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 | April 4, 2012 | 2 Comments
The University of Illinois published an interesting report about Civic Engagement and Local E-Government: Social Networking Comes of Age, where 75 largest US cities and 20 largest Illinois cities are ranked by how good their web sites are at providing information services and participation to residents.
The same study had been conducted two years ago, and the report provides a detailed comparison with earlier results and describes how he evaluation grid has changed in 2011 to reflect more recent trends.
The top ranking cities (New York and Seattle on a tie) are no surprise, and other active gov2.0 cities such as San Francisco and Portland are in the top tier (respectively 5th and 4th), while Chicago or LA tend to lag behind compared to their size and relevance. There are also smaller cities, such as Virginia Beach (ranked 2nd), that show better progress than many larger ones.
One of the conclusions of this report is that
As in 2009 local governments have not used their web sites as a venue for citizen participation. Social networks pose some potential for this, but a scan of activities on the web sites doesn’t indicate much active discussion.
One might argue that they have realized that existing social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter (for which there is a significant increase in uptake by local governments) are a much better place for discussion and engagement. This is something I may be checking in the coming weeks by looking in greater detail at the Facebook and Twitter presence of the top cities in this report.
However the report also says something interesting about open data, another milestone for open government and transparency
While the open data portals can promote transparency, their significance over time will depend on what data are made available, and the extent to which it is usable for intended audiences.
So the bottom line is that, despite the progress, not a lot has changed since 2009 when it comes to real engagement and participation. Although we can point to more open data, more blogs, more tweets and more Facebook pages, I am not sure any of this is making a real difference on most citizens can really participate.
Category: social networks in government web 2.0 in government Tags: government 2.0
by Andrea Di Maio | April 3, 2012 | 2 Comments
I was shocked yesterday when I received a news alert about Martha Johnson’s resignation over excessive spending for a training conference near Las Vegas in 2010. According to news reports, the chief of Public Buildings Service and Johnson’s top adviser were fired, and four managers were suspended.
In her resignation letter, Mrs Johnson explains that the outcome of an investigation she launched upon reports of lavish spending at this event require her to step aside.
Anybody who is familiar with the federal government circles has great respect for Mrs Johnson and for what she accomplished during her GSA tenure. From my own perspective, I can just say that every single GSA official I had the privilege to know or just briefly meet showed professionalism, competence and a genuine drive to do what is best for his or her country. It is not a surprised that many people working at GSA have been awarded with the Federal 100 and even the Eagle award (the latter is particularly close to my heart, as it was awarded to my former colleague Dave McClure).
From my corner of the world where top public servants and members of parliament do not step down even when charged with direct responsibility for much greater missteps, I want to reassure all my friends at GSA that Mrs. Johnson’s resignation witnesses how serious she has always been about making GSA a place to be proud of working at.
I am sure that her colleagues in government, members of congress, business leaders will remember her tenure at GSA as a peak point for this agency’s history. Under her watch, GSA has spearheaded some of the most remarkable changes in government IT that I have witnessed in a long time (it is not by chance that I placed GSA at number three of my personal top ten for 2011).
The legacy of her success is here to stay.
Category: cloud web 2.0 in government Tags: GSA
by Andrea Di Maio | April 1, 2012 | 1 Comment
Last week I joined a few other Italian Gartner analysts for an Italy-only event where we addressed an audience of over 300 people with some of the key messages from Gartner research. At the end of the usual analyst keynote I was asked to talk for about ten minutes about the euro crisis.
At the beginning of my section I asked anybody working for a company that has either developed or is about to develop IT plans to deal with the euro crisis to raise their hands. When I asked the very same question at the European CIO forum in London, with a smaller audience and quite a few folks coming from the UK or Scandinavian, I had fewer than ten hands. Being in Italy, which is one of the countries at the very center of the euro crisis, I was expecting more hands to be raised.
But – guess what? – not a single hand was raised. It is quite possible that people were shy, or unwilling to show that they actually believe in the possibility of Italy dropping out of the euro, or maybe it was just too early in the morning. However, I found the outcome quite worrying.
Now, compare this absolute silence to an inquiry I had the other day with the Italian CIO of a multinational corporation that has asked subsidiaries in all countries at risk not only to develop plans but to also to implement the necessary changes in high-priority applications, so that the switchover may take place in a matter of days if needed. This organization is actually maintaining separate versions of the most critical systems, and has also a clear strategy about how to deal with other systems, how to engage vendors, how to prepare staff for before, during and after the changeover.
So where is the truth? Should IT organization remain in denial, assuming that the euro is “too big to fail”? Or should they consider the euro failure such a likely scenario to invest (and continue investing) significant resources to prepare for it?
