans published by US federal agencies, and the related dashboard, it is quite apparent that most plans have not been updated since their first version, and there is very little information about progress and what has been accomplished.

Of course there is still a lot enthusiasm elsewhere, and every week there are new jurisdictions joining the race to openness, but how long will that enthusiasm be maintained before open government delivers on its promise?

There is still a chance for open government to prove its value, before being marginalized, and it is to create a clear connection with problems that jurisdiction and agencies need to solve. This implies that open government must be redirected from simply increasing transparency to fighting crime and tax evasion, improving health and education, reducing the cost of government. And that open government experts do no longer limit themselves to enabling the wisdom of the crowd and the creativity of application developers, but take ownership of how open data can and will solve specific problems, and be accountable for those solutions.

But this is a completely different ball game, isn’t it?.

I do not think either of them is wrong.

Hana underlines a well-known problem with some open government endeavors, which is the lack of focus. Sometimes people confuses the means with the end, and application contests deliver technically interesting results that turn into a modest citizen uptake.

On the other hand, Alex highlights that by embedding sustainability as a key concept in an open government plan (as Chicago did in his opinion), it is easier to achieve successful use of open data that sticks, rather waning after the initial excitement.

I tend to err on the side of cynicism when it comes to open government. It may be the case that, like in other great examples of use of social media in government, its value will become evident when facing a major crisis, an emergency or a problem that cannot be solved otherwise. But, lacking any of that (which would be a blessing) we certainly need to take it out of the hands of enthusiastic pioneers, application developers and “open anything” geeks, and turn it into a tool that the average government managers can understand and utilize. This implies that open government may have to become more inward-looking, aimed at solving internal and bureaucratic problems rather than making citizen happy and saving lives.  As I have been saying for quite some time now, selfishness may be the best way to make open government stick.

This is still much less than the $34 million originally planned for 2011, but it could have been worse. This money funds projects like Data.gov, USAspending.gov and the IT Dashboard, all highly visible transparency initiatives that have been launched early by the Obama administration.

While transparency advocates may insist that this is not enough, I would argue that it is time for open government to prove its value also through demonstrable cost savings that would strengthen the case – and provide cash – to pursue this noble but potentially expensive endeavor. We all agree that transparency is a key principle, but when government organizations are challenged in their ability to meet statutory obligations (like a shutdown or deep financial cuts would), then openness needs to contribute to make government sustainable.

Last week I had two refreshing conversations with agencies at federal and state levels that are taking a hard look at how to evolve their open government plans. In both cases there is an imperative to connect open government to mission effectiveness and efficiency, probably with a stronger accent on the latter than on the former, given the current fiscal climate.

I am convinced that open government is a very powerful tool to solve many of the problems that public administrations are facing and will face going forward. Leveraging data and information in many different ways will be key not only to improve service quality and transparency, but also to make those services sustainable under tighter budgetary circumstances. Improving employees’ effectiveness and efficiency as well as engaging citizens to help in service delivery or compliance work are the new frontiers for open government.

Therefore, besides maintaining or improving central funds, it is key that agencies see open government as an indispensible weaponry for their day-to-day operations, rather than a nice-to-have complement to their mission-critical processes..

As usual the blogosphere has been buzzing with enthusiasm and anticipation, but – at least at this stage – my first reaction has been to yawn. Something I shared in a response to a tweet from open government advocate and reporter Alex Howard, receiving his usual slap on my wrist in return.

Once again, I have no problem with the principle behind open data, and I am personally convinced that those exciting scenarios that many have depicted, with entirely new services and businesses stemming from the clever reuse and mash up of this data, will become reality at some point in time.

My problem is with timing and emphasis.

There are formidable problems that Europe and most of the rest of the world have to deal with, such as dramatic budget cuts, unsustainable public welfare, massive youth unemployment, risk (and often reality) of social unrest, the gloomy picture of countries defaulting on their debt and pulling with them most of the financial services industry.

