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"I've tried the other way, the rational way, the way of trying to get bills passed and asking people to work together. After a while I realized that most of the good ideas we came up with just died somewhere"

Just as many people thought GTC East 2006 was winding down, Richard Varn got up to keynote the final day's luncheon. His presentation was a fire hose of information about the future and how it will change our lives and our world.

Varn -- former Iowa CIO, Iowa state legislator, university professor, president of RJV Consulting and now a senior fellow at the Center for Digital Government -- said he has been engaged in digital government for 29 years, and says he believes that this is where government can make the most changes. "I've tried the other way," he said, "the rational way, the way of trying to get bills passed and asking people to work together. After a while I realized that most of the good ideas we came up with just died somewhere. But if you got people to adopt tools it changed their behavior in such a way that I didn't have to convince them to do something different, they just did it. So I changed my focus exclusively to technology in government."

Because of drivers in government to cut taxes while providing entitlements, said Varn, we are in debt which is driving an overall decline in our standard of living. But technology can play a role in changing that.

Processing speed, according to Moore's law will double every 18 months. It's doubling about every 12 months now, said Varn, it is speeding up, as is change in our society. In 100 years, we went from no cars to freeways, from no world wars to 2.x wars, from no molecules to molecules to DNA, from writing to the computing to the Web. Varn said that we are now getting 100 years of change in about 20 years, and soon we will see such things as universal translators that will allow us to talk Chinese in realtime, and $1,000 computers that will match the computing power of every person on the planet.

Networks have enabled a transition from workplace workers to distributed workers to outsource workers to crowdsource workers -- breaking up a job into little pieces so that anyone in the world can pick up that piece and do it. " Instead of competing against another state," he said, "you are competing against six billion other potential workers in any job you have. Being able to do human activities in a distributed environment is mostly a function of processing and network, and a little bit around storage."

Small shops didn't survive the standardization of mechanization in the early 1900's said Varn. "Ask Henry Ford how many people he put out of business. Today, anyone who thinks owning your own data center is a way of guaranteeing job satisfaction and longevity is wrong."

Tools will change the way we work, said Varn -- what should we be aware of that will help us both helping guide and enable decision-makers?

In James Burke's The Axemaker's Gift, said Varn, the axemaker hands the gift to the king, the king adopts it unquestioningly and then later they find out what that tool actually did to their kingdom, that they may not have liked. "What should your agenda be?" he asked the audience, the axemakers of the Information Age.
Wayne E. Hanson served as a writer and editor with e.Republic from 1989 to 2013, having worked for several business units including Government Technology magazine, the Center for Digital Government, Governing, and Digital Communities. Hanson was a juror from 1999 to 2004 with the Stockholm Challenge and Global Junior Challenge competitions in information technology and education.