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.

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