FOSE: The Web Is 'Discussion In Concert With Content'
That's the case in government or anywhere else, argued Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, in the opening keynote at FOSE 2009 in Washington, D.C., Tuesday.
Anderson laid out four maxims for understanding the Web:
1. Everything should work, pretty much all the time.
2. If it's not in Google, it doesn't exist.
3. Meet us where we live (via Twitter, RSS, etc.).
4. People want to talk around content.
"The Web is discussion in concert with content," Anderson said. "The idea that people are going to come to your site, see your organizational tree and click-click-click is just not how it's going to go."
What keeps public-sector business from embracing Web 2.0 advances—cloud computing, content management, social networking—is often a mix of outmoded client/server software, strict security and privacy rules, archive rules, procurement rules and a lack of urgency or pressure.
"The world changed," Anderson said. "The decisions we made in 1998 and 1999 and the early 2000s turned out not to be the right decisions. The cloud emerged. Open source came out and became robust. The facts changed. When the facts changed, our obligations are to change with them. Sometimes that means writing off the million dollars you invested in old technology."
For government IT infrastructure, that can be a bitter pill to swallow, Anderson admitted. But the public sector will remain hopelessly behind the technology curve if it can't meet the needs of future generations.
Incoming government employees, for example, don't like to be told Skype is blocked, their iPhone can't be supported, e-mail retention is difficult, storage is limited and they don't have their own administrative privileges as they do in cloud applications like Gmail and Google Docs.
"I quite like Excel and I quite like Word," Anderson said. "But Google is made for the cloud. The documents are always there with me wherever I go. It's not hard to integrate data from the Web into my spreadsheets and documents."
The Google generation needs a CIO and IT department only to provide broadband and support printing. Other than that, they can manage, Anderson said.
" 'Keep the pipe open and pay for the ink.' That's what they want when they come to your companies," he said.
When money becomes the issue, Anderson reminded that for less than $5,000, any organization can use Wikis, Google apps, open-source content management systems like Drupal, blogs, databases, project management and social networks.
"In the '90s and early 2000s, we all got locked into these incredibly expensive, rigid, hard-to-use content management systems," Anderson said. "My advice to all of us is to rethink those systems. It's a painful thing to migrate, but now is the time to do it."
He championed the work of incoming federal CIO Vivek Kundra, formerly the CIO of Washington, D.C. The creation of the post—a government executive in charge of how the government uses and buys IT among other things—is, Anderson opined, one of the