Australia's great leap forward in digital diplomacy

In the UK the Foreign Office states, in regards social media, that "The FCO encourages all staff to make full use of the opportunities offered by social media to help deliver FCO objectives", and "we do expect social media to be a core part of the toolkit of a modern diplomat."



In the US the current Secretary of State, John Kerry, has said "Of course there’s no such thing any more as effective diplomacy that doesn’t put a sophisticated use of technology at the center of all we’re doing to help advance our foreign policy objectives, bridge gaps between people across the globe, and engage with people around the world and right here at home," and "The term digital diplomacy is almost redundant — it’s just diplomacy, period."



Many other nations have taken similar steps to introduce digital channels, particularly social media, into their diplomatic suite.



Australia, until recently, was regarded as a laggard in digital diplomacy. I've heard us described on forums for diplomatic staff as highly conservative and as potentially damaging our diplomatic efforts through taking an excessively risk-averse approach to using social media in diplomacy.



Fortunately this has changed over the last year, with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) having become far more active in digital channels to promote the values and character of Australia.







Under the auspices of DFAT, Australia now operates over 60 social media accounts for digital diplomatic ends, including 22 Twitter, 30 Facebook, three each for YouTube and Flickr, a blog and China-specific accounts on the Sina Microblog, Sina Blog and Youku (a YouTube equivalent).



I've briefly analysed these accounts, which you can view at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ap1exl80wB8OdDF6YTVKZWt1MGh5UEIwaFVZZ19pTEE&usp=sharing



DFAT's social media accounts now cover around 60 countries and, while most were established in 2012 or 2013, they are already growing Australia's digital diplomatic reach and influence.



Countries covered by DFAT social media accounts at 4 November 2013







While Australia still lags powerhouses like the UK, which has over 240 international Twitter accounts alone and the US, which now has over 300 Facebook page and is tweeting in over 11 languages, we've definitely established ourselves in the second tier of countries engaged in digital diplomacy.



We're roughly equivalent to countries like Ireland, or Canada, both of which have just over 30 Twitter accounts and between 60 and 80 social media accounts overall in use for diplomatic purposes.



This is a sold start - although it has occurred without a broad and public discussion of how to most effectively use social media in diplomacy, as in countries such as the USA and Canada.



Hopefully as DFAT builds its skill base and guidance, we'll see less broadcast and more engagement by embassies and ambassadors online - more public conversation that leads to real and valuable diplomatic and economic outcomes from these channels.



After all, with civilian populations and governments alike increasingly engaging each other on social media, being absent online excludes an agency or government from important conversations and allows others without Australia's best interests at heart to fill the gap.



Below is my consolidated list of DFAT's social media accounts, drawn from DFAT's media page and current at 4 November 2013.

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Craig Thomler's personal Gov 2.0 and eGovernment thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective

Social media policies from across Australian governments

I've been compiling a list of social media policies released by government agencies and councils across Australia as a central resource bank for organisations who are either still in the process of creating their policies, or are interested in reviewing and improving them.



Thus far I've identified just over 70 policies - a small number considering Australia has over 550 councils, 100 state departments and 18 federal departments, plus all of the independent agencies and statutory bodies across the nation.



This is even smaller when considering that I took a broad view and included policies written for the public as well as those written for agency staff or as models for other agencies to adopt.



Based on previous research I conducted in 2012 (which will be repeated next year), many Australian Government agencies claimed to have or be developing a social media policy, but hadn't considered whether to publish it as yet.



I consider staff social media policies as one of the standard documents that agencies should disclose proactively, and it will be interesting to see when I ask them next year whether agencies feel the same way about this.



Anyway, below's the spreadsheet of social media policies - please comment if you have more to add (I'm not ready to open it up to general editing as yet).

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Craig Thomler's personal Gov 2.0 and eGovernment thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective

What's the digital communication capability of Australian governments?

