U.S. CTO is Making Data Awesome. Todd Park, Chief Technology Officer at the White House, gave the audience at the 2012 Social Good Summit on Saturday a high-energy lesson in the importance of making government data more useful and available to anyone. Park, who previously served as Chief Technology Officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, became the White House's second CTO in March of this year.
"We've really embraced the power of open innovation," said Park, who broke his job down into three primary tasks: making new data available to the public; taking already publicly available data that's unusable and making it usable; and making entrepreneurs and innovators aware of government data. "You take the data that's already there and jujitsu it, put it in machine-readable form, let entrepreneurs take it and turn it into awesomeness," he said. "It's about turning government into a platform for open innovation.
Data by itself is useless. Park, however, encountered a problem with that step. About Ericsson.
21st century smarter government is 'data-centric' and 'digital first,' says US CIO. Any nation’s top government IT executive has a tough gig in the 21st century. The United States chief information officer, for instance, has an immense budget to manage — an estimated $80 billion dollars in annual federal IT spending. US CIO Steven VanRoekel (@StevenVDC), who started work in the White House just over eight months ago, must address regulatory compliance on privacy and security, and find wasteful spending.
As the nation’s federal CIO, he has inherited a staggering challenge: evolve the nation’s aging IT systems toward a 21st century model of operations. In the age of big data, he and everyone who works with him must manage a lot of petabytes, and do much more with less. He must find ways to innovate to meet the needs of the federal government and the increased expectations of citizens who transact with cutting-edge IT systems in their personal and professional lives. “If we think of citizens as shareholders, we can do a lot better,” he said. Steven VanRoekel: Yes. OK. Innovation in government: Brazil - McKinsey Quarterly - Public Sector - Management. Historically, Brazilians had no visibility into government spending—which areas got funding, how efficiently public money was being used, or whether fraudulent activity was occurring.
Over the past few decades, many high-profile incidents of flagrant corruption have sorely tested the public’s trust, hurt Brazil’s image in the corporate sector, and hampered economic growth. In the World Bank and IFC Enterprise Surveys 2009, 70 percent of global and domestic companies responding said they viewed corruption as a “major constraint to doing business” in Brazil. An investigation by the Federation of the Industries of the State of São Paulo found that, in 2008 alone, corruption cost the country some $40 billion (2.3 percent of GDP)—equivalent to about half its education budget.
Although CGU encountered resistance from government officials when it first launched the portal, it remained committed to full disclosure. The CGU’s regular budget covers the portal’s relatively low maintenance costs.