An Inscrutable Hunch

With Al Gore's climate change trifecta - the Nobel Peace Prize, an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth and the Live Earth concerts - 2007 may be best remembered as a tipping point in environmental consciousness, complete with attendant attention to the greening of IT and government's own carbon footprint. It is an obvious choice and perhaps too easy by half for this page's sometimes inscrutable choices for a year in review. Longtime readers will know that this retrospective is now a five-year-old tradition inspired by the old Saturday Night Live sketch about Father Guido Sarducci's 5 Minute University, which promised to teach only those few things that will still matter five years after the fact.

Here's the rest of the 2007 list: 

MyPublicSpaceBook: A Two-Way Street in Service Delivery
In five years, nobody will be talking or writing about Web 2.0. Not only will the version number have been eclipsed, but like everything "e"-related from an earlier time, the chatter stops when everybody is actually doing it. In the interim, John Miri of the Texas Department of Information Resources reminds us that what makes "2" important isn't the technology itself, but that it presumes two active parties to every transaction - promising to forever change the relationship between governments and citizens. 

SaaS and GaaS: Funny Names, Important Ideas
These two sets of awkward initials for Software and Government as a Service also will go to the dustbin of history, however, the underlying models of both promise to change the service delivery cost structure while catalyzing collaboration by blending the formerly discrete dot-gov, dot-com and dot-org domains. 

Response and Recovery: A Little Help From My Friends
Since all emergencies are local, local governments have properly continued preparing for the next big thing without relying on the federal government as part of the initial response (while craftily shoehorning the things they want into any available federal funding source). But it's worth noting, as I did in August, that Web 2.0 is proving its value in putting people with people in significant ways - and that some public agencies are determining how to contribute meaningfully in these communities that aren't of their own making. 

Falling Down: The Infrastructure Dilemma
Seventy-one thousand bridges aren't the only public infrastructures in trouble. Heavy loads force the electrical grid to brown and black, and our beloved Internet is four decades old. Public investments commensurate with national priorities are past due - but there's no latter-day Ike in sight.

All this suggests that the hard slog of government modernization continues even as public revenue prospects are expected to tighten again as the decade ends. It portends another period characterized by disruption and the dark horse potential of transformation that such moments make possible. Perhaps Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov captured the zeitgeist of this time when asked whether he expected a breakthrough in the face of considerable obstacles. He quipped, "Breaks definitely. Through or down, I don't know."