1. A public service haunted by the failure of imagination: cracked foundations
In its indictment of the intelligence community, the 9/11 Commission famously quoted a witness on how even connected dots were systematically ignored -- "The system was blinking red."
The growing cracks in the foundations of public institutions, through which billions of dollars flow and on which millions of lives rely, require reform that does not fit neatly within a single election cycle. The problems are compounded by the retirement wave within the civil service, where government ranks are being drained of the people who not only remember how government does what it does -- but more importantly, why.
2. Critical cohorts: two generations reshaping society and reforming government
The graying of public service is a small but important part of the baby boom retirement wave that will hit fully in 2008. In the years ahead, 77 million aging boomers will contribute less to and demand more from government services. At the same time, 60 million young people will come of age in the opening decade of the new millennium.
These "millennials" are Net-native, experience-oriented and unlikely to find public service a compelling career choice, at least in the current climate. Together, the boomers and millennials account for almost half (47 percent) of the population -- and their conflicting expectations increase the risk of fracture in the foundations of public institutions.
3. An open future at the crossroads: becoming what you rebel against
Even as Linus Torvalds rallies the open source community around a more stringent software certification regime for his namesake Linux, what the community sees as increasing commercial encroachment risks undermining its central tenet: openness.
As a large-scale software user and purchaser, government has a long-term interest in avoiding UNIX fragmentation and another generation of vendor lock-ins. At a minimum, government can contractually reinforce the Linux Standard Base, a standard for Linux distributions and Linux-based applications design, to ensure interoperability among vendors.
4. Consolidation but not necessarily centralization: once is enough
Through surveys, the Center for Digital Government documented a new wave of consolidation in state and local government, particularly in terms of shared infrastructure and common architecture. Importantly consolidation is being delinked from Soviet-style centralization -- with a new emphasis on building it once, building it right and building it anywhere, just not everywhere.
The Center's new vice president of advisory services, John Thomas Flynn, anticipates this competence-based flavor of consolidation indicates that consolidated applications will tie together agencies that share mission and function but have operated autonomously.
5. The bankruptcy of "doing more with less": death of a transitionary mantra
The trouble with enabling technologies is they can also be "enablers" in the therapeutic sense -- as in enabling dysfunction, denial, and ultimately, destruction. The ubiquitous phrase "doing more with less" seemed a reasonable compromise between realism and hope during the public-sector revenue recession's darkest hours.
But public service and public institutions will not be sustained in the long term by doing more with less -- only by doing things fundamentally differently.
That is the vital conversation on which public-sector IT stands or falls.