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Andrea Di Maio | March 29, 2012 | 5 Comments
Over the last couple of weeks I have had numerous conversations with government executives and IT leaders about cloud computing, open source, shared services, software reuse. These are all different perspectives on IT sourcing, and they are often made problematic by clumsy public procurement procedures.
Let’s take cloud computing. Part of its value proposition is the easiness to acquire a service according to a specific need, in the appropriate quantity and at the appropriate time. However public procurement requires a due process that forces prospective buyers to go through a competitive tendering process that takes time and can ultimately annihilate thatparticular aspect of the cloud value proposition. To counter this, central government agencies, such as the GSA in the US or the Cabinet Office in the UK, have established cloud stores hosting service offerings from vendors who have successfully responded to a request for proposal. This allows departments to buy at ease through those stores – notwithstanding certification and accreditation, as well as any additional competitive tendering requirement depending on the quantity and nature of their purchase.
This model is quite similar to how mobile applications are sold through app stores, which can be either targeted to consumers (like Apple’s, Android’s etc) or established by an enterprise to deploy mobile applications to its employees. In fact we see a convergence of cloud and mobile app stores going forward.
But then, why should this be limited to mobile and cloud? What about commercial or open source software that still needs to be installed on premises? And what about the mythical “sharing and reuse” of software across agencies, local authorities or even countries?
The app store model is potentially valuable for any sort of IT product or service that is sufficiently industrialized and packaged in order to be consumed by a non-expert client (i.e. potentially without the intermediation of the IT organization, or without a deep expertise of the software itself). Such a concept was present in the first version of the UK IT Strategy (see blog post) under the name of G-AS (Government Application Store), and is mentioned in the Strategic Implementation Plan: however the current focus on cloud computing has obscured the broader concept of the app store.
This is yet another example that governments should not focus on cloud computing per se (after all, it is just a different acquisition and delivery model) but on how to make sure that demand and supply meet more effectively and efficiently. The app store could become the marketplace to access cloud, commercial software products, skills, as well as to finally succeed reusing and exchanging software across different government organizations.
However this broader objective may be hard to achieve if the development of government app stores remains in the hand of those who are in charge of either cloud or mobile strategies.
Category: cloud shared services in government Tags: App store, GSA, UK government
by Andrea Di Maio | March 27, 2012 | 1 Comment
Eurostat just released some interesting figures in its report Computer skills in the EU27 in figures. The most interesting figure is that while between 2005 and 2005 the number of Europeans in the 27 EU member states who have ever used a computer climbed from 78 to 96 per cent, the number of computer graduates as a percentage of all tertiary education dropped from 4 to 3.4 per cent over the same period.
Of course the data is uneven across different countries. large mature economies like the UK, Germany, Italy, the whole of Scandinavia, Portugal, Benelux saw a significant drop, while several Eastern Europe countries as well as Austria saw an increase.
Data is a bit old, but it witnesses an important trend. As IT becomes entrenched into everybody’s life, there is less interest in specializing in computer science and probably greater interest in mastering other subjects, where technology can be applied without a great in-depth knowledge, given the progressive industrialization and consumerization of technology.
At the same time, while 20+ years ago a European computer science graduate could still fulfill his or her dreams of designing computers and complex software programs, today’s harsh reality is that most technology development take place outside of Europe, and the European enterprise technology market is dominated by service players, mostly outsourcers and systems integrators. Furthermore, the former are being challenged by industrialized services provided by vendors in different regions, while the latter need more business than technology skills.
I wonder whether academic institutions across Europe have realized the nature and causes for such a shift and are preparing themselves. IT opportunities are endless as one looks into the role of technology in operational systems all around us, and to the major challenges that we have to face to make our way of living, moving, eating, healing, retiring sustainable. But is change actually happening? Are we equipping our youth with knowledge and skills that will make them succeed tomorrow, or are we still teaching them what is already past?
Category: cloud Europe and IT Tags: higher education
by Andrea Di Maio | March 23, 2012 | 1 Comment
Last week I have had a chance to visit Brazil for the first time. I visited three cities in five days, presenting about government IT trends and predictions, social media and open government. In all cities I had a pretty good audience, as well as interactions with government officials and representatives of government-owned IT service providers.
Unfortunately I had no time for sightseeing and certainly missed the most touristic spots, but the visit gave me the impression of a great, fast-developing country with a rather insular attitude. From the use of no other language than Portuguese when calling flights at each domestic terminal I visited, to the very limited (if any) knowledge of English for most of the airport staff (security, shops, etc), to the tone of several discussions, I had the impression of a rather introvert country, concerned with its own growth challenges and perhaps less attentive than it should to what other parts of the world have been doing.
