by Andrea Di Maio | December 11, 2012 | Comments Off
I just read on the Guardian that the hyperactive British minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, “wants fellow ministers to be given the final say in picking a candidate from a list approved by the board”. This would be quite a change in the UK, where civil service executives are selected according to the [...]
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Category: Europe and IT Tags: UK government
by Andrea Di Maio | November 20, 2012 | 8 Comments
I read yesterday on Computerworld UK that UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s special envoy on the UN’s post-2015 development goals has said that he is ‘disappointed’ by how much the government’s open datasets have been used so far. I wonder how this can be a surprise. Despite the efforts of so many governments, advocacy groups, [...]
Category: open government data Tags: open data, UK government
by Andrea Di Maio | November 9, 2012 | 14 Comments
The UK cabinet office just published its Government Digital Strategy, which culminates its focus on all services to be “digital by default”. The strategy states 11 principles and 14 actions to shape how UK central government departments and agencies will embrace digitalization of their services and improve uptake by citizens and businesses. What is good [...]
Category: e-government Europe and IT Tags: digital government, UK government
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 [...]
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Category: cloud Europe and IT IT management Tags: cost cutting, UK government
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 [...]
Category: cloud shared services in government Tags: App store, GSA, UK government
by Andrea Di Maio | February 21, 2012 | 7 Comments
After a tendering process started in late 2011, the UK Cabinet Office selected over 250 vendors providing about 1700 services that government agencies can choose from in order to meet their cloud needs. Yesterday it opened its cloud store. The store, which admittedly in its early stages, allows to browse services by type (IaaS, PaaS, [...]
Category: cloud Tags: G-cloud, UK government
by Andrea Di Maio | February 1, 2012 | 5 Comments
The UK Government Digital Service created by Minister Maude under the leadership of Mike Bracken (ex-Guardian) just released a much-awaited beta version of its new unified web site for public sector, at www.gov.uk. This is still far from being a full replacement of the current government portal Directgov, but gives a pretty good idea of [...]
Category: e-government Europe and IT open government data Tags: Directgov, UK government
by Andrea Di Maio | December 9, 2010 | 1 Comment
I have been sitting on this blog post for a while, as I was traveling for Gartner Symposia and dealing with a number of quite interesting news around both Government 2.0 and cloud. I understand that this may sound like a very late comment to the review provided by the UK Digital Champion for the [...]
Category: e-government Tags: Directgov, portal, UK government
by Andrea Di Maio | August 5, 2010 | 14 Comments
An article on The Guardian yesterday highlighted the failure of one of the crowdsourcing experiments launched by the new coalition government in the UK. According to the article The government’s first attempt at crowdsourcing its coalition programme has ended without a single government department expressing a willingness to alter any policy. Crowdsourcing involves soliciting knowledge [...]
Category: web 2.0 in government Tags: crowdsourcing, UK government
by Andrea Di Maio | July 9, 2010 | 3 Comments
Landing in the US from Japan, I’ve been welcomed by two very interesting news. The first one is that the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has just launched a web site called Spending Challenge, which is very similar to what IdeaScale provided to US agencies earlier this year and to what the US [...]
Category: web 2.0 in government Tags: Facebook, government 2.0, UK government
