Digital Government
US CIO Steve VanRoekel just released Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People.
The Digital Government Strategy sets out to accomplish three things:
- Enable the American people and an increasingly mobile workforce to access high-quality digital government information and services anywhere, anytime, on any device.
- Ensure that as the government adjusts to this new digital world, we seize the opportunity to procure and manage devices, applications, and data in smart, secure and affordable ways.
- Unlock the power of government data to spur innovation across our Nation and improve the quality of services for the American people.
To drive this transformation, the strategy is built upon four overarching principles:
- An “Information-Centric” approach—Moves us from managing “documents” to managing discrete pieces of open data and content which can be tagged, shared, secured, mashed up and presented in the way that is most useful for the consumer of that information.
- A “Shared Platform” approach—Helps us work together, both within and across agencies, to reduce costs, streamline development, apply consistent standards, and ensure consistency in how we create and deliver information.
- A “Customer-Centric” approach—Influences how we create, manage, and present data through websites, mobile applications, raw data sets, and other modes of delivery, and allows customers to shape, share and consume information, whenever and however they want it.
- A platform of “Security and Privacy”—Ensures this innovation happens in a way that ensures the safe and secure delivery and use of digital services to protect information and privacy.
This strategy is focused on “harnessing the power of technology to help create a 21st century digital government – one that is efficient, effective and focused on improving the delivery of services to the American people.” While this strategy is focused on citizen services, the DoD can apply many of these strategies to defense operations. The Army CIO in particular has led the way in championing open data and common platforms. There are tremendous innovation opportunities that can be unleashed once the core elements of a platform, data model, and culture are in place. I encourage those in the defense community to read the Digital Government strategy and adopt within their enterprises.
Jennifer Pahlka: Coding a Better Government
Jennifer Pahlka of Code for America has a brilliant TED discussion. Can government be run like the Internet, permissionless and open? Coder and activist Jennifer Pahlka believes it can — and that apps, built quickly and cheaply, are a powerful new way to connect citizens to their governments — and their neighbors.
Collaborative Leadership in Government
The Partnership for Public Service study Best Places to Work Snapshot: The Federal Leadership Challenge highlights: “Leadership is the most important factor when it comes to driving employee satisfaction and commitment in the federal government.” While there has been positive trends over the last decade, only 50% of government employees are satisfied with their senior leaders.
- 48% were satisfied with the information they receive from top management about what’s going on in their organizations
- 43% felt their senior leaders generate high levels of motivation and commitment
- 46% felt personal empowerment with respect to work processes
The survey broke out leadership rankings by 30 federal agencies. The Army finished 11th (T), Navy 12th, Air Force 13th, and OSD/Joint Staff 15th. The Top 5 were the NRC, FDIC, NASA, State, and OPM while DHS finished last.
Leaders who focus on communication and empowerment will yield significant results from their workforce.
Senior leaders – how do you communicate to your organization? How do you share your vision, assessment of the organization, industry trends, priorities, key programs, and initiatives? If your employees wanted to learn more about these areas, how would they go about doing so? What about your external stakeholders?
This is where collaborative web-based tools should play a central role to enable your communication strategy, beyond your weekly staff meetings and monthly/quarterly all-hands meetings. Public websites, internal collaboration platforms, and a suite of tools should be part of your daily operations.
- Leaders who blog regularly can effectively communicate across their enterprise and enable employees to ask questions, provide feedback and ideas, and collaborate among each other.
- Wikis are powerful tools enable everyone to effectively contribute to and access their collective knowledge. From drafting a simple memo to compiling an enterprise-wide knowledge repository, wikis are rapidly taking hold within business operations.
- Collaboration sites enable discussion forums and employees to self organize into groups based on areas of interest to engage on the organization’s challenges, projects, and innovations.
Leaders should aggressively explore how these sites and tools can transform your processes, policies, and culture to get your employees more actively engaged and committed to the organization’s mission, priorities, and outcomes.
Disruptive Innovation Explained
Clay Christensen, Harvard Business School professor and the world’s most influential management guru according to the Thinkers50, lays out his landmark theory.
DARPA Crowdsourcing Weapon System Manufacturing
The NY Times has an interesting story on Pentagon Pushes Crowdsourced Manufacturing.
Designing and building things for the US military is a notoriously slow-moving and costly endeavor. The time from idea to manufacturing for a new armored personnel carrier or a tank is typically 10 to 20 years. DARPA wants to change that, and drastically so. It seeks to cut the design-to-production cycle to two to four years. So how are they going to do it? Crowdsourcing and prize contests are crucial ingredients in the speed-up recipe.
The crowdsourcing effort will rely on a software initiative, called Vehicleforge.net, which will be a Web portal for gathering, sharing and testing ideas.
DARPA, a government-sponsored research program, has enlisted scientists from the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Vanderbilt University, University of Pennsylvania, and a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and General Electric. The work is getting under way in earnest now, with the first of three prize challenges scheduled for next year.
G.E.’s research arm announced its collaboration with M.I.T. on Thursday. Earlier in the week, researchers from the company, M.I.T. and the Pentagon agency, Darpa, discussed the project and its potential significance for the military and beyond.