I would argue that there should be an attempt, if not a real impetus, to orient open data initiatives to help with one or more of these problems. This does require focus, planning, execution.

It requires people who understand problems as well as organizational and regulatory constraints, people who are most likely to be working in or for government. Sure, application developers and non-experts can offer new ways of looking at data and spotting partners and solutions that nobody else has been looking for: but their efforts need to be coordinated, if not directed, by government folks who will be accountable for those solutions.

Unfortunately governments keep buying into the “government-as-a-platform” metaphor, assuming that once all data is published in machine readable form, problems will almost sort themselves out. Reality is that, except for few notable exceptions, not much has happened so far.

Open data should not be an excuse for governments to outsource or abdicate their responsibility, nor can they believe that the good will and enthusiasm of people can deliver results unless there is focus and coordination.

It is time for governments to wake up and raise to the challenge. It is time they move from believing that appointing a scientist or a well-respected media-savvy executive from the private sector is enough, to planning for training and rewarding government executives and staff for actually using open data, rather than bean-counting how many data set they have on a web site.

It is key that open data initiatives do not turn into pissing contests between governments around the world. Also because the wind of financial crisis and recession is already blowing against them, and the outcome may be embarrassing, to say the least.

Just as the success of free software led to the founding on companies based around that freely-available code, so I think we are about to see a wave of exciting new startups based around freely-available data

I predict that there will also be indirect models. The distinction can be seen in the world of open source, where there are companies like Red Hat that make money from open source directly – selling various kinds of services – and others like Facebook that simply use open source for its operations.

Open data is not only of interest to companies that want to make money from it. Just as open source has become an accepted tool for most businesses today, I predict that more and more of them will routinely draw on the growing bodies of open data for their businesses – after all, given that it’s freely available, they’d be mad not to.

So it should not be surprising that so few companies look like being able to make money out of open data. In fact, there are only a handful who make money out of directly selling or leveraging open source software, but there are many more that thrive by using it.

Application contests and other means to engage application developers to develop citizen-facing apps are of limited value to explore the indirect value of open data. The most obvious beneficiaries of open data are governments themselves, as they become able to look at each other data. Earlier today I had a great conversation with a client  from a small German local authority whose only interest in open data was to gather data from other cities for comparison and competition purposes.

Many recognize the internal, less glamorous value of open data, but – as a client put it once – telling people that open government’s primary purpose is to let departments know each other better is not a politically astute value proposition, although it may bethe absolute truth.

While many open government and open source proponents (actually, they are often the same in my country) will rejoice, it does not look like they have been looking at the history of many of these competitions. How many apps have provided any real value? How many apps have had any demonstrable transformational effect? How many apps have shown to be sustainable.

The Italian initiative had an opportunity to do something different, such as focusing applications on the solution of some major problems the country has: employment, tax evasion, environment and cultural heritage protection, but it decided not to. It is very possible that, like in other jurisdictions, the application contest is simply the press-worthy bit, and the real value will come from the use of open data inside the administration, for instance with regions using other regions’ data to improve their own operations. So I do hope that behind this rather empty shell there is a business case that nails this effort down to areas where the country is in desperate need of improvement, including public sector productivity increase.

I would have liked the Italian proponents to have the courage to contextualize Apps4Italy. Since we are on the world news every day, and lately not for anything particularly complimentary, it would be nice to be quoted in the open government circles as the first country that is trying to address a specific set of urgent and concrete problems with open data. I am sure that some of the proponents will claim that those participating to the challenge will certainly provide new ways to look at data that will help solve some of our problem. It is certainly possible, but very unlikely, unless there is a tight cooperation with – or even leadership by – those who own the problem, that is governments themselves.

But that would take a different type of contest structure that they simply didn’t have the guts to pull off.

Robert introduced the panel by showing that the federal government lags behind other industries when it comes to innovation, and the discussion revolved around why this is the case, how other countries succeed, and what are the key technologies to watch for the next wave of innovation.

