Associates have to accept a code of ethics that stipulates their independence from existing political parties and other concerns that might distract them from defending collective interests. Transparency and participation are said to be at the core of the new party to make sure ideas and plans are developed collegially.

Interestingly enough, the party’s brand new web site and Facebook page do not carry any information about the background for this idea, who the actual promoters and current roles are, nor is there any evidence yet that this information will be released any time soon.

Although this is a small example, it says a lot about the difference between preaching and adopting transparency. While some caution in embracing full transparency by established organizations is understandable (as they try to understand the potential disrupting impact on the mission, operation and structure), such caution is much more surprising in a brand new entity that claims its difference from previous ways of doing politics and centers its messaging around participation.

Transparency is a great tool, but comes with a high price: the loss of control. If our clients, citizens, voters see through our walls as in a glass house, so  that they can tell us what is wrong, what to change and who to change, are we ready to take their advice? Are we ready to disrupt our plans? Are we ready to step aside?

The common wisdom is that social media is disruptive only for traditional organizations. The reality is it can disrupt each and every one of us. Are we willing to listen?

UPDATE: Less than 48 hours after its creation the Facebook page of the newly formed party “Insieme Italia” has removed the ability for Facebook users to post comments, and allows only posts from the administrator, claiming that this measure was requested by Facebook Inc. Here goes transparency.

He certainly has quite an exciting and tough job, being responsible for timely delivery and glitchless execution of one of the highest-profile events on Earth.

As we are preparing our interview, I’d like to hear what you would ask him, if you had a chance.

But the client did not dial into the call. It is very possible that something came up. After all it is Friday, some weekly deadline may have crept into their schedule. However I cannot help thinking that maybe, after yesterday, with the US CIO’s announced departure, people feel a little bit less pressure on going cloud, or just doing things differently.

I hope this is not the case.

I was there with three distinguished engineers who made good careers as entrepreneurs and managers, and I had to share with the audience some advice about one of the most important choices in their personal and professional lives.

Each of us speakers said that what we thought we would do for living when we entered our technical universities was not at all what we ended up doing.

I for one went for electronics engineering after a period of uncertainty between literature and physics (I know, I was really young and confused at the time). The reason why I picked engineering was the fascination with a special issue of a scientific magazine about the microprocessor. I fell in love with the idea of being able to design microchips and help change the world. Of course after graduating I never designed a microprocessor. .

Today uncertainty for higher-education students is even greater than it was for us. The only certainty is that most of what they will learn in their computer science courses will be obsolete by the time they find a job.

So the advice I gave them was;

• Choose something that intrigues you and is likely to keep you excited.
• Think more about having professional fun than about career and money (becoming rich should not be your primary driver to choose a university, also because you are very likely to be wrong).
• Learn foreign languages and foreign cultures: not a big deal for them, as I was amazed to see that many were fluent in Italian, German and English, unlike most of their colleagues in the rest of my country.
• What you learn today will be obsolete tomorrow, but how you learn won’t.

This last bit is the most important. We have entered a period of uncertainty that won’t be over any time soon. When these folks will graduate, nobody knows if economy will be growing, if ICT will have created lots of job opportunities or if most IT services will have been displaced somewhere else. They will find themselves addressing new problems or more complex versions of current problems, around sustainability, economic development, social inclusion.

What will be key is the ability to face those problems, does not matter how intractable they’ll look like. That’s why the most valuable piece of their experience will be how and not what they learn.

Less than one month after our Minister of Justice and his colleague responsible for Public Service and Innovation proudly announced the “Vivifacile Giustizia” project (it sounds like “LiveEasy Justice” – see link in Italian here), allowing attorneys and – at a future stage – the public at large to receive electronically on their mobile devices notices about judge decisions relevant to their cases. Unfortunately a few days ago, the Ministry of Justice was at the verge of being unable to guarantee the operations of its own data centers due to significant cuts in the maintenance budget (see article in Italian here).

While this may be the consequence of a peculiar budgetary situation in a country that needs to pull the brakes on public spending to prevent pernicious consequences on the viability of its own debt, it is also exemplary of the intensifying conflict between cost reduction and innovation in government. Although receiving an SMS about a case may look like a no-brainer in several countries, it is quite an accomplishment in a country where justice is plagued by inefficiencies, very long trials and a comparatively poor level of automation.

Unfortunately budget constraints challenge even the ability of keeping the lights on, let alone deploying further innovation: a classical example of how IT is still perceived as a cost factor and not as a key enabler to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

As I flagged in another post, yesterday I came across a very interesting document, which articulates his vision and describes the Citywide Digital Divide Strategy by Washington DC.

The District of Columbia hosts one of the most interesting capital cities in the world, with lots of culture, art, parks, things to see and to do, but also with a traditionally serious divide between more and less affluent parts of the city.

