Governments are Leading Many IT Innovations

This week I am back to covering emerging technologies and their practical uses. I have been seeing some innovative social business efforts from government for some time so this post, Governments Are Out Front in IT Innovation, was not a surprise. It mentions President Obama’s campaign to see innovation in IT, ranging from its use of big data to open source technologies. On his first day in office, the President also pledged to make the federal government a model for open data. It will take time but there is progress. The use of big data by his re-election campaign to target get out the vote efforts  remains a model for this space.

Innovation is also happening at the city level. New York has its own chief digital officer.  The article writes, “cities and states are not only making use of open source tools, they’re also walking the open source walk by participating in open source communities and contributing their work back to open source repositories such as GitHub.”

It goes on to add that, “in addition to releasing data that citizens can use, governments are increasingly making themselves more available electronically to help them fight crime, by predicting where crime is likely to occur.” I have seen the IBM ads on this type of effort. It makes a lot of sense. Below is an excerpt from a post I wrote after attending Lotusphere 2011. I t shows another innovative effort by government.

Tracy Hackshaw, is the Chief Solution Architect for iGov for the government of Trinidad and Tobago. Tracy discussed how the government is using social business for more effective e-government efforts. There are 1.3 million people in Trinidad and Tobago. A main goal is to increase the engagement of these people with their government and have them more satisfied with what the government is doing. They often look for what the people want and more interaction was a request.  Another was the simplification of information, which became another goal.

Within the country there is a high percentage of access to mobile phones so this was one channel they focused on. They wanted the user experience to be similar to what was offered on computers. One popular example was maps with the location of government offices and transit information on to reach them. Another was the reporting of such things as broken street lights or potholes in the roads. They have reduced the time that these issues are reported.

The different government agencies were each providing their own siloed source of information. So they consolidated this to offer a single, consistent point of access.  Different agencies could collectively created content that they shared with the residents. They also built in more interactivity to get greater feedback. They wanted the government to be more accessible so they created interactive town hall sessions.  They have achieved a 90% satisfaction rating from the residents and this is remarkable for government services. As you will see, each of these cases in their own way demonstrates the value of social business but, of course, I was already convinced. It is nice to see these tangible examples. 

Comments

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It is true story. Looks good. I want more post post about this topic.

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