On the back of the UK Government's second whole-of-government communications plan, the UK Government has been undertaking a Digital Communication Capability review asking (in simple terms), how is digital communication and engagement done, and how could it be improved?



The Review has involved consultation with Communications Directors, digital engagement specialists and senior executives across the UK Government and was led by a team of three independent reviewers with a deep knowledge of digital communications.



The review is still in the closing stages (final due in November), however has been an extremely transparent process, with all comments available online and the draft report already released for final feedback (similar to the process the Australian Gov 2.0 Taskforce used in 2009, but has been rarely used since in Australian government).



Many of the top-line findings would resonate with Australian public sector digital communications professionals, with the headline finding being:

Pockets of good practice notwithstanding, the headline finding is that digital communication in government is developing in silos and not in the mainstream. The consequence is that it is being outpaced by the best of the commercial and NGO worlds. Too much is broadcast and does not seek to engage. And, crucially, it is still treated by many in departmental leadership positions as a specialist area where the risks usually outweigh the benefits.

Underneath this, the review found that there wasn't a natural home for digital within departments - with placement in existing areas such as media relations leading to a biased approach which didn't serve all agency needs.



It also found that;

• departments were not realising economies of scale, with different agencies separately purchasing the same or different social media management and analytics tools, 


• communication focused far too much on informing rather than conversations, 


• objectives were based on easily measurable quantitive scores (such as followers or tweets) rather than on changing outcomes,


• there was an over-reliance on 'build it and they will come' approaches, 


• there was a shortage of skills - exacerbated by a lack of confidence and judgement, 


• there were limitations on access to social media due to IT security considerations - which may be valid but were poorly explained and understood, and


• there was a lack of trust and overriding pre-occupation with risk.

Unfortunately there's been none of this type of work done in a systemic way in Australia - despite it being possible to take an approach (such as the UK one) and repeat it across every state, territory and the federal government to provide a comparable model (then do a cut-down version for local governments).



This is similar to where I started with the Digital Innovation Review I conducted in Victoria (no other states or territories have been interested in a similar review as yet though).



I'd like to help. Any takers in government?

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Craig Thomler's personal Gov 2.0 and eGovernment thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective

Government as a Social Machine featuring Professor Dame Wendy Hall

I blogged today from the Government as a Social Machine forum hosted by ANZSOG and featuring Professor Dame Wendy Hall from the University of Southampton in the UK.



The discussion involved a diverse group of stakeholders from public and private sector organisations and covered the history of the internet and the challenges organisations, particularly governments, and citizens face in adapting to the new knowledge-rich, engagement-rich worked enabled by global real-time distributed communication systems.



Wendy also presented at a NICTA/OKFN event this afternoon, and is presenting at the Semantic Web Conference in Sydney later this week and in Victoria next week at the first Digital Literacy event being held by the Victorian public service (details of most of these events are in my Gov 2.0 calendar to the left).



Wendy opened with a story from before the web, on how no-one predicted the Internet, despite some earlier thinkers, such as Vannevar Bush, who foresaw a memory device (memex) in his brilliant work 'As we may think' in 1945, which contained many of the elements of modern computing systems.



She also discussed Ted Nelson, who coined the terms hypertext and hyperlinks back in the 1960s and Doug Engelbart, who invented the mouse, windows and much of the user interface that we find familiar today. In fact Doug gave the 'mother of all demos' which foresaw modern computers and the web.



Wendy recalled that when she met Tim Berners-Lee at the Hypertext conference in 1991 (which rejected Tim's paper on the web), she thought it was presumptuous that he had named the hypertext system he had invented the 'World-Wide Web', presuming that people around the world would use it.



At the time she didn't think the web was original or breakthrough - "how wrong you can be", she said.



Wendy said that Tim's strategy was to give away the web, making it an open protocol and standard - universally free to use and not controlled by any organisation. She said that otherwise Tim felt that the web would not grow or thrive, but be locked down by political, academic or commercial interests.