The situation has much improved since the first time I visited DC almost 20 years ago, and I was appalled by the huge differences across different areas: urban developments and improved public safety have made Washington DC a better place to live in and visit. But still, differences are huge. The strategy document highlights how income and social differences in the city are mirrored by differences in broadband usage.

The strategy is not simplistic, assuming that bridging the gap is only about providing more affordable broadband, or cheap technology in homes and schools. It looks at three different barriers: usability, affordability and perceived value. In essence, can you use a connected computer? Can you afford doing so? And, if you do, can you get enough value for that cost and effort?

In particular I like the concept of meaningful access, which is a combination of bare access, literacy, broadband access and understanding the advantages. For instance, the strategy observes that the form factor of mobile phones, that many see as the ultimate solution to the digital divide, may not be the right one to allow users to see and manipulate at ease.

The strategy is really down to Earth, by recognizing that there is little money available and it is unlikely that budgets will grow earlier than 3 years from now. So, rather than suggesting the grand plans that we have seen so many times around the world (with dubious outcomes), it focuses on leveraging funds, initiatives, infrastructures and roles that are already in place. Be they public libraries or schools, existing online government services or accessible grants under the ARRA, all available bits of resources are pull together to give an answer to the three points above: usability, affordability, perceived value.

In its honesty, the document admits that “there is little evidence to date as to the effectiveness of such initiatives in addressing non-adoption”. Nonetheless it is worth trying, but putting a particular emphasis on “incorporating efforts to measure effectiveness of solutions as well as efforts to better identify the targets of digital divide solution”.

Bryan’s may not be the most ambitious digital divide strategy, it may be missing the role of tablets and social networks, but it is for sure one which is grounded in reality and has good chances to be sustainable over time.

I wish all the best to Bryan, his colleagues and all those in Washington whose life will be touched by this worthwhile initiative. And, as we all know, best wishes at this time of the year have greater chances to be heard.

A few days ago I heard from a colleague that a popular Italian blogger had complained over a post-event dinner about a comment I had made a long time ago on Facebook. I am not sure if my recollection is accurate, but I think that about a year ago I responded to an enthusiastic comment he made about an event he had been invited to, which seemed rather lame to me, by observing that he was unlikely to criticize an event he had been invited to speak at.

I thought this was not even an incident, but apparently the guy was pissed, so he griped about me with colleagues at that dinner. In that discussion and in the following exchanges with some of my colleagues, it became apparent that – in spite of my disclaimers and relentless compliance with our own social media policy – some people read some of my statements as potentially embarrassing for Gartner.

Luckily enough this seems to be limited to when I comment about the situation in my country,. According to one of my colleagues, my own passion and disappointment for the current situation would cloud my otherwise neutral judgment. While somebody thinks this reveals my political preferences, anybody who knows me and has a good memory can witness that I have been criticizing the Italian government attitude to IT for a long time, through at least four different coalitions of different color.

Not my fault if this country offers numerous examples that can be used to distil lessons about what not to do rather than about what to do as well as about how individual, courageous initiatives can solve systemic deficiencies. Not my fault if in more than 25 years of career, mostly spent abroad or dealing with international clients, I have often had to overcome a credibility gap or swallow cheap jokes for the very reason of being Italian and having some of our political leaders reinforcing the worst stereotypes about our people.

However this raises an interesting point about how to manage the very thin and moving boundary between personal and professional. Should I stop using personal experiences to exemplify disservice and areas for improvement? Should I stop saying anything about what happens in my own country? If so, I would be self-censoring, and the next step could well be that I would become more cautious in how to tackle situations that may directly or indirectly involve Gartner clients or prospects. But then, what would prevent this from creeping into my professional approach to analysis? Wouldn’t this threaten my independence as an analyst?

So far, I have been publicly criticizing and praising the same individuals or organizations depending on what they do and not who they are, and while some of my posts sound a bit cynical, this is because I cover topics that are often excessively hyped.

Actually I have noticed that some of the criticisms I receive come from people who dislike my down-to-earth, no-nonsense approach on certain topics, and quite often their outrage is connected to me suggesting that their government clients should spend less rather than more money, start small before deploying grand plans, leverage internal resources rather than placing expensive consulting contracts.

I wonder whose independence and credibility is at stake here.

The first thing that strikes you about Tokyo, as you arrive from the airport, is its incredible road system. Highways cut across the city at an height between three and 10 floors high, giving you the impression of flying (although sometimes very slowly) between and above buildings. Beneath the highways there are streets and sidewalks, almost a parallel world that one joins when exiting the highway, to often discover tunnels beneath the street level. Roads in Tokyo are the closer urban analogy I’ve ever seen to blood vessels. While there are other cities, like Bangkok, where high-rise highways segregate the faster traffic from local jams, there is greater sense of harmony and seamless integration here than anywhere else, as if highways were a most natural part of the landscape.

