At the start of a New Year ....

.... I debate the old question - which comes first - the chicken or the egg - or in our context - emerging technology or emerging need?  And of course, the answer is somewhere in the middle - where need might not be identified, but technology offers real opportunity.

Hang on a minute - did I just say "Need might not be identified" - is that because we're standing to close and need to stand back.  As a Public Sector CTO, I stand quite close and look at technology for better public service based on Departments seeking to improve their efficiencies.  Seldom do they look at that from the "customers" viewpoint - mainly they look at it from their own internal viewpoint.

And as such there is a tendency to say let's use technology 'cos it's there - and the CTO has some bright sparkly new stuff.

I get pressed politically about value for money from IT investment.  And I know I can generally demonstrate that, if somewhat nebulously 'cos Departments seldom put up and deliver business cases in realisable form.  And that's why we do things like benchmark, etc., as well.

But are we standing back far enough?  What are the needs? The current global economic climate is clearly a major need as is the educational approach noted in a previous discussion thread.

I think one of the challenges we face is how to turn the governance of the last 10 years on its head.  We've seen increasing centralisation of IT strategy, goals, architectures etc - that's had a strong "control" basis for improved efficiencies, risk management etc.

But perhaps its time to take more risks - be more "outside the box" - loosen our controlling approach - build our innovation centres - churn out disposable solutions - build whole new alliances - and see bright new radical things emerge. 

And perhaps the biggest of those will be connecting the republic - joining disparate data together and getting value outcomes.  The old Rumsfeld thing about "We don't know what we don't know" can easily be turned on its head to "We don't know what we do know" when our organisational knowledge is spread across Departments etc. 

We know the world of the Net is providing us with access to so much more - Lord knows how many RSS feeds I subscribe to, including Connected Republic.  But that is still something which I then have to individually check, RSS input, by RSS input.

And that's time consuming! And I still don't know what other sources with RSS feeds are out there that are relevant and meaningful to me.

So if I have wishes for the New Year, it's to see us use ICT for new purposes as well as old, building small things often, rather than big things slowly, and seeing the emergence of an intelligent internet that is more attuned to my needs and is more pro-active in alerting me to the things I need to know or to manage.

Happy New Year to all!