White House launches new digital government strategy by Alex Howard.
From the post:
There’s a long history of people who have tried to transform the United States federal government through better use of information technology and data. It extends back to the early days of Alexander Hamilton’s ledgers of financial transaction, continues through information transmitted through telegraph, radio, telephone, and comes up to the introduction of the Internet, which has been driving dreams of better e-government for decades.
Vivek Kundra, the first U.S. chief information officer, and Aneesh Chopra, the nation’s first chief technology officer, were chosen by President Barack Obama to try to bring the federal government’s IT infrastructure and process into the 21st century, closing the IT gap that had opened between the private sector and public sector.
Today, President Obama issued a presidential memorandum on building a 21st century digital government.
In this memorandum, the president directs each major federal agency in the United States to make two key services that American citizens depend upon available on mobile devices within the next 12 months and to make “applicable” government information open and machine-readable by default. President Obama directed federal agencies to do two specific things: comply with the elements of the strategy by May 23, 2013 and to create a “/developer” page on ever major federal agency’s website.
Thought you might find some good marketing quotes for your products or services in the article or the presidential memorandum.
I do have to wince when I read:
For far too long, the American people have been forced to navigate a labyrinth of information across different Government programs in order to find the services they need.
Obviously it has been a while since President Obama has called a tech support line. My experiences recently have been good but then also very few. There is probably a relationship there.
There is going to be a lot of IT churn if not actual change so dust off your various proposals and watch for agency calls for assistance.
Don’t forget to offer topic map based solutions for agencies that want to find data once and not time after time.