Update 12.28.09: I just had to record for posterity the flames from some folks who tagged my previous post in Reddit. (So much for polite, constructive discourse.) In truth, I would like to have this conversation with some of these folks. Even the harshest ones. But I don't want to have to register for a service I don't use and I don't want to get into flame wars over comment threads. I get the frustration. I've experienced it. I too have been and remain rather skeptical of the hype. Some level of hype gets things noticed and forces conversations that need to happen but aren't. Some of what I said was written and/or read poorly. For example, Mac/Office is about culture, not interoperability. I know that Google came before Web 2.0. That was expressed poorly. My company also was doing a lot of this stuff before we ever heard of Web 2.0. I can't speak for Tim O'Reilly, but I feel confident he realizes he didn't invent something. He made salient observations about the Internet and human behavior and how the two have, do, and perhaps ought to work together. Many of these concepts go back decades to the roots of computer science and the Internet. I've been in workshops with Senior Technical Fellows, having extremely well-qualified CVs, who said, "we proposed all this in the beginning." My response was, "Exactly. Isn't it past time we got back to that?"
Showing posts with label government. Show all posts
Showing posts with label government. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
"Response" to Previous
And I know how radical ("insane") my idea sounds, but I am not saying government should fund Web 2.0. This is not about a bailout, as some seem to think. Some of these comments come from the position of having no idea how government runs. I'm saying government is actively spending money, money is being wasted, and I know from education and direct, relevant experience that several of the concepts articulated in the original essay can help tax paying citizens spend more wisely.
Consider this from the Army:
"The Army spends, under 85 programs, approximately $6.7B annually on Information Technology (I.T.) without a method to converge these systems into a centralized infrastructure designed to improve robustness and dynamically deliver web services to hundreds of thousands of users while reducing risk"
And that is just service within DoD, DoD just being one (the biggest) government spender on IT. It's full of waste and the reason isn't just because Web 2.0 is magic Koolaid or that we are already on to so-called Web 3.0. It is because the government still looks at the Web the way it used to be in the 90s; i.e., with a 1.0 mindset.
More concrete thoughts on this later on how exactly government might use Twitter, for example. Think SMS. Twitter is a metaphor. The folks who run Twitter - for example - just might be the Pros from Dover who can help save government from itself. Think FEMA and USAID...
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Q: How Does Web 2.0 Make Money? A: Government.
A lot of folks are wondering how Twitter will monetize. Will they sell premium services to businesses that want to make Twitter part of a communications strategy? What about Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook? Are the ads working? Regardless, if this is Web 2.0 then why are we still talking about subscriptions and eyeballs on pages?!
I want to suggest another strategy: Sell to government.
I don't mean the general sense. I mean, specifically, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook and a great many others should set up for-government operations. I wrote to the Delicious team years ago asking when they were coming out with a solution that I could bring to government, i.e., in-house. I never got an answer. Regardless, figuring out how to get these companies oriented toward government is not straightforward. Most Web 2.0 companies literally could not be further outside The Beltway. I suspect they don't have much in the way of strategy for state, tribal, or local either. Google does a good job selling into government with its enterprise appliance model, and with more than just search. But, of course, Google is a massive company.
Culture has a lot to do with things. The Pentagon is not a T-shirt and flip flops kind of environment. "The Bigs," i.e., large-cap companies that provide most of the contracting labor, are not at all oriented to innovate in the Web 2.0 technology space. You don't see Macs anywhere. You do see MS Office everywhere. I'm not entirely sure what conclusions can be drawn from these observations but I am sure the observations are significant.
I suppose the best example of Web 2.0 penetration into the government space is tele-presence. Adobe Breeze is ubiquitous on Defense Knowledge Online (DKO). Just about anyone with a DKO government account can create or attend a meeting. But tele-presence probably isn't the first thing that comes to people's minds when asked to name a Web 2.0 technology and I'm not sure Adobe is the best example of a Web 2.0 company.
Yes, there is something different about Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Delicious, et al. I happen to think that something different - whatever it is - translates into unrealized opportunity for both buyers and sellers in the government space. I choose to focus on these technologies specifically and there are others that I include. ProgrammableWeb has a solution for the registry problem, for example. I don't represent any of these companies, by the way. I call them out as (mostly) well-known examples of capabilities the government needs. I don't really care if Flickr, Picasa, or PhotoBucket is the image repository of choice. Vimeo and YouTube can and should compete for the video infrastructure.