She also said that Tim believed that to make the web scale, it had to be able to fail. While many at the time believed that a system which could dead-end, linking to a non-existent page, would turn away users, Tim strategically introduced the '404 error' (which appears when a web page isn't found) to encourage individuals and organisations to build out the web, rather than limit it.



Wendy asked whether we could have built the web another way. She believes that we may have to at some point as the web is only 23 years old, "barely out of nappies".



Wendy also believes that there's many ways to kill or corrupt the web, such as having specific organisations or governments control it - however we don't really know the outcome of these scenarios as we haven't had those experiences yet.



She did ask about what if the Internet disappeared overnight - how would it impact on individuals, organisations, societies, even countries?



The impact of a one-day shutdown of Wikipedia was immense (she said) during the SOPA protest, and there is an increasing risk in some developed nations that blackouts, caused by inadequate electricity supplies, could cause a blackout of information, with people unable to access the information they need to cope with the situation.



Wendy also said that when Tim created the web he understood that it had to include an easy way to write, as well as read, web pages - leading to the development of his first web browser, which was also an editor.



Wendy said that in 1996-8 while the web was growing, the Internet wasn't sufficiently mature for broader use, due to difficulties with slow modems, finding information (pre-Google) and the cost of computers - making categories such as online shopping inconvenient.



However now the technologies have matured Wendy believes that High Streets will disappear. She said that the UK government's decision to sell off the Royal Mail, which was instituted in the Victorian era, is a sign of this change flowing through the system.



Wendy said that years ago she consulted to the Royal Mail, highlighting to them that the new business they needed to dominate was parcel delivery, based on online sales "however they didn't get it".



Wendy also said that "it is very hard to convince the big juggernauts of industry, including government, to change".



She said that, for example, large organisations seem to believe that people will always read books - Wendy believes that yes they will read, but not necessarily books.



She recalled telling biologists years ago that they would be reading papers online. They retorted that the Internet was so slow and computers so heavy that they would never be able to read their papers on the train. Wendy said, "Now, ten years on, biologists are reading their papers on the train using iPads."



Wendy said that Google was inconceivable before the web, and engineers had 'proven' it wasn't possible to quickly index huge amounts of information.



However she said that since Google, the world has changed - and Google is also no longer just a search engine, they are incredibly diverse, "there are at least 2,000 driverless Google cars driving around San Francisco".



Wendy believes that once an organisation has a majority of people using it on a network it becomes very difficult to dislodge. Google, eBay, Facebook and now Twitter are giants, at least in the English-speaking world - different titans exist in China.



Wendy opined that Google may be the James Bond villain of the future - because it knows what you search for, "everyone has searched for something they would not want to be made public". She believes that if Blofeld took over Google they would have something over every politicians.



However, Wendy said, when used benignly or even for commercial profit, Google is fine. She also believes many other industries are in a similar position of potential control over society.



Wendy also believes that even before the arrival of social networking "we should have known how much people would want to write about themselves, take photos, videos and share, based on what we knew about human psychology and behaviour".



Wendy said there is now an expectation that people can find anything, any knowledge online and if an organisation, product, place or individual doesn't have an online presence "they don't exist." As a result, Wendy believes that the web should be the first way any new entity is introduced or promoted.



Wendy said that while Tim Berners-Lee invented the technology and helps set the standards, we (globally) have created the web. We write the websites, blogs and micro blogs. We make the links and the apps. "The web doesn't have shareholders or owners - we are collectively the creators and custodians of the web."



She said that the web exists because we want it to be there, and it will keep existing as long as we want it to exist, so we all have a responsibility to ensure it is a place we wish to frequent.



When people ask her about issues online, she tells them that we didn't make the streets safer by imposing curfews - similarly we need to create the right culture on the web, not create legal restrictions.