There are a couple of areas that come to mind.
The first one is the positive attitude toward open source. While most of the countries that had taken an aggressive stance on the adoption of open source have now realized that it is only one among different sourcing models, I have found quite a few spots in Brazil where open source is still given an edge with respect to commercial software, despite costs or risks (mostly related to skills availability) associated to some of it.
The second one is a less acute perception of trends like commoditization of technology and industrialization of IT services, which leads insourced service providers to be more complacent about maintaining and strengthening their current portfolio of IT services as opposed to repositioning where their value proposition can be more immune from the influence of highly commoditized services from vendors.
In both cases Brazilian IT executives are justified by a weaker pressure (if any) on cost containment and sustainability and by the important role that government It can play in shaping local markets and skills in a still developing economy. On the other hand, a growth economy can be attractive for vendors that struggle with decreasing budgets in more mature regions and that could disrupt the role of government IT organizations and captive service providers.
Despite these challenges, I found that people were receptive and quite smart, so I am confident that many will be able to prepare for these challenges and turn the advent of industrialized IT in the country into an opportunity to focus their considerable resources on areas of innovation and excellence, also leveraging the momentum created by the Soccer World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016.
Category: cloud IT management Tags: Brazil
by Andrea Di Maio | March 9, 2012 | 1 Comment
Yesterday I spent the whole day with government clients in a European country where there is an aggressive plan to consolidate infrastructure across several departments. This is one of the many data center consolidation programs that are going on around the world in all tiers of government. Some of them are quite aggressive and are driven by a mandate, like in Canada, while others are more aspirations or part of a normal (and indeed healthy) rationalization process.
Now, who would be against the idea of consolidation? The number of data centers that many governments run and their low level of utilization almost cry for consolidation: benefits are clear, ranging from greater security to lower costs, from lower energy consumption to easier maintenance, and more.
We all know that there are a number of non-technology challenges, such as fear of losing headcount, budget, authority, but all this can be managed if there is sufficiently strong executive leadership.
However, there is a different, subtler risk to consolidation, and some of the other initiatives that governments themselves have set in motion amplify such risk.
Put yourself in an agency CIO’s shoes. You are told that data centers will be consolidated across government, and yours could be one of those that are going to be retired. As you need to support your agency business, you start exploring what options you have to minimize your exposure to a possible delay or failure of the consolidation program, or just to the emergence of new business needs that require changes to existing applications or entirely new ones. You need to reduce your cost base but also to be in control of your own destiny, and you know that you data center has an expiration date: therefore you would probably start looking at various sourcing options, one of which is the consolidated data center, but that would include also hosting, outsourcing and cloud sourcing.
And here comes the irony. Those same government organizations that are carrying on data center consolidation are also leading a cloud computing effort, that often leads to providing procurement vehicles that are meant help whoever is willing to use cloud. apps.gov, the UK CloudStore, the NZ panel contract for IaaS, and more to come give you as the CIO a lot of choice about how to meet your agency’s business needs. As the maturity of these cloud stores improves, your business users could buy straight from the cloud store, bypassing (within reason of course) their IT organization – i.e. you.
One might argue that providing more choice to individual departments and agencies is a good thing (and I personally agree that it probably is, assuming they can use it judiciously). However what this does is to undermine the business case that was behind the data center consolidation initiative.
Let’s take a hypothetical example. Let’s say that there are about one million government staff that are the target users of an IT consolidation initiative. The savings are predicated on the assumption that one million people’s worth of workloads will be hosted in the new consolidated data centers.Since this migration cannot happen instantly but takes years (at least two if you are an optimist, most likely much longer), in the meantime a number of agencies, accounting for – say – 200,000 staff may decide – over time – to move into a variety of cloud offerings. This means that the target for consolidation is now 800,000. And of course, if the migration of those 200,000 is successful, others are likely to follow, further decreasing the target for the consolidated data centers. The trouble is that the original business case that justified the consolidation was based on one million users, and it may be hard to demonstrate that the case still holds with 20 or 30% less. Of course number of staff is only one possible metric, and one could consider number of applications or workloads or transactions and so forth.
And make no mistake: even when consolidation is mandated by taking over IT budget and staff, nothing prevents the business from looking into business process as a service offerings, hence circumventing the mandate while the consolidation is still ongoing and equally hurting the business case.
The bottom line is that consolidation still makes a lot of sense, but requires a far more realistic business case.