The point is that government needs platform solutions.
Simple, content-based, platform solutions are the most obvious plays for Web 2.0 in government; images, video, audio. The federal government processes a staggering amount of this stuff. The DoD may be the first to get into the mix with TroopTube.
There also are plenty of outfits that would use social tagging tools if only they could bring them in house. By bring them in house, what I mean and recommend is providing enterprise services solutions. It's nice to have applications that provide tagging, but applications are seldom the best enterprise solutions and are hardly social (except, perhaps, in MOSS). Tagging is a domain, a Web 2.0 partition, if you will, unto itself. It is a simple-enough-but-not-too-simple utility that scales and it can be integrated with just about any other application, regardless of whether or not the application was designed with tagging in mind. Yes, government needs strategic guidance and support for tagging services and Web 2.0 tagging companies are just the ones to provide it...if we can figure out how.
The current providers, a.k.a. "The Bigs" are not oriented to provide Web 2.0 tech support.
This is either an opportunity to get new business before The Bigs or to create a business of showing them the way. In any case it is an opportunity to make money. More specifically, it is a way for Web 2.0 technologies to make money. In the government services space the biz-speak is generally referred to as "priming" and "subbing," as in: you are either a prime contractor or a subcontractor. I don't see many Web 2.0 companies subcontracting to big, traditional system integrators, though.
The government is not set up to acquire Web 2.0 technologies.
While services contracts are fairly common and understood, things are less well-defined in the products and solutions space unless the products and solutions are ubiquitous or otherwise extremely well known. Government, especially federal, wants to buy everything in bulk. See also: Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ). New technology is extraordinarily difficult to insert, especially in secure environments. Protocol, procedure, and process rule the land. Force-fitting into an existing model is too often the preferred method.
We are getting better at defining and avoiding undue process but process, by definition, is: 1) necessary and 2) inherently situational.
When doing business with the federal government, it's important to know how business is done inside The Beltway. There are most probably things in the mix that need to be undone, too. To a meaningful extent the situation is not different at state, tribal, and local levels. Education is needed on both sides of the buyer/seller relationship. We might "change the world" in the process of implementing Web 2.0 for government, but requisite is the obligation to have a fair understanding of "the world" first. The obligation goes both ways but mostly falls on the shoulders of sellers.
Choices for Web 2.0 companies to make money by doing business with government:
- Become or spin-off an enterprise systems integrations unit
- Sell enterprise systems solutions a) to government b) to system integrators (Note: probably can't sell solutions to government without either being an integrator or having the support of one.)
- Consult a) to government b) to system integrators on enterprise systems
Of course, "partner" is an option, but still implies one or more the previously listed options.
[Update 9:47 PM - I've decided I really don't like these choices at all. Need to come up with an altogether new business model, perhaps...probably]
There's so much more to this than I can wrap my head around now, certainly more than I am prepared or qualified to comment here.
[Update 9:47 PM - Forgot to comment on need for and evidence of government investment in backbone instracture and understanding of cloud architecture; significant issues arise once a bunch of these services are running around on a single network. And as always, security is different and harder.]
I think it's time Web 2.0 companies, government, and large-cap contracting companies had a grand introduction to one another. Believe it or not, there are plenty of people who have never even heard of Web 2.0.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Common Web 2.0 Services for Government Brainstorm
- SMS - ex., Twitter
- Expertise Location - ex., Facebook, LinkedIn, semantic profilers
- Tagging - ex., Delicious, Magnolia, Stumble Upon
- Image Sharing- ex., Flickr, Picasa, PhotoBucket
- Video Sharing- ex., YouTube, Vimeo, TroopTube! (12.28.08)
- Audio Sharing - ex., SoundCloud, HuffDuff
- Document Sharing - ex., Google Docs, MOSS, Word Press, Blogger, Tumblr
- Registry - ex., ACME.ProgrammableWeb, Wiki (?)
- Tele-presence - ex., Breeze, WebEx, GoToMeeting
- Search - ex. Google, Yahoo!
- Visualization - ex., ManyEyes, Swivel
- Dictionary - ex., Merriam-Webster.com (http://m-w.com/dictionary/[WORD])
- Data Transformation- ex., ??
