It’s good to share

By Laurence Millar | 3 August 2010 | Permanent link | 3 comments

I have just finished a very successful and enjoyable week in Australia. The FutureGov forum in Canberra was an opportunity to share views and insights into the key issues faced by federal and state and local government CIOs in Australia. There were more than 100 attendees from three levels of government, as well as IT vendors and international speakers from Europe, New Zealand, and the United States.

Gov 2.0, citizen engagement, open access to data, and consolidation of shared services are the four main areas that I heard during the conversations over the two days, and they are consistent across all levels of government.

The Australian Gov 2.0 TaskForce report, released in December 2009, continues to provide the strategic direction (in the social media world six months is approaching the half-life of any initiative), and in the week before the forum, the Australian government issued the Open Government Declaration.

There continue to be questions about how these fine words will result in actions by government agencies. Stephen Collins (Gov2 activist based in Canberra) gave his take on the event, and Nicholas Gruen followed up his presentation at the Forum with a discussion on public servants participation in Gov2.0. Here is a more cynical take on the current position in Australia.

As readers know, I am always looking for a common thread – the themes that allow us to make sense of the multiple challenges and opportunities. For this forum, I was left with a sense that it’s all about sharing – sharing infrastructure, sharing systems, and sharing experience; sharing data within and across agencies, sharing knowledge and people between teams, projects, agencies and different governments.

Later in the week I was delighted to have the opportunity, with Bill Shrier CTO from Seattle, to attend a lunch with 14 public officials from the Victoria State Government, together with Cisco and FutureGov colleagues. I love Melbourne as a city, and have always thought of the State of Victoria as a world leader in the application of ICT to the business of government and the government of business.

The balance between innovation and cost-reduction has been a key theme of our sector, and getting it right is an important factor for success – the balance needs to reflect the values and strategy of the government and the community. So I was not surprised that while Victoria has a strong infrastructure standardisation agenda, officials are also looking at geospatial, land, and information management for the next wave of innovation.

During the Forum, we were lucky to be able to tap into the experience of public servants from the USA, New Zealand, Netherlands, Austria, and the OECD. Governments can find it difficult to take systems and experience from one jurisdiction and apply them in another – but that is a very effective and powerful method of reducing cost and time to market for new systems, as well as evolving a common approach across boundaries. This applies whether it is different states or cities in the USA, states and territories in Australia, or countries in the Europe Union.

In the future, we will need to pay more attention to the re-use of systems from elsewhere, if we are to meet increasing stakeholder expectations – Ministers, citizens, employees, communities, businesses, other government agencies. Remember, it’s good to share.