The near-term target, they said, is to collaborate on a design for an amphibious vehicle for the Marines. The first contest, with a $1M prize, is planned for early next year. It involves mobility and drive-train subsystems for the vehicle. Next, about six months later, will be the design for the chassis and other subsystems, a contest that will carry another $1M prize.
In 2014, there will be a $2M prize for the best design for an entire vehicle. Individuals, small teams and businesses and major defense contractors are welcome to compete and contribute, said Lt. Col. Nathan Wiedenman, a DARPA program manager. The goal, he said, is to “democratize the design process.”
At G.E., the view extends well beyond military vehicles. “This is about changing the paradigm so you can rapidly design and manufacture complex systems of all kinds,” said Joseph Salvo, manager of the business integration technologies lab at G.E. Research. If successful, the approach could have a big impact on G.E., the nation’s largest manufacturer of industrial equipment, including jet engines, power generators and diagnostic medical devices.
Crowdsourced software design, of course, is old hat. That is the open-source model that gave us the Linux operating system and the Apache Web server years ago. But what is different about the Vehicleforge.net project is that it is essentially a software “engine” that contributors use to plug in simulated components. Then, the new part or subsystem can be tested, virtually.
“You attach these simulation services to explore the behavior of complex systems,” explained David R. Wallace, a professor of mechanical engineering at M.I.T. “That allows you to predict problems earlier to get a better design faster.” There are plenty of software simulation tools used in manufacturing. It is a niche industry — computer-aided design. But the software is often difficult to use and expensive, so mainly big companies use them.
The Vehicleforge.net program, Dr. Wallace said, will allow solo inventors or small teams to tap into those capabilities. A vehicle body and chassis design, submitted as code, could be plugged into the Vehicleforge.net platform and tested for aerodynamics by in a virtual wind tunnel, for example. “The design models all hook up together,” Dr. Wallace said. “It’s an emergent way to design complex systems.”
Innovation
“To be an innovator you have to challenge the beliefs that everyone else takes for granted—the long-held assumptions that blind industry incumbents to new ways of doing business.”
- Gary Hamel (What Matters Now)
Best IT Books of 2011
CIO Insight published their list of Best IT Books of 2011. Like many top X lists these days, it was flooded with banner ads and required clicking through 10 slides to see the full list. Their slideshow has the picture, title, author, publisher, and one liner for each book.
I took their list, compiled in a single page, linked to their Amazon pages, and included the top 3 Kindle highlights of each book. These 10 books received high marks via Amazon’s ratings. The 27 highlights (one book doesn’t have highlights) provides you a succinct rundown of what readers found to be the best lines of what CIO insight found to be the top 10 IT books. Enjoy!
10. The Power of Convergence: Linking Business Strategies and Technology Decisions to Create Sustainable Success by Faisal Hoque
- Convergence creates an environment where technology helps shape (rather than simply enable) strategic choices, leading enterprises to synchronize (rather than simply align) their business and technology decision making.
- Technology is only as good as the imagination of business leaders who are focused on customers, markets, business models, threats, and opportunities, and who can make technology do what they need it to do.
- In other words, business managers assume that they’re communicating when they’re actually just dictating; technologists assume that business managers will appreciate their technology when they are often just delivering greater complexity.
9. The Leader’s Checklist: 15 Mission-Critical Principles by Michael Useem
- Honor the Room: Express confidence in and support for those who work for you. Communicate Persuasively: Communicate in ways that people will never forget. Place Common Interest First: Common purpose comes first, parochial concerns last.
- Act Decisively: Make good and timely decisions, and ensure that they are executed.
- Marine commanders learn to make do with a “70-percent” solution, not 100-percent consensus; explain unambiguous objectives and leave their subordinates to work out the details; tolerate mistakes if they point to stronger performance next time and are not repeated a second time; and view indecisiveness as a fatal flaw—worse than making a mediocre decision, because a middling decision, swiftly executed, can at least be corrected.
8. Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others by Justin Menkes
- Great leaders seek to fulfill their own potential but equally seek to fulfill the potential of those who work for and with them.
- leaders’ ability to realize their maximum potential and the potential of their workforce is the most profound way that they can differentiate themselves.
- You cannot be a great leader without understanding the importance of teaching the deep gratification that can only be attained through discipline.
7. Lessons in IT Transformation: Technology Expert to Business Leader by Larry Bonfante
- Providing value to the organization is the primary purpose of information technology; everything else is secondary.
- make people understand how what we are doing connects with what already inspires them.
- technology and information have only one real purpose—that is, to promote the business objectives of the organization.
6. Higher Ambition: How Great Leaders Create Economic and Social Value by Michael Beer and Flemming Norrgren
- Creating both social and economic value directly reinforces the primary motivators of people: purpose, autonomy, and mastery.
- Creating social value unlocks the dormant creative energies that exist in all of us, which in turn creates outstanding financial results.
- By superior social value, our leaders mean that they are building lasting institutions that both contribute to the social good (building a better world) and create social capital (relationships with employees, customers, communities, and others characterized by distinctive levels of trust and mutual commitment).
