The past year has been an exploratory phase for many technologies that have already hit the private sector. For government, 2008 will be about using new tools and technologies to change the way it interacts and collaborates with citizens - in a way that should save a few bucks at the same time.
Green IT
Government is accountable to the public and is constantly under pressure to reduce costs - and the good news is that a lot of these cost-cutting opportunities are actually positive for the environment. "We're seeing green as a big theme, and the trend is how you actually do this but at the same time save money," said Andy Woyzbun, lead analyst with Info-Tech Research Group in London, Ont.
With the amount of energy consumed in both running and cooling data centres from a server and storage perspective, there's no question that one of the ways in which government can reduce its own energy consumption is to look at its data centres, he said. A technology behind that is virtualization, which reduces the total number of servers by virtualizing the server environment. Many of the tier-one server vendors are also working towards reducing the energy consumption of their servers.
Collaboration
Government agencies have been pretty good at leveraging the Internet to facilitate traffic between citizens and the government, but that's starting to get somewhat traditional, said Woyzbun. The fact that you can fill out a form and print it off in PDF format means you've just automated an old forms-driven process.
There's an opportunity for governments to improve the service levels they deliver to citizens by going beyond Web sites to Web 2.0, moving closer to real-time collaboration as opposed to the store-and-forward approach that generally defines government today. "And that's going to be tough," he said. "There's a lot of people in senior positions in government who still think of government processes the old way as opposed to the new way."
The next-generation workforce will force the Web 2.0 issue, said Alison Brooks, senior analyst for government insights with IDC Canada. There's already a lot of uptake in collaboration, as governments start moving from voice-over-IP to integrated unified communications offerings.
Many thought social networking was a waste of time. "The applications have to be more internal," Brooks said. "If it's used correctly, people will embrace it a bit more."
Collaborative tools are getting much better, whether it's the next-generation of IP-based videoconferencing or tele-presence technology, and this will be pushed by lifestyle and environmental requirements, said Kim Devooght, vice-president for public sector with IBM Canada.
Governments are going to have to deal with social networking, both in terms of business operations and policies.
"As demographics push the population along, our kids are pretty familiar with these tools and expect to be able to use them in a professional way and not just in a personal way," he said. "The whole idea of social networking is something that's going to be top-of-mind in 2008, certainly more than this year."
Continued:Social networking takes its place in the Government 2.0 world
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