Building an app store for government: challenges and opportunities

As part of a multi-year research effort to understand how wikinomics and web 2.0 was changing the nature of government and democracy, my research associates and I argued that governments–perhaps more than any other institution–could benefit enormously from broad-based shift to cloud computing. That idea is gathering steam and in some leading jurisdictions it’s becoming a reality.

Where most governments build mainframes and buy expensive software, a growing number of IT leaders in government are consolidating computing resources and encouraging public agencies to use free Google services and open source wikis for everything from word processing to performance measurement, to service improvement. Some call it the government cloud, or a g-cloud, but think app store for government—a place where employees can access a vast ecosystem of secure applications and data sets for doing their jobs.It may sound like a no brainer, but it’s an enormous improvement over the stubborn resilience of today’s industrial age models of government.

In the UK, John Suffolk is amalgamating government computing power into a series of about a dozen highly secure data centres, each costing up to £250m to build. The new data centres will replace more than 500 presently used by central government, police forces and local authorities. The UK government will also build its own “app store” for software programs that have been written elsewhere and can be re-applied in different agencies or jurisdictions.

Across the Atlantic, Suffolk’s US counterpart Vivek Kundra is leading a similar charge towards cloud computing. If he gets his way, within five years there will be no department-by-department mainframes or data centers, anywhere in the US government. Most of the information and applications that underpin public office will be run in a virtual cloud of computing capability that stretches across the whole of government.

It’s ambitious, but Kundra has already done it once in a similar role for the District of Columbia. One of his first initiatives in D.C. was to migrate from expensive enterprise platforms to Web-based solutions, in particular Google Apps. From e-mail provision, web-based software for word processing and spreadsheets, to YouTube for video-hosting, the costs dropped by 90%!

Eliminating vast redundancies and dropping costs are among the chief reasons why people like Suffolk and Kundra are so keen on cloud computing. But the ultimate prize is bigger still. An internal government cloud is a crucial first step toward building a more collaborative model of public service delivery that leverages innovation, knowledge and value from the private sector and civil society. But first it makes sense for governments to make sure they are exploiting their internal resources and capabilities to the fullest extent possible. And from my experience, we’re no where near that reality yet.

With some exceptions, most governments still reflect industrial-age organizational thinking, based on the same command-and and-control model as industrial-age enterprises. After all, bureaucracy and the industrial economy rose hand in hand. And during the last forty years, governments, like corporations, applied computers to their work as each agency acquired and built data processing systems to meet their automation needs. You’d think computers might have made things better. But, in fact, old procedures, processes and organizational forms were just encoded in software. Huge, unwieldy mainframe beasts not only cemented old ways of working, they required still greater levels of bureaucracy to plan, implement, operate and control them. But even the most surgical IT experts have utterly failed to resolve the chaos of inconsistent databases, dueling spreadsheets, and other data anomalies that plague most government agencies. The result is that government organizations today are still locked into old structures and ways of working, each with corresponding islands of technology. If you ever wondered why public services so often perform poorly, you’ve now got your answer.

The shift to cloud computing and app stores can finally reverse this trend. If done right, it could save taxpayers billions and help unleash a new era of integrated, interactive and customizable public services. Tough problems solved in one jurisdiction could be readily applied to others. For example, if a local council in the UK invents a better system for aggregating and responding to public complaints, that same application could be adopted by similar local councils across the country, and perhaps even the world. Similarly, citizens accustomed to having to manage discreet relationships with multiple government agencies at multiple levels of government could eventually benefit from an integrated and seamless experience where services are delivered in partnerships that transcend the usual organizational and jurisdictional data silos that have inhibited collaboration in the past.

Of course, there could be problems. Andrea DiMaio at Gartner argues that cloud computing could undermine the the use of open sourcesoftware as IT shops opt for the simplicity of hosted solutions offered by Google or Amazon. Open source pioneer Richard Stallman says cloud computing is simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time. Privacy advocates worry that centralized data centres could be become targets for hackers and criminals.

These are legitimate concerns that require attention, but they should not stall the efforts to break down the organizational silos in government that have long stalled efforts to build a more responsive, resourceful, efficient and accountable form of governance. It’s need now more than ever.