Information Technology
Public Policy and Technology
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Information Technology: Public Policy and Technology
The new U.S. president is counting on technology to help realize his key agenda items. Government policymakers and business leaders also need to consider foundational technology and public policy issues, such as privacy, identity, architecture and the impact of Web 2.0. E-Governments is the future of any nation and as soon as Government moves towards Internet, the internal operations will be faster.
More and More Governments are moving towards cloud computing and Web 2.0 service to implement public policy today. The biggest challenge in this is data security and maintaining the integrity of the data. This is one of the most difficult and important task to do. This is the biggest challenge for the governments all over the world. The last time that research houses published a special report on how technology would affect public policy and vice versa in the U.S. was during the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election. That report led to other special reports on the relationship of technology and public policy in other parts of the world. In those reports, we were optimistic about the prospects of technology's enablement of the public policy, including streamlining government in much the same way that IT has helped to improve efficiency in the private sector, and the prospects for the public's involvement in rule making and legislation. Our predictions at the time were pessimistic about the prospects for e-government citizen-facing portals, freedom from government surveillance through the Internet, and the ability to continue avoiding Internet taxation. Of research houses seven predictions in 2001, they were correct on three (e-government project failures, business outsourcing to IT clusters, and Internet-enabled surveillance) and wrong on two (IT-enabled government streamlining and Internet taxes), and the jury is still out on two (public participation in rule making and legislation online, and new parties and political coalitions emerging through the Web) (Dumas, 2011). This report is focused on technology and public policy in the U.S., but many of these issues are relevant in other regions as well. With a new American president elected in 2008, especially one who used IT very effectively in his campaign, research houses is taking another look at technology and public policy in four categories — government architecture issues, "Government 2.0," fallout from the economic crisis and the U.S. presidential administration's public policy initiatives.
The first category is architecture — what does the U.S. federal government need to do to address some of the most pressing issues of its own back office? Primary among these issues is the need to address its security architecture — if government is to lead a national cybersecurity strategy, then it must first establish effective IT security within its own agencies. Next is the goal of supporting transparency in government operations. (Dumas, 2011) With the advent of e-mail, maintaining an effective records management strategy has become problematic for most agencies, and yet there are strategies that Research houses recommends that can begin to resolve the dilemma of what to retain and how to preserve it. Improving the success of e-government projects is another architectural issue, but it may not require a lot of effort if privacy concerns can be addressed. And, of course, an architect is needed — that should be one of the roles of a federal CTO.
In the not-too-distant future, research houses foresee the emergence of Government 2.0. For the full economic potential of Web 2.0 to be realized, there is a pressing need for governments to establish standards for identification and to sort out the confusing patchwork of privacy protection in the cloud and in social networks. For government agencies themselves, government adaptation to social networks is both a threat to current territorially delineated systems of service delivery, and an opportunity for improving the effectiveness and relevance of services. Information technology intersects with public policy in the fallout from the ongoing economic and financial crises, and both private-sector institutions and government agencies need to consider their IT strategies. Bank CIOs who have large investments from governments and sovereign wealth funds will need to take those investors' interests into account when building the business case for IT initiatives (even employment public policy issues like offshoring and H-1B visas could be factors). They must especially consider the renewed interest in risk management from regulators. To ensure accountability and public trust, government agencies that are disbursing economic stimulus funds also must incorporate effective risk management and so must public- and private-sector organizations that receive the funds. In the future, standardization in financial, and nonfinancial, reporting worldwide will depend on XBRL reporting and common standards for enterprise risk management (Chong, 2009).
Lastly, the new American presidential administration has introduced public policy initiatives addressing some profound issues that depend heavily on IT to make them effective and affordable. Chief among these are healthcare reform and environmental sustainability. This time, we've held back from offering predictions in most of our reports. Public policy proceeds at a snail's pace, except during times of crisis, and while public policy is predictable in its direction, the timeline is challenging. Indubitably, in the U.S. and in other areas around the world, we are in an era of major change, and IT strategies must account for public policy.
In 2009, cloud computing moved from being an overhyped phenomenon to something that governments took seriously from an enterprise wide perspective. While some agencies and departments had already adopted cloud-based solutions to meet selected infrastructure and software requirements, the Obama administration and the new U.S. federal CIO have made this a government wide issue, challenging a status quo where almost every department runs its own IT shop and the largest departments have multiple shops and CIOs. Over the past several months, the U.S. federal government has created the first cloud application store for government, launched a request for quotation to determine the viability of infrastructure-as-a-service offerings, embedded references to cloud computing in the budget, and progressed its agenda on security and portability. At the same time, some agencies have taken the lead in both providing cloud services (the Defence Information Systems Agency, NASA and the National Business Center) and using them (the General Services Administration and Department of Labor), and some states (Utah, Michigan and Colorado) and local governments (the county and city of Los Angeles) have developed plans and started deployments for some specific cloud services. In other parts of the world (the U.K., Netherlands, Denmark, Singapore and Japan), governments are looking into the potential of cloud computing for consolidation and rationalization of IT assets and spending. In spite of all these efforts, many governments struggle with fully articulating the value and risk of cloud computing for different workloads, applications and process requirements. Multiple definitions of what cloud computing is, different levels of maturity in managing external service providers, and different attitudes about the problem of owning and controlling the infrastructure create multiple viewpoints inside and across government organizations, as well as somewhat conflicting positions between central organizations tasked with overseeing enterprise wide IT and individual agencies and departments. Cloud services exist in a continuum of delivery models and may not be necessarily the most appropriate for what government user organizations are trying to accomplish.
In order to make the right decisions about cloud computing, users need to articulate which attributes of cloud computing are needed for what they are trying to accomplish, and explore how cloud computing rates against alternative options (such as traditional hosting or infrastructure utility) that support a subset of the cloud attributes. Governments cannot just "implement cloud," but will implement or acquire one or more cloud technologies or services that provide the right fit between requirements and offering maturity such as software as a service. On software acquisition models that government agencies can use, such as open-source, custom and proprietary off-the-shelf software.

References
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Dumas, L. J. (2011). When Costs Approach Infinity: Microeconomic Theory, Security, and Dangerous Technologies. Chatterji, M., Bo, C., & Misra, R. (ed.) Frontiers of Peace Economics and Peace Science (Contributions to Conflict Management, Peace Economics and Development, 16: pp. 59-71. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
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