Wendy said that Wikipedia was started as an experiment - even Jimmy Wales didn't believe it would work - however it is now equivalent to 1,900 volumes of an encyclopedia, most of which is very accurate. It has grown its own governance, it wasn't invented ahead of time, a lesson for organisations today.



Wendy also said that YouTube is another giant attractor to the web, the place for storing and sharing videos - now owned by Google.



Wendy believes that if an alien had came to earth a hundred years ago and then returned today they would find everything had changed - except possibly education, which is now being transformed by MOOCs. The first platform for MOOCs has also been bought by Google, which is developing it as an open source platform. She asked "who will be the university of the future? Google."



After the break Wendy took questions, giving a view that while cybersecurity is a risk to society, it is not a risk to the web. She commented that it was an area of high expenditure for the UK government.



She also said, in response to comments at morning tea about people being advised not to trust Wikipedia as a reference, that Wikipedia is at least as trustworthy and accurate as printed encyclopedias, plus it has a faster error correction rate. Plus, she said, we create Wikipedia, so it is what we wish to make it.



Wendy also believes that privacy won't kill the web, young people are growing up with different concepts of privacy and will adapt their approach and the web to suit their values.



However she believes that blackouts, siloisation and/or the end of a level playing field for creating and publishing content would end the web. Wendy said that net neutrality is also important. Without it we would lose the level playing field and commercial or ideological interests could control publishing and access to the web.



One of the crowd has commented that probably government is the biggest risk to the Internet, and Wendy says that she has concerns over legislators making decisions about an ecosystem they do not understand, which can lead to all kinds of unforeseen and undesirable consequences.



Wendy said it is hard to dictate in the web, to get people to use something they don't want to use. To get the network effect requires co-creation, meaning that government must work with communities collaboratively to develop platforms which benefit both.



An ABS representative said that they are now opening up a lot of data through APIs and unleashing developers through GovHacks to co-create new tools and services, however it is still a not insignificant challenge to get people within government to just agree on a common definition for Australia or Sydney, to allow datasets to correlate across agency.



Wendy next talked about Twitter, and how its real-time nature can support, even drive, community movements, "the way bad news spreads now is via Twitter. It is a mechanism for warning people to get out."



She said the interesting thing about Twitter is that it is being co-created, with functions like RT, MT and hashtags invented by the community.



Wendy believes co-creation is critical for the web, not only codesigning systems, but using systems which allow people to add value as they go about their daily interactions, such as via ReCAPTCH and Duolingo.



Wendy then talked about the semantic web, a web of data, saying it was in Tim Berners-Lee's original vision for the Web. However without sufficient data online (she said) we cannot experiment to find out what this will become or create the network effect, where people share and reshape data and create services or new visualisations with it.



She wrote a paper with Tim in 1996 which identified four principles for the Semantic Web, however says that the commercial sector still didn't get open data, hugging it tight.



Then governments began opening data based on discussions with Tim and others, leading to President Obama's declaration and a cascade of open data releases by governments around the world and initiatives like the Open Data Institute.



Wendy used an example of UK prescribing data, how open data allowed the NHS to identify 200 million pounds in savings each year.



Wendy said that while engineers and scientists often think of the web as a technological byproduct of a set of simple standards, it is a socio-technical construct, effectively a 'social machine' co-created through interactions between technology and millions of humans.



The technologies that underpin the web didn't create the web - people did, providing the content, linkages and developing, sharing and using the apps and websites that sit on it. However without the technology the web could also not exist.



Wendy said that social machines start with an incomplete specification that evolves and grows to cover more of the problem via interactions. They achieve participation through local incentives and the network effect, eventually succeeding through a process of rapid trial and error involving subsets of participants.



Wendy is working on understanding social machines through a 'web observatory' at Southhampton University that observes, monitors and classifies social machines as they evolve. She said this will also become an early warning system for detecting new disruptive social machines and identifying the 'tipping points' where they become ubiquitous.



