The Knowledge Worker Desktop.

Government agility is one of the headlines that caught my attention concerning the government information forum to be held in Hong Kong on August 19-21, 2009.

It is a conference with an IT focus but many of the sections are very relevant for senior governmental executives wanting to get an understanding of new opportunities for improvements in how government and citizens interact.

Most of the speakers are from Asia – China, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and Australia among others.

Bill Schrier, the CTO from the City of Seattle is the only speaker not from the ASIA region. He is widely regarded as a thought leader in the use of social media and other tools to create a translucent government. His blog http://schrier.wordpress.com/ is worth a read.

I like his recent quote: “Making government “transparent” is in vogue in 2009, whether by doing map mashups of crimes or twittering by Mayors and public agencies. But I often wonder if we’re exposing the trees, without showing the forest or illuminating the true ecosystems of governing.” And he goes on ” So I’d say we’re starting to get adept at exposing the trees – or maybe the branches, twigs, leaves, owls, squirrels, nuts and bark of government operations. But what does all this data mean, and how can it influence government behavior, budgeting and public policy choices?”

Seattle is at the forefront of making the public aware of the goings-on in government and I assume that is why he was invited to speak.

Other topics covered at the Hong Kong conference – to name a few that caught my eye:

NOT AN OXYMORON: GOVERNMENT & BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE.
•    Responsive, agile policy-making calls for real time insight into the operations of the government machine. In a data rich environment, public sector is well placed to see a quick return from tools that deliver actionable intelligence to government decision-makers.

VIP Address – TRANSFORMING GOVERNMENT OPERATION THROUGH INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
•    Exploring the networks and internet technologies for the delivery of government information, services and processes
•    Using technology to provide user-centered information and services and achieve joint outcomes

BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT FOR OPERATIONAL BEST PRACTICE
Mapped and monitored processes drive effective BPM strategies, enabling public sector organizations to embrace operational best practice.
•    Compliance & improvement initiatives driving public sector BPM
•    More than workflow automation: process-centric government
•    Process visibility enables process agility

So often at these events the focus is on technical stuff like portals and databases and not so much on better tools for the governmental knowledge worker. This conference seems different in the topics it covers.

Government transformation requires that citizens, politicians and senior governmental knowledge workers (or as Gartner calls them “Officer 2.0”) work towards a common goal.

It seems to me that too often the governmental employees’ pivotal role in this transformation is ignored and better tools are not addressed – it is refreshing to see a change of attitude coming from ASIA.

The Obama administration has embarked on several bold initiatives in how it interacts with the public.

Less than a week ago it launched data.gov described this way: “The purpose of www.data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable data sets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.

What seems unique to the approach is to ask the public to participate in the development of the site and engage in the evolution of the site – in other words launching a governmental site that will be very dynamic in nature and acknowledging that not all information is available from day one – see the tutorial here.

Terms such as “Government 2.0” and “Context-driven Governmental Services” has been introduced by the administration using layman’s term and with refreshingly straight forward guidelines and tutorials.

Another initiative is http://usaspending.gov (a re-launch of www.fedspending.org) which is described as allowing citizen to verify “when, with whom, and on what the US Government is spending taxpayer funds”. Data will be made available in such a way that users will be able to “combine them into different data sets, conduct analysis and research, or power new information-based products and businesses”.

The third one is www.recovery.gov, which applies the same principles as usaspending.gov to the tracking of funds coming from the Stimulus Package.

The White House document issued together with FY 2010 budget request says that “the Federal IT agenda is focused on helping agencies use developing technologies to inform the work of Government” and “Agencies will be called upon to take creative action in developing new approaches to citizen involvement, including the utilization of social and visual technologies, such as Web 2.0 tools”.

Very little information has been revealed about the tools available to the governmental white collar workers. They will need superior tools to help them live up to the public service expectations created.

We believe that our proven “Knowledge Worker Desktop” concept could be a big help in delivering that public service. We believe our concept can empower the governmental employees to be at the center of this government transformation and make them an active part of the innovation process needed.

Stay tuned for more information about this in future postings on this blog.