Bill's Notebook

Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, describes the inefficient use of technology of federal government at a recent speech.  Inefficiencies such as forms that are entered online, printed out, passed around in manila folders, and then rekeyed into another computer system.  This is nothing new and federal employees are quite aware of these inefficiencies.   So, why don’t the agencies just adopt new technologies?

It can be summed up as the agencies are more comfortable with the devil they know then a possible devil they don’t know.  A fascinating study on why rural hospitals don’t readily adopt new technologies describes six barriers to adoption.  Understanding and confronting these barriers can help overcome inefficiencies.

The first barrier, cost, is an obvious one and quite relevant to current state of the federal budget.  Legality, the second barrier is also a well-understood cause.  President Obama’s policy of Open Government addresses and overcomes these barriers.  But the remaining four barriers may be more difficult because they are tied into the culture of government.

Time is a barrier because implementing and learning a new technology may take longer to realize than an impatient public is willing to give.  Political appointees also like to see immediate results and may not have the patience for a new technology.  Allied with time are the barriers of inefficiency and complexity.  Poorly implemented new technology solutions will provide “proof” that the old system may be ineffective but not as bad as the new “ineffeciency.”

The above barriers all feed into the fundamental barrier – the fear of change.  Technologies and processes are embedded in the culture of the organization.  Technology adoption is not plug-n-play where you can easily swap one process for another.  Adopting new technologies takes time, trust, and the willingness to tolerate failure as the employees learn to use the new technologies.  Again, change is not about technology but about people.

UPDATE: Firoze Lafeer makes an insightful comment that government should require contractors to set aside funds for developing Plan B innovations while creating the Plan A innovation.

1)  WhiteHouse.gov goes Open Source (Drupal) – actually reported on10/25/2009 but the original story has been updated to include the contractors: Acquia and Phase2.  The contractors also had folks at the OpenGov workshop I attended.

2) U.S. Department of Defense to allow Social Networking on unclassified computers – Check out their Social Hub.

3) Pew Research Study shows we get our news through social networks – “The latest study from Pew Internet analyzes the news Americans are consuming and various different ways they find news. Based on a sample of 2,259 adults, the study reveals that three fourths of the people (75%) who find news online get it either forwarded through e-mail or posts on social networking sites, and half of them (52%) forward the news through those means.”

4) UK Newspaper, The Guardian, opens new API on political information – You don’t even have to register to access APIs that will feed election and political information into apps that you create.

So, governments are going open source and embracing social networking at the same time people’s news consumption shifts to online social networking applications.  Almost a perfect storm of open government.

This is the workshop I attended on February 17th.  Amazing amount of great material in such a short time.  The final document (available in Word):

http://opengovdirective.pbworks.com/f/Final+Results+of+the+February+Open+Government+Directive+Workshop.doc

Gizmodo tells you how to escape from Google.

An interesting perspective on how power is shifting from government to the people.

Four months ago, I wrote about Walter Anderson’s Reality Isn’t What It Used To Be and how it perfectly described the rise of social networking even though it was published in 1992.  Essentially, Anderson argues that technology has advanced to the point that people can construct their own reality of like-minded individuals.

Rachel Winchester updates this argument with her concept of the Metanet.  She defines it as:

“The population of the internet has hit the point where we can no longer lump everything and everyone together as ‘the Internet.’ There’s the internet of things, as more and more devices come online of their own accord, and more and more sensors are added. There’s the cloud, where data is stored and processed, there’s the commerce internet, there are the walled gardens of intranets and private instances, and there’s social media, now the main way people interact with the internet. I’m starting to call these the metanet, the macronet, the micronet, and the me net.”

On a related note, I think my last paragraph of my original posting was a bit pessimistic as I asserted that social networking will lead to more groupthink and exclusionary communities.  I still think there is a danger of groupthink but the same technologies can also make it easier for people to break from groups they no longer find useful or welcome to form their own.  A key to this is how social networking technologies make it easier to raise criticisms and objections that could prevent the formation of groupthink.  Must keep an open mind on this.

From ProjectSteps:

“Can we or should we do it?
Will it make our situation simpler or more complex?
Will it help us to solve a problem or cause a problem?”
Should we do nothing?”

Watching the video tutorial about Google Buzz and its features I think that Google has quietly conceded that Google Wave wasn’t as revolutionary as they had hoped.  Notice how Google Buzz is essentially Google Wave with GMail as the platform.

UPDATE – O’Reilly Radar has also noticed the similarity between Google Wave and Google Buzz.

Charles Leadbeater (titles himself a leading innovation and creativity thinker) writes a provocative essay on five potential problems with the move toward cloud computing:

1)  Homogeneity stemming from established companies like Google and Apple.

2)  Corporate Control.

3)  Prevention of cloud formation by strict copyright controls.

4)  Government control of the cloud.

5)  The Digital Divide.

These are potentially serious issues that do warrant further exploration.  The Internet is famous for routing around controls but can it survive in a cloud environment?

Yesterday, I wrote about NASA’s new budget and how this new direction has the potential to greatly revitalize the US economy.  A fascinating project that has major potential for IT is NASA’s cloud computing platform – Nebula.  In this video, NASA’s CIO describes Nebula.