The discussion was proceeding quite smoothly, until when a member of the audience made a strong point, saying that the panel had started, and was being conducted, on a relatively negative tone, assuming that federal government does not innovate, while this is not true. This question gave me the opportunity to highlight that there is no other enterprise in the world that is as complex as the federal government, given its diversity of missions. Innovation does happen – and has always happened – at the agency or program level, but it is more difficult to find innovation that works at the whole-of-government level. Be it open government, mobile, cloud, different agencies have different mission priorities, culture, technology legacy, and can absorb different innovation at a different pace.

My view about government innovation is that there are three types of innovation:

• Enterprise innovation, which concerns all or most agencies at the same time, through mandates or centrally-managed initiatives: open government or cloud first would be good examples
• Agency innovation, which concerns a specific mission or program, and is focused to solve a particular problem: an example is the use of data analytics to detect fraud with stimulus funding.
• Individual innovation, which concerns government employees who become agents of innovation by solving a problem in a new way: examples abound in state and local governments facing major budget shortfalls.

Innovation can be successful only if these three different types are recognized and an innovation framework supporting all three is put in place. But today most of the buzz is on enterprise innovation, and this is an area where governments generally lag behind due to complexity and accountability.

The other myth to debunk is that there has to be an innovation strategy. Of course this is important, but in many cases government organizations are more ready to undertake a tactical innovation, in order to solve a problem that cannot be solved with traditional tools, assuming that the innovation will not necessarily apply to other problems. This idea of “throw-away” innovation applies very well to the use of social media, which can be applied very successfully to certain category of problems, but may not to others (see my previous post).

When we will start measuring and comparing the right things, and to provide innovation with a context, the picture will probably much less bleak than the one that was discussed at the beginning of the panel.

In this climate, some people have welcomed the creation of an open data portal (dati.gov.it) that joins the many similar portals that are popping up all around the world, following the lead of data.gov in the US.

Any move toward transparency is always good, so there are definitely reasons to cheer. However, as many open government endeavors at local and national level have shown, sustaining these initiatives may be challenging unless they are focused toward the solution of a specific category of problems. Now, one of the biggest problems in Italy is the very high level of tax evasion, which may be approached by opening data about taxpayers (as I pointed out in a previous post, and was piloted in 2008), but as soon as this was aired as part of one of the several iteration of the budget decree, there was an outcry about privacy violation and big brother approach. Of course there are many other areas where open data may help detect waste, identify areas for cost containment and optimization, maybe even involve the many citizens who are concerned with the state of their nation help solve difficult issues by leveraging voluntary work as well as increasing self service.

However for this to work, focus is of the utmost importance. The discovery, transformation, publication and use of open data need to be directed to the solution of thorny and urgent problems. This requires leadership, clout, courage, a risk-taking attitude, and cannot but come from inside government, from individual agencies and departments that wholeheartedly decide to ask for help from constituents to tackle otherwise intractable problems. Unfortunately this is not the case in Italy. With the government surviving thanks to a fragile majority coalition, mounting protest, international scrutiny, and the reputation of many political leaders and government executives on the line, it is unlikely that an open government initiative will be able to tackle any of the big problems the country is facing.

What is worse is that the open data experts (be they researchers, professors, IT consultant and even politicians) are expressing their enthusiasm for the very fact that an open data portal is announced by the Minister for Public Service and Innovation, and relate to initiatives like the Open Government Partnership, probably already dreaming about the n-th version of an application contest (Apps for Italy?) leading to dozens of mobile apps that will be of little interest to citizens and of dubious relevance to addressing the urgent problems at hand.

Open government cannot be open-ended in its objectives. It needs to open data efforts to be finalized or at least prioritized for maximum impact. Leadership cannot be left to techies, consultants and politicians who look at open data as an end in itself, rather than a means to solve problems.

Therefore, while this announcement can prelude to a positive impact of technology on tackling and solving tough problems that plague our beautiful country, it can also turn into yet another failure of IT-savvy leaders in industry, academia and politics to make any real difference on issues such as fiscal equity, employment, sustainability of government services, that impact everybody’s life