Her group is studying Twitter networks, as well as Wikipedia and YouTube, amongst other services, to understand 'activity pulses' and how they help explain social movements and trends. For example, Wikipedia was a better indicator of a trend around 'Gangnam style' than Google with the trend occurring a month earlier on Wikipedia.



She asked how does Government, potentially the original social machine (as one audience member commented), transform itself to take advantage of digital channels to be a better social machine?



How do governments employ gamification, the network effect and web observatories to develop and deliver better policies and services?



How do we address the challenges of the 24-hr news cycle, election cycles and other factors which make developing and maintaining social machines difficult?



Wendy said she can't help reflecting back on governments from Victorian times, the 19th century, that created amazing long-lasting infrastructure in Britain that still serves the population today. She believes they were amazing social machines and still have lessons to teach us today on how to transform government to address the challenges of the 21st century.

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Craig Thomler's personal Gov 2.0 and eGovernment thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective

A look into the mind of John Miri

Yesterday I had the opportunity to catch up with John Miri, the former Deputy to the State CTO for Texas, following his presentation at Sitecore's Digital Citizen Engagement event in Canberra.



John is also presenting in Melbourne today, and in Perth next week.



The first thing that struck me about John is how different he is from the stereotype of a government IT professional.



Personable, approachable and possibly the only tea drinker left in the US, John was trained in physics but pursued a career in IT after it was pointed out to him that there were more career opportunities in IT than science.



He came late to government, spending a number of years founding and working in early-stage start-ups before making the leap to public service in 2005, as Director of E-Government and Web Services for the State of Texas, reporting directly to the State CTO.



In that role John was responsible for shepherding the TexasOnline.com program (now texas.gov), implementing 829 new online services, and leading to 83 million citizen financial transactions, with more than $5 billion online revenue.



John is now Editor-In-Chief for the Center for Digital Government and principle of Bluewater Technology Services, a technology consulting company.



John believes that government is at an interesting crossroads - still applying governance principles from the 19th and 20th centuries, while trying to rapidly adapt to the 21st.



He talked to me about the vision that the founders of the US had for their nation, a participatory democracy where citizen involvement in governance didn't end with their vote, where citizens were empowered and supported to contribute to civic life.



John says that with today's technologies it is now possible for societies to realise this kind of vision - to reshape governments to be more participatory without losing the strong institutions and traditions that make democracy possible.



We discussed how government institutions are designed to maintain the status quo, the value of bureaucratic processes in maintaining stable, safe and secure societies, however these strengths can also become weaknesses when politicians and public servants stop asking 'what is the goal of government' and focus on repeating the processes in government - resisting change from within or without.



John asked the question 'what is the role of citizens in delivering government services?' saying that governments need to begin considering citizens as stakeholders and engaging them in the same way agencies engage expert panels, companies and lobby groups.



He also commented on how government's tendency to silo problems and attempt to solve them individually is failing - today's problems are complex and multifaceted, crossing traditional ministerial portfolios and requiring complex and collaborative solutions.



John argued that the current structures in government are poorly suited to solving these problems, and our reliance on subject matter experts - rather than problem solving experts - meant that many problems are being seen through specific lenses and perspectives that made them difficult, if not impossible to solve.



He gave the example of US state road taxes on petrol - designed to cover the cost of maintaining roads. As cars have improved their efficiency, travelling far further - and doing more road damage - on the same amount of petrol, the gap between the funds the tax raise and the maintenance cost has been growing.



John asked a group of road policy experts in government about this issue, and their response was that the solution was simple - raise road taxes. His comment to me was that while the experts may think this was simple to do, it wasn't simple to get tax increases through political processes or sell their value to the public - more participatory processes and more innovative solutions were needed for the long-term.



He said that the increasing size of many of the complex problems that face government today mean that the odds are in the favour of those who advocate for more participative government and Government 2.0.



