BasicGov / BLOG

O’Reilly’s Gov 2.0 Expo and Summit is on this week in Washington, DC.  There are numerous of well known speakers with discussions mostly focussed at the federal government level and using modern technology to fuel innovation.  The Obama administration with CTO, Vivek Kundra, has taken a strong stance to better connect government to its citizens using technology.  For example, they created data.gov to catalog all of the federal government’s web services to engage in more development and innovation.

While all of this is being discussed and slowly adopted at the federal level, there have been faster grass roots changes at the local government levels using modern technology to better connect with citizens.  Perhaps being smaller makes local government earlier adopters and quicker decision makers or perhaps they are more connected with citizens in their communities and more connected with how to implement improvements to citizen services with basic community development functions - building permits, licenses, neighbour complaints, development zoning, citizen access portals, to name a few.  City halls, county halls and town halls see citizens and contractors daily with new requests, changes to existing requests, status inquiries and regardless of the specifics, they are under pressure to respond quickly.

See some examples of local governments that are innovators and adopters of web-based, e-gov solutions.

Post a comment and share your examples at the local, state or federal government levels ….

Very good interview in eweek by Renee Boucher Ferguson with Ann Winblad, a co-founding partner of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners about SaaS trends and its point of being beyond the tipping point of customer adoption.

“With SAAS no longer the domain of small companies that cant afford on-premises software implementations, users extend across a broad swath of small, midsize and enterprise companies, according to Winblad.And adoption is continually on the rise. Winblad points to several recent analyst reports to underscore her point: a survey by AMR Research that says 40 percent of companies are using hosted CRM (customer relationship management) applications, while 49 percent intend to use on-demand applications on an incremental basis; an IDC report that shows SAAS growing at 29 percent annually; and an Aberdeen Group report that said 70 percent of 631 companies surveyed are looking at or planning to use SAAS.”
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“Whats driving adoption of SAAS is the ability for customers to choose best-of-breed software and look at the way their businesses really operate, according to Winblad. “Thats why youre seeing new categories like spend management [that represent] business processes that can bring a very, very rapid ROI to a corporation,” she said.