The Future As Seen By Me In 2010

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Well looky here, things one has scanned in eh. (ignore the photo, that's some guy that made some accounting software, not sure what became of him ;) MIKE RIVERSDALE is fuming. The expensive headphones he bought in Sydney three weeks ago have just died. His first reaction is not to randomly spill expletives into his coffee, but to use his iPhone to vent his frustration to his Twitter con- tacts, under the moniker Miramar Mike. "I will also put, 'What should I do?' It's a conversation. I'm reaching out to the people following me." The council predicts hand-held digital devices such as smartphones will rule the world in 2040. They already rule the life of Mr Riversdale, whose company WaveAdept helps businesses adapt - their computing sys- tems to allow staff to work from anywhere - and with anyone. In order of fre- equency, he uses his iPhone to tweet (1136 followers; 8363 tweets since joining), e-mail, make phone calls and use online services, such as checki
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Laurence Millar's Parting Words

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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)
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?

Comments

  1. nzlemming1 May 2009 at 13:28

    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.

    Also, 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.

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