As traditional approaches to problem solving fail, due to agency silos, expert bias and limited community involvement, governments will be forced to look towards more innovative solutions - involving citizens and reshaping bureaucratic processes.



John also said that digital was an opportunity for governments to do more than simply replicate their business processes online. Rather than mimicing or tweaking paper-based workflows and forms for online use, agencies should use the opportunity to reinvent their business processes.



This involves questioning every assumption - what information is needed, when and how is it needed, how should it be stored, actioned and how should citizens be informed and engaged throughout the entire process.



John says that agencies that simply replicate existing processes online are unlikely to realise the full benefits in cost-savings, accurate completion and citizen satisfaction - an automated mess is still a mess.



He says there are no shortage of example of how technology has transformed business processes and the situation is no different in government. If agencies and politicians can focus on the goals and outcomes they are working towards, rather than bury themselves in repeating the same processes they've used for decades.



John also suggested that a reinvention approach allows room for innovations in how government services are delivered. For example as train timetables become digitalised, why should trains runs at the same time every day?



Would it be possible to adjust train schedules on a flexible basis, managing it like an electricity grid, based on the number of travellers and communicated via electronic messaging boards.



He also asked whether child protection services could be radically reinvented to provide 24/7 access to case workers for children in need. Could a single contact phone number, SMS and email address be used to route case workers to where they are needed most, using GPS and mobile devices to ensure they had the information they needed at all times to maximise their efficiency and protect more children from harm.



In conclusion John was of the view that egovernment, Government 2.0 and the rise of digital citizens who wish greater participation in the democratic process, should not be seen as a threat to traditional democratic institutions - we're not trying to add a third house of parliament.



Instead he said that these movements and emerging technologies should be embraced as a way to realise the original intent and goals of government - to represent, serve and involve citizens. 

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Craig Thomler's personal Gov 2.0 and eGovernment thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective

The road to public sector IT hell may not be paved with intentions at all

Something that scares me enormously is the house of cards that many (if not most) governments have built with their IT systems.



It can be witnessed every time government agencies get 'MOGed' - Machinery of Government changes where parts of agencies are shifted to other agencies to meet the latest political whim.



In these cases it's not simply a matter of moving tens, hundreds or even thousands of public servants to new offices - in fact in many cases they may not move at all - it is about extracting them from the secure environment, software and network systems of one agency and connecting them (including all their historical records, emails and files) to the network and software of another.



This is a hugely complex and increasingly expensive exercise that can have an enormous productivity and cost hit each time it occurs.



Why is it complex and expensive? Because every agency uses different systems - or different versions of systems - and agencies are now so wedded to these systems after a purchase decision many years earlier that, even though senior bureaucrats recognise the issue, they can not address it without a complete (expensive and time-consuming) overhaul of how government runs its information technology.



Another example is eTax. While I have a great deal of praise for eTax, and it has been very successful by most measures, when the system was originally procured and built it was done in such a way that limited it to the IBM-PC platform. Certainly no-one can blame the ATO for not foreseeing the rise of Apple or the arrival of smartphones and tablets - however the decisions made at the time locked the system into a single platform, which has caused significant pain over the years.



Other examples include the Department of Finance and Deregulation's choice of a document management system as a Web Content Management System for www.australia.gov.au, an entirely appropriate decision at the time based on their well-governed procurement approach, but which led to delays and cost blowouts, constraining the site from what it could have become.



A better known example would be the failure of the Queensland Health payroll system several years ago, where an enquiry is still ongoing. It even has its own website - www.healthpayrollinquiry.qld.gov.au



Indeed, there are hundreds of examples both big and small, where this has occurred - a decision has been taken with the best possible knowledge at the time, or small incremental decisions have been taken over time - all for the right reasons - which have inadvertantly led into blind alleys or very expensive remedial work years later.



And lest you think this is an issue only for the public sector, consider the disaster that was Telstra's bill payment system, the issues our largest banks have had keeping their systems operating, or Virgin's booking system.



