Information technology (IT) is central to Gov 2.0, both as a platform for government operations and to provide channels for government internal and public communications. The Internet — the Web in particular, both the static first-generation Web and its reconceptualization as Web 2.0 — is likewise central to nearly every element of modern IT. Internet computing has become more than just a business (and personal) tool; it has reshaped the way individuals and organizations work and interact. Government agencies — public administrations — are of course among the organizations profoundly affected by this on-going revolution.
Gov 2.0 is in many ways a conceptual descendent of Web 2.0. After all, it was Web 2.0 that kicked off the whole ‘2.0’ craze, the idea that a generational leap defined by Net-centric IT should be emulated in every computing application domain. Yet while Tim O’Reilly defined Web 2.0 as “the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform,” Gov 2.0 is something more. It’s not just a computing platform but a new way of conducting the business of government. Gov 2.0 aims for Web 2.0’s Internet-mediated interactivity and collaboration, but its aspirations are greater: to bring those 2.0 capabilities to government operations whether internally focused or outward facing. The IT platform is central, but the success of Gov 2.0 depends on critical elements beyond IT, on people, policies, and procedures, and on ways that Web 2.0-style approaches:
* improve service delivery and satisfaction
* inform policy
* transform procedures and optimize performance
* enable new services.
Take these points as Gov 2.0 goals. The path to these goals is a focus on measurement, data, analysis, and informed action. But what measurements, data, and analyses, and how do these inform action? The key to these questions is a systematic analysis of Gov 2.0.
This technical note, the second in a series, sketches out such an analysis. It describes the many dimensions of Gov 2.0 and more, and outlines a basic Gov 2.0 implementation roadmap for governmental organizations.
Continue at http://www.spacetimeresearch.com/making-sense-of-gov2.html
Great Series. Haven’t seen the BI spin on Open Gov yet.
Out of curiousity, what’s the BI functionality you see? To pull data from disparate Gov 2.0 tools? Like the thousands of postings on blogs and trend data out there on a program to program or agency to agency basis? Or are you suggesting a higher level BI functionality for the entire government–much more future state?
Jenn, Ana,thanks for the comments.
BI covers a huge gamut of functions from reporting to advanced analytics (definitions may vary) and of information sources that may include data warehouses sourced from transactional systems and Web-scraped text. In theory I’d include all that stuff, which is all doable today, although my technical note, which was vendor sponsored but editorially independent, was written with governmental statistics foremost in my mind.