The second thing that strikes you is its sheer size. I have been in large cities, like LA or New York or Seoul or KL or Bangkok, but Tokyo beats them all. Even from the tallest building it looks endless, its borders fading at the horizon, even when you are lucky enough to have a clear sky.

As a consequence, the third impression concerns people, how many there are and how orderly and calmly they face the ordeal of moving together on sidewalks, at crossroads, in stations or malls. There is a form of kindness and untold social bonding among these thousands of people who move to and from work, or shop or just have fun, and while I am clearly different, it is easy to feel part of that flow.

I was also impressed with how many young people there were. Although I was staying in Shibuya that is indeed a center for entertainment, still I was not expecting so many nice young people around, in a country with constantly declining population.

One of my worries before arriving was language. I knew that not many Japanese speak a fluent English and I had been forewarned that this may create some personal as well as professional difficulty. Indeed on the bus from and to the airport the driver spoke only Japanese, but a recorded voice would help me get the basics in English.

All colleagues spoke decent English and a few clients too, but I spent two days with an excellent interpreter who would sequentially translate both ways. Incidentally, I seriously doubt that average government officials in Italy, France or Spain speak a better English than Japanese ones. I have found myself a few times appealing to our common Latin roots to make a conversation sensible (mostly in Spain, luckily enough I can understand French and Italian is my mother tongues): I can hardly imagine how tough it must be for US colleagues to rely exclusively on the help provided by local sales colleagues in South Europe, who sometimes are not terribly fluent in English either.

In Tokyo things went far smoother. The translation did not disrupt the flow of discussion, and I learned how to speak English more slowly, using shorter sentences and providing more information with fewer words, quite a tough exercise for Italians who are used to talk a lot. I also had to control my typical hand-waving, as when clients were getting the meaning associated to my gesture, I had long stopped talking.

I was also favorably impressed with how clients are willing to engage, to be challenged and to challenge your statements. While this always happens in a very polite manner, I found this more intense and entertaining than what I experienced in some other countries.

The nicest surprise was to debunk a myth that many colleagues of mine have convinced me of, i.e. that Japanese audiences do not get jokes. An old line that I’ve heard from countless analysts is that during a presentation where an American speaker tells a joke, people will laugh only because the interpreter says “The American told a joke, please laugh”. While I do not really understand why, since Japanese people have many things in common with Americans (such as baseball), I had the counterproof myself. As I was using my jokes about Italians who have invisible and untaxed incomes and how tax authorities are getting smart at catching them using web 2.0 technology, those who understood English laughed instantly and other later, but in both cases laughs were genuine and I could see some people laughing at each other, which gave me a good feeling of connecting to them.

On my final evening, my colleagues – who always took care of me wonderfully – took me for dinner in a traditional Japanese restaurant, one of those where you have to take off your shoes and sit on the floor. I have to confess that I’ve always been suspicious of the Japanese cuisine. The main reason was the sudden success of sushi restaurants in Italy and the number of friends and colleagues who seem to have fallen victim of this new fashion, which – similarly to jogging, another recent Italian fad – tries to combine fashion-consciousness with dietary requirements. Not being fond of raw seafood, the idea of raw fish was a bit alien to my tastes.

My colleagues started making me taste exquisite cooked food, like tofu, soba noodles with wasabi, tempura and an excellent juicy Japanese beef that I had never tried before. Then came the sushi. Surprisingly, the sight of these well prepared small portions was intriguing and, as a thank you to my colleagues who had been so kind to me, I tried one. To my own astonishment, I found it delicious, and did not have a second one just to make that moment most memorable and preserve the memory of that single bite, which is probably going to broaden my cuisine preferences forever.

So far it looks like everything about Japan is wonderful and I am just looking forward to my next visit (assuming I didn’t piss off too many clients) to discover and learn more.

On the other hand, there seem to be certain aspects of the Japanese culture which are rather far from my European roots. One is workaholism. Despite coming from the South of Europe, where there is a more relaxed attitude toward work-life balance, I have to say that I have always met very hard workers in my part of the world as well and I think I am one too. However when my colleagues made me look through the restaurant’s windows to office buildings nearby, where many people were at work after 9 pm, and they told me that Japanese managers expect their reports to read and respond to emails late at night, I balked.

We went deeper into the conversation, exploring what this implies for social lives. I discovered that Japanese people do not have much of a family life during the working week. Hanging out in bars with friends, sometimes as a break during late working hours or as a way to cool off after a long day, is quite typical. A colleague told me that when he was a kid he would wave goodbye to his dad on Sunday evening asking “Please come back” as he would not see him until the following weekend. If you add long commuting times, sleeping three to four hours at night and not seeing much of your family becomes the norm.