- [Update 12.29.08] Geospatial, mapping - ex., Google Earth/Maps, Microsoft Live Virtual Earth/Maps
- Utility model (i.e., like electric, water, natural gas)
- Specialized content and application services infrastructure
- Government needs a strategy for inserting these technologies
- Government strategy must be capabilities-based and vendor indifferent, yet cannot be generic
- How exactly/specifically can government do business with Facebook or LinkedIn, for example?
- To what extent will/should third-party integrators be involved? Is Twitter likely to provide labor resources for technology insertion or would they just want to license the platform to third parties?
- Companies listed above need a strategy for doing business with government. Some have them, but most don't.
- The mutual strategy should be for companies to implement their architectures for these platform services in public and government-managed domains.
- Probably the biggest hurdle is the massive amount of process and procedure required to navigate the government marketplace and interact with customers
- Culture gaps
More later...
[Update 12.23.08]
- Security model is much more complicated than just protecting access to personal information; ease of and tracking of information flow a greater concern
- Security models need to be reconsidered by both buyers and sellers
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Priorities for Technology and Innovation?
If I could choose our country's top five strategic priorities for technology and innovation, they would be:
- Diversify the energy ecosystem
- Transform human transportation
- Open more government data
- Boost resurgence in manufacturing
- Transform farming practices
Diversifying the energy ecosystem means that we diversify production and consumption. Diversifying production means that we increase the number of different means for producing energy in terms of both type and scale; everything from storing the energy you produce in your exercise machine up to expanding nuclear. If they ever figure out the photosynthesis model of using the sun then we're literally set for life. Diversifying energy consumption means that we increase the number of different kinds of energy a consumer can use and decrease the amount of energy the consumer requires in order to be effective. There will always be both high energy and low energy systems that have purpose and value. Efficiency of consumption still matters. Ideally we will produce and require less energy to do more. This is not a pipe dream. This is innovation and efficiency.
Transforming human transportation means that we change the way we think about how people move around geographically. We need to look at the logistics of national and local transportation free from the constraints of mode. When it comes to moving people, we will also place great emphasis on the preferences of the individual. These might be combined into the notion of demand. Given an understanding of demand (past, present, future?) we can make better decisions among biomotive, automotive, locomotive, hydromotive, and aeromotive modes of transportation (most of which are not English words, by the way). I'm not sure I have good answers, but I'm certain transportation is A) complex and B) broken. That usually tells me we need to turn the problem on its head and look at it sideways to recognize what will work.
Opening more goverment data means that local, state, and federal governments and their agencies commit to putting all information already in the public domain online in standard, ubiquitous formats that are easy to publish, syndicate, transform, integrate, and view. Governments should spend less time and money on applications (analysis and visualization tools, websites/portals). Governments should spend more time and overall less money on opening up our data vice building applications. Naturally, government-internal uses of data will require tools and applications. But in all cases better tools and applications will emerge when data is open. This may be the easiest and least costly priority to implement.
Boosting resurgence in manufacturing means that we recreate and reinvigorate our strength and ingenuity as skilled manufacturers. More specifically, we invest in:
- High-tech, lightweight manufacturing; tools, devices, sensors, robotics and the like
- Transportation manufacturing; planes, trains, and automobiles
Transforming farming practices means we find the middle ground between niche farming and factory farming. Niche farming is not efficient or practical and is more costly than Americans will endure. The factory farming model is failing in the current environment. There is entirely too much land not being farmed in an effort to control prices and trade, yet prices are high and trade is poor. Some argue that cheap food is gone. I'm not so sure. The reason sited is the high cost of transportation undercutting the (tightly) controlled production practices that created cheap food in the first place. I agree those practices should end. But as long as we are purposely not farming land I don't know how we can make accurate determinations about price realism in food. Here in Virginia and in southerly neighbor North Carolina we have acres and acres of underutilized, fertile farmland. Whether it is land that goes unused because a mid-sized farmer can't compete in a factory-farm environment or old tobacco farms that must transform or die, a new strategy for farming can make use of that land, uplift local economies, keep choices up and prices low.
Then again, what do I know? This is more feeling than fact. I could be terribly, terribly wrong. Clearly I'm short of specifics. What I'm after is strategic priorities. This feels like what matters.
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Kitchenfire 3 points 4 days ago[-]
I wonder if this guy knows that Macs can run MS Office. Or that he's insane.