I asked the question a while ago whether Laurence Millar's leaving from the New Zealand Government's State Services Commission (SSC) would be detrimental to "open data" and use of "the cloud" within New Zealand and today he posted his final SSC Blog post, Government in the global village.
He talks, from the NZ Government's point of view, about two areas close to my heart and I have to say his viewpoint matches exactly that of my own.
Offshore data ("cloud computing" - use of Google Apps and the like)
Open up government data
Underlying the this "world change" is a "consumerism" of IT which is now part of the everyday landscape for ALL of us:
Cracking stuff BUT will the next CIO of NZ government have the same view?
Will it be tears of pain or joy?
Offshore data ("cloud computing" - use of Google Apps and the like)
NZ will never have the scale to establish a data centre at the price points available from cloud computing, so we will need to decide how much value we place on the areas of risk ...
Open up government data
... government acting alone cannot achieve the outcomes
... will increase the level of trust that NZers have in government
Underlying the this "world change" is a "consumerism" of IT which is now part of the everyday landscape for ALL of us:
... These business leaders don’t need IT to do this for them, they can fund it themselves because: Technology is no longer scarce; Technology expertise is no longer the domain of IT; and Technology is no longer a capital expenditure"
Cracking stuff BUT will the next CIO of NZ government have the same view?
Will it be tears of pain or joy?
Word is that next CIO will be Tier 3, rather than T2 as now. So work out for yourself the level of importance SSC place on the role.
ReplyDeleteAlso, while NZ might not have Google like capacity, we might not have google-like demand either, given one of the biggest costs in the cloud will be international data transfer. What's important is to not become dependent for data or service on an entity that NZG might become at odds with. Contracts won't help when they've got you by the bits.