Launched by our Cloud Ventures incubator, the Open Government Innovation network is a CoP (Community of Practice) focused on the dynamic of how Cloud computing technologies can enable the policies of Open Government.

Best practices innovation community

This actually aligns wholly with the 25-point ‘Cloud for Clunkers‘ strategy from the White House CIO to migrate the IT systems of the US Government to Cloud services.

In particular there is a very important role for groups like Cloud Ventures.

A key goal of the White House strategy is liaison with the commercial Cloud industry, especially to ‘reduce barriers to entry for small innovative technology companies’. This will directly link massive government spending to product innovation in the world’s most exciting tech growth market.

There is also a call for the same portal tool and collaboration model. Points 10 and 25 describe plans for web sites that help cultivate this agency-industry collaboration, with features for brainstorming solutions prior to RFP, procurement templates and ‘myth-busting’ educational material about how agencies can work with the private sector and agency adoption best practice case studies.

G-Cloud Migration Program

The purpose of this forum is to co-ordinate this very large-scale transformation of their enormous legacy IT estate, and these same goals will be used to drive our community too. We’ll therefore be able to market it to the White House and departments on this basis.

• Open Government leadership - Pioneering the new business models that are developed into best practice case studies.
• Cloud strategy - Publish a strategy document based on the NIST standards work to accelerate adoption.
• A Transformation Blueprint - A template project plan to enable agencies to migrate legacy apps to Cloud services.
• Staffing and training - Each agency requires a dedicated data-centre consolidation program manager, to impement these projects.

Agile Cloud Delivery

Ultimately the overarching goal is to enable agile solution delivery.

Government IT is costing the public so much because the projects are so big and slow that they fail to deliver value for money in a timely fashion.

Vivek Kundra wants a faster, more Agile-centric project methodology, one that turns around functionality for users much faster through a modular approach that leverages Cloud.

This will be achieved through each project requiring ‘IPTs’ – Small multi-disciplinary, integrated program teams. This brings together the business managers who understand the organization needing transformation and how best to achieve this, with the software developers and infrastructure teams who work hand in hand to deliver these new capabilities quickly.

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