Category: cloud IT management Tags: consolidation, shared services
by Andrea Di Maio | March 9, 2012 | Comments Off
At our recent Gartner CIO Leadership Forum in London I met a quite unusual government CIO from a local authority. His attitude reminded me of Vivek Kundra, when I first met him, who used to say that his philosophy was “prove me wrong”. What this means is that he would decide to venture into gray areas that naysayers warn you against, taking a calculated risk that people might say “I told you”. This CIO seems to apply this principle to quite a few decisions, ranging from placing desktop apps into the public cloud to supporting BYOD policies, from allowing the use of social media to aggressively planning to move applications managing citizen data into the cloud.
He is driven by speed of execution as well as the need to reduce costs, and stated that many worries about security or data location are vastly overrated. In particular the risk posed by understaffed government data centers placed in vulnerable locations is far greater than the occasional breaches that may affect a professional cloud provider.
He also applies a down-to-earth 80/20 approach: if a solution is good enough for prime time and addresses most of the user requirements and saves considerable amounts of money, let’s go for it, possibly through a short beta or a pilot phase, and without getting into analysis paralysis.
I always enjoy meeting public sector CIOs who are willing to take a risk. Sometimes they come across as too self-confident and a tad arrogant (this was not his case though) but they are always a breath of fresh air in a politically-sensitive environment where very capable people are often put off by the fear of taking risks.
Governments that aim at being smart and sustainable, re-inventing the way they produce their outcomes, will need people like him to succeed.
Category: cloud Tags: local government
by Andrea Di Maio | March 8, 2012 | 3 Comments
Yesterday at the Gartner CIO Leadership Forum in London I had the opportunity to address the audience with a 10 mins piece in the euro crisis and its ramifications for IT, followed by a full session for a smaller audience.
During the general session I asked how many of the attendees (over 200 CIOs from commercial and government organizations in Europe) worked for enterprises that had plans in place to deal with the euro crisis. Less than ten people raised their hands.
If this is not scary enough after the in-depth session on the euro I was approached by two attendees.
The first one, from a government organization, agreed that the impact of some euro crisis scenarios on immigration would be massive, including on IT systems, but he was not aware that his organization, which is indeed responsible for the immigration portfolio, was planning anything.
The second one, from a pension fund, mentioned that the potential redenomination of long-term assets (such as government or company bonds) which had already been redenominated from the original national currency into the euro might be a nightmare: in fact, if defaulting countries return to the original currency, with the same currency code, but with a value that is different from the original conversion rate and that fluctuates rather freely against the euro, the valuation of those assets become very difficult and of course prone to litigation.
Other questions during the session included the likely timetable for a possible conversion, who would be deciding it, how quickly it would happen. There is no answer to this question, as the eventuality of a country dropping off the euro was not even considered when the monetary union was designed. But it is likely that the transition will be quite fast, despite the time required to physically replace euro notes and coins with the new currency, and the time needed to adapt information systems. This clearly makes the scenarios even more complex.
These are just few of the many issues that businesses and governments may have to face to deal with a euro crisis. The low readiness and state of denial that we keep observing is hard to justify.
For our research on the euro look at the list at the end of this post.
Category: Europe and IT Tags: euro crisis
by Andrea Di Maio | March 6, 2012 | 2 Comments
Today’s news in Italy reported (see here) that the Northern Legue party presented a motion to block access to Facebook, Twitter and other social media for all employees of the Lombardia regional government, as well as any controlled company. The motion claims that social media affects employee productivity and creates vulnerability to viruses and malware, let alone the risk of information leakage.
This is not new for Italy, as reported in a previous post. What is new is the tone of people responding to the article, most of which are in favor of such motion. Here are a few quotes:
As they are not needed for work, but these are for fun pretty much like a videogame or a coffee break, they should be regulated. Or even totally prohibited outside lunch breaks. People are welcome to spend time on Facebook when at home but not on their employer’s payroll, with the risk of sending them bust due to productivity loss.
I do not think that preventing people from wasting time during working hours is crazy, althogh one could leave an open window during the lunch break
People are paid to work and not to spend time on the Net. The prohibition to access the Internet for non-work related stuff should be extended to all civil servants.
All this should have happened long time ago. I’m surprised that people can still do anything like this at work: this does not happen in commercial enterprises, people can go on Facebook when at home after work.
I was amazed to read so many comments supporting such a restrictive view. While a few people invoke a digital agenda as a way to stimulate a struggling economy, it is very possible that the vast majority of Italians get this at all, despite many of them spending time on Facebook. Outside working hours, of course.
Category: social networks in government Tags: government 2.0, Italy