I will share some reflections on all this from a social media perspective in my next post.

All in all, a wonderful experience and a great opportunity to have a short immersion in a different culture that, like mine, is suffering from striking contrast between tradition and modernity.

By the way, could I please get a phone that works in Japan? As I realized that my brand new Blackberry was not working (and it is so odd to feel disconnected these days), I enquired and found out that you do not only need a UMTS phone, but also one that is quad-band. Speaking of which, I was impressed with the sheer numbers of iPhones and iPads that I saw around and at all meetings I attended: Japanese people seem even more excited with Jobs’ products than we are in the West.

It provides government CIOs and strategic planners with a framework to measure the maturity level of their organization’s capabilities to effectively and efficiently engage constituents and other stakeholders in transforming service delivery and operations.

It should be used as a key tools in managing the direction of an open government and government transformation program. It consists of five levels, ranging from scenarios in which organizations are unaware of or denying the pressure for socialization and commoditization of processes, data and services, through to higher levels in which open government becomes a funded, enterprisewide strategy covering all relevant aspects of stakeholder engagement.

The ultimate level of maturity is where constituent engagement fuels service and operation transformation, leading to measurable and foreseeable improvements in the effectiveness and efficiency of government action.

The five levels are illustrated in the picture below.

The research note describes the characteristics of each maturity level in terms of:

• which element of public value is most important: citizen service? operational efficiency? alignment with agency mission?
• the balance between the use of government-controlled media (such as own web site or own Facebook page) and engagement on third party communities;
• who should be in charge for open government in the organization (and I am sure quite a few will be surprised about our suggestions here):
• what technologies are most relevant;
• the attitude toward participation of employees to external social networks;
• the main purpose of and drive for open government.

We will socialize this model in forthcoming events and are looking forward to comments from our clients and the broader open government community in the coming weeks.

I am not an Apple-maniac and I have never used a Mac, nor do I carry an iPhone (but some members of my family do). All I had was an iPod touch, first generation, which I bought because I loved the album view when turning it into landscape mode.

As I found out that the iPad touch has been doing for me many more things than I had ever imagines (from being my favorite device to read tweets to providing tools like a plumb bob or a level), I thought I would use the iPad mostly as a home device, a family version of our iPods and iPhones, and I would take it with me on long trips at most to enjoy videos.

But also this time I was wrong. What the iPad has turned into is a compelling professional device. I use it to take notes during meetings, to show slides to small groups around the table, as well as to do formal presentations (I bought the dongle to connect to VGA projectors). Most of my blog posts are now drafted on the iPad, an so are my research notes. When I find a wifi hotspot I just send those as attachments to my Gartner email, where I import into the relevant tool.

The most pleasant surprise of all has been the touch keyboard. While it can be comfortably used when the iPad is in portrait mode, it becomes truly excellent in landscape mode, and so much so that I do not really see the point of buying an external keyboard (either the specific one from Appla – which works only in portrait mode and with the iPad off its case – or a bluetooth one).

Not having the 3G version (I could not afford the data plan, given that I would be constantly roaming abroad) and rarely having wifi accessible at client sites, I have not tried to browse the Internet to discuss about web sites with clients. I guess it has to be as effective as using presentation material with Keynote (the slide editor available for iPad).

Another use that I had not anticipated (and mentioned in a previous post) was as a notepad while I was moderating a panel in Amsterdam. I had the questions on the iPad and I could read tweets from both the session I was moderating and a parallel one, dealing with a similar topic. So, rather than having one Twitter stream on the screen with the hashtag of that particular session, I could manage which questions to ask panelists based on multiple Twitter feeds.

Of course there are small downsides. Compatibility between Keynote and Powerpoint is  not perfect, in particular when it comes to animations and the use of shapes containing text. While corrections are possible on the iPad, you cannot convert a Keynote presentation back to Powerpoint. Also, even when I have mastered all animations, if I go back one slide, and that slide is an animated slide, Keynote brings me to the beginning of that slide (i.e. before its animation) and not – as it happens in Powerpoint – to the slide after all animations. As a consequence, if you are having a quite interactive discussion and want to go back and forth between slides, it becomes painful as you have to go through all the animations of a slide over and over again. So my advice is not to have any slide animation.

Another downside is the inability to transfer notes or presentations unless there is a wireless connection. Apple could allow iTunes to be used to transfer files of any sort from a PC to the iPad, but it doesn’t.

Nonetheless, this device is impressive. And, for what is worth, this is the first device that my mom, who is 82 and is not at ease with either a cellphone or a remote control, could use with very little explanation.