How to Make Innovation Happen – Notes from ACT/IAC ELC

Taking notes at ACT/IAC ELC from panel “Innovation Happens!”

Job as CTO is to find out what’s happening

Energy Summit

-Search needed to solve business problem – like when Energy loans Coalera

If we aren’t leveraging the work GSA is doing to bring vendor relations together at one, we are stovepiping it. GSA is under-utlized service.

How do we bring new ideas and insights to government?

Grassroots up and then removing barriers to key processes – hiring people, buying services.

IT reform plan
-moving to module delivery – every 6 months deliver something

How do we incentives doing right thing? Individual components. Control vs choice – need middle

Roadmapped to Energy labs – how can tech support business needs?

-Found some key needs
-Some is commodity IT – help desk, email, telephony, video conference –

-Some is unique to Energy
-CIO shop is creating facilitation from business to technology

Energy.data.gov – agencies encouraged to share high-value data

-Tons of data, entrepreneurs create data

-Public/private partnership

Gov’t needs its one application developers

Context aware capabilities

Social media, Cloud, Big data

-Use technology to solve their specific problems

Keeping crossing the boundaries

Innovation – still at grandiose, next step is changing it to changing lives

No idea how to make that innovation stick.

Something could serve that purpose and goes away. Transience of innovation. Marry permission w/ control.

Build within enterprise vision within which people innovate.

Outputs and outcomes – can we really measure productivity? Focus on real mission outcomes

Basic business processes on the ground – filling out forms, delivering benefits, core business processes

-Still in early stages

Do good at specific agencies. When you try to do things across government agencies, it’s very tricky and hard.

Always about different between choice and central.

At end of the day, it’s people that are curious and want to learn from different agencies.

Been talking about this shared services since 1997. Have to accept this moves over time – may have redo it all over again.

Nobody as diverse as federal government.

-Level of complexity is so high.

-More innovation at enterprise in U.S.

-Gets tricky though on innovation that sticks

Lots of changes have happened
-When went from hundreds of payroll vendors to 1-2

Create the culture of collaboration and problem solving.

Show OMB a proof of concept.