At this week’s Gov 2.0 Summit, the feds seemed to have a coming out party of sorts for their new approach to IT in government – do it faster, lighter and be more transparent. Kundra & Chopra spoke about how open standards and building platforms for citizens to expound on government data should be major parts of new federal IT spending. The agenda was filled with sermons on the virtue of transparency and the wisdom of open source. Watching these things be taken so seriously warms my heart. But, the question remains – does the government have the will to execute? More importantly, do their contractors?
This is key. While the drive to do IT differently, more cheaply and more transparently is clearly emanating from the folks now holding the reigns of the government, this notion easily be lost somewhere deep in the opaque depths of the IT procurement process. If there is one thing that some government technology contractors have come to appreciate, it’s that building a system that is expensive, difficult to retire, and complicated can often serve to lock in years of future revenue. As one presenter put it, some companies consider building bad enterprise software “a competitive advantage”. In some cases, this has become the only way they know how to operate. Think of the billions in contracting vehicles now rendered useless by a government who only wants to buy lightweight, open source software built on flexible data exchange standards – software that many of its legacy contracts aren’t able to provide.
Some will adapt. Some won’t. But, this opens a tremendous opportunity for smaller, more agile firms that have concepts like OSS, sound UX design, and web services built into their DNA. At Government 2.0, people like Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs showed the feds that massive, data-intensive websites can be built quickly, and even crowd sourced to citizens who feel engaged by this approach. His Apps for Democracy project exemplifies this (in fact, Vivek Kundra sponsored this project when he was DC’s CIO). I’m confident that we’ll see the new administration work with IT vendors that can deliver projects that follow this model, big or small.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Gov 2.0 Summit: Vendor Smackdown - open project // Sep 11, 2009 at 5:12 pm
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2 Posts about Open Source Software as of September 11, 2009 // Sep 12, 2009 at 12:02 am
[...] doesn’t allow us the ability to discuss at this level of detail, but only very broadly. Gov 2.0 Summit: Vendor Smackdown – e2oh.com 09/11/2009 At this week’s Gov 2.0 Summit, the feds seemed to have a coming out [...]
3 links for 2009-09-12 « burningCat // Sep 12, 2009 at 3:05 am
[...] Gov 2.0 Summit: Vendor Smackdown [...]
4 Mark Montgomery // Sep 12, 2009 at 7:11 am
I am the founder of just such a company, an early and long-term supporter of OS as one of few means to compete with monopolies, but there are deeper issues to consider that could be lost in the euphoria.
We have embraced semantic standards due to the interoperability for public transactions, but we had to wait years for the standards to catch up to what we wanted to do, and was necessary to achieve our intended results.
One problem is that we’ve invested over a decade in applied R&D, which employs universal open standards, but we have no protection other than patent applications, which often cost millions to defend. And the risk is not necessarily the historic giant employing predatory tactics, or government contractors that have written the code for procurement, but indeed one of our greatest risks is the government itself.
For example, I recently attempted to work with one of the larger federal labs to gain them as a customer– they clearly need the Kyield system, and their scientists raved about the technology, but in a conference call he called me the middle man… even though I am the inventor of the system, they want to not only build such a system for their own org, but also the rest of government, and the private sector as well!
So you see it’s a very complex mine field for young, agile, innovative companies attempting to serve the national interests without investing one’s entire retirement and adult life working for free, just to be run over by empire building.
Ironically, one of the core values we provide in our holistic semantic enterprise system is IP protection, crisis prevention, adaptability — everything this summit seems to support….
The question is can government avoid the same syndrome we all rightfully criticize giant vendors for doing– once empowered by technology can they embrace the creativity and innovation of others, or will they insist on stifling innovation by expanding their own empires?
The answer could well dictate the future of America– job growth, economic sustainability, innovation, crisis prevention…. the stakes could not be higher.
Kind regards,
Mark Montgomery
Founder
http://www.kyield.com
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