U.S. CIO, Steven Van Roekel kicked FOSE off with an inspiring and sensible keynote address. Moving through his presentation from old presentation technology to new—overhead projector slides, to DOS, to 20th-century Powerpoint, to modern-day images—he illustrated the evolution that government needs to embrace.
We’re at an inflection point. There is a gap between the public and private sectors in productivity, skills, technology and pace. This is partially because government doesn’t have depreciation to help take it from the old to fund the new. Rather, government has grown by increased spending. Government budget has grown ~7%/year… until 2009 when spending was frozen. That year, the budget was $83 billion. If spending had not been frozen, it would have been $103 billion.
So, how can we innovate on a declining budget?
- Eliminate duplication to increase efficiency through programs like Shared First
- Strengthen the role of the CIO through programs like Tech Stat ($4 million in realized savings) and Portfolio Stat (rolling out soon)
- Data center consolidation through the use of cloud technology to increase expenditure predictability
The mission is four-fold:
- Maximize ROI
- Foster 21st century government
- Improve business and citizen interaction
- Ensure cybersecurity by taking a holistic approach with programs like FedRamp
We need to start to have an outside-looking-in view rather than an inside-looking-out perspective.
- Culture of Innovation: this doesn’t exist inside government in the same way that it does in the private sector
- Citizens expect more: they want self-service with government. They expect their interactions with government to be as easy, seamless and intuitive as everything else in their lives.
- Employees expect more: wifi, social media, collaboration, online training. We have an obligation to deliver more.
We have a horizontal opportunity, but we live in a vertical world.
It’s easier to do things in the vertical way we’ve been doing them. It’s harder, but more beneficial to look horizontally. We need to drive this horizontal culture into everything we do.
One example is open data. Data is the core of everything we do and deliver. We couple data and its presentation. The problem is that no one can find the data that they need and they don’t know where to look. To solve this problem, we can look at an analogy from digital music revolution. Initially, the unit of measure was the album.
- Digitization (machine-readable)
- Breaking basic unit into the lowest common denominator yields new opportunities
- Sharing and promoting data across the ecosystem
- Advanced services—personalization, discovery, connections—to be developed by looking at how data related to other data across the ecosystem
How can we deliver data anywhere, anytime on any device?
Mobile may be a catalyst for thinking differently, but we need to take a holistic approach.
- What: data, information
- How: building and managing digital services
- Where: online, mobile, web service, etc.
We need to think of government as a platform.
- Take a data-centric approach: how to build discoverability into the data?
- Architect for openness, interoperability, and shared-first, common approach, device agnostic, platform agnostic.
- Customer-centric by design, both inside and outside government
- Engage citizens and the private sector to join us as partners in delivering better digital government services for our country
Where do we go from here?
- The public needs to demand more and help/do more for your government. There are more opportunities for citizens to create ideas and solutions for government.
- Government needs to embrace a lean start-up mentality. We need to innovate and save money.
- The private sector can help us build a government for tomorrow.
Maxine is a business and digital strategy consultant. She helps public and private sector clients embrace social media and other collaborative technologies and principles to improve organizational efficiency and effectiveness. She helped to launch the U.S. Department of Defense’s Emerging Media Directorate, co-authored DoD’s Web 2.0/social media policy, and founded Government 2.0 Camp.