With the pace of change accelerating and the increasing limits on public sector employment, the likelihood is that these types of issue will continue to grow and plague IT, becoming even more widespread and expensive.



Agencies could increasingly find themselves trapped into slow and inefficient systems, restricting staff productivity and absorbing more and more of their resources to maintain, with no funds to 'jump tracks' to more future-proofed solutions.



This can even affect the performance of elected governments - who may be forced to change their policies to fit IT limitations. I am already aware of government initiatives that have had to be abandoned (never having seen the light of day) not because they were bad ideas but because the IT constraints in government make them impossible to cost-effectively deliver.



This isn't the fault of public servants or of politicians - seeing that far into the future simply isn't possible anymore. Technology isn't progress linearly and the accelerating rate of change means left-field technologies can appear and radically transform peoples' expectations and strain existing IT systems within a few years (remember the iPhone).



There's many more of these technologies emerging around us. For example 3D printers, capable of printing anything from kitchen utensils to medical devices to firearms, disintermediating physical manufacturers, opening a new front in the ownership of intellectual property and providing access to deadly weapons. There's also unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drones that are capable of live-streaming video, or even carrying weapons, that can be bought online for a few hundred dollars and flown with limited chance of detection by individuals or corporations.



Many others technologies from Google Goggles to driverless cars are in development and could, in increasingly shorter timeframes, radically transform societies.



So when government agencies are still struggling to manage and maintain their legacy green-screen mainframe systems, out-dated (insecure and unsupported) web browsers, where they are locked into increasingly expensive proprietary technologies (due to the cost and resourcing required to migrate - even changing email systems can cost our largest agencies $100 million or more), what are they to do?



There's little time for innovation or for thinking of consequences - the majority of resources in an agency's IT team are committed to maintenance and quick patches on existing solutions.



The likely outcome over time is that we'll start to see more catastrophic IT failures - particularly across the most complex and most essential systems - such as welfare, payroll and grants management.



So how do we fix this? How do we break the cycle before the cycle breaks us?



There's no simply solution, but there's fortunately some trends which work for government agencies facing this challenge - if they're prepared to consider them.



A big area is open source software, which is increasingly being used by agencies in a variety of ways. While open source can run into the same issues as proprietary software, a platform with a large and diverse group of users can combine their IT assets to ensure the system is more useful to agencies and more rapidly updated as the world around it changes.



Another area is cloud-based solutions, which allow a government to more rapidly reconfigure itself to meet the needs of political masters. When software is independent from computer systems and there's a government-wide secure environment which can host software approved for use it can be far faster and cheaper for people moving agencies to retain the files and applications they require.



There's open data - which when made available in machine-readable formats liberates the data from proprietary systems and simplifies how it may be discovered and reused by other agencies (as well as the public).



These trends do not allow governments to replace all their existing systems - however they allow agencies to contain the problem to critical systems, which allowing all other services to be done 'in the cloud'. Imagine, a single email system and intranet across government. A web-based suite of office tools, graphic design tools, finance and HR tools - which can be managed centrally within a government, leaving agency IT teams to focus on the unique systems they can't share.



What does this vision take? Intention, planning and choice.



Governments that fail to proactively and intentionally plan their futures, who simply live on autopilot, will inevitable crash - not today, not tomorrow, maybe not in five years, but eventually - and the damage that their crashes will cause may take decades to recover from.



So for agencies who see themselves as being a continuous entity, with an existence that will exist as long as the state they serve, it is imperative that they plan intentionally, that they engage their Ministers and all their staff in understanding and addressing this issue.



It is not good intentions that will cause agency IT to fail, it is the lack of intention, and that is highly addressable.



CORRECTION: I have been advised by John Sheridan, the Australian Government CTO, there was no cost-overrun on australia.gov.au, it was a fixed price contract.

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Craig Thomler's personal Gov 2.0 and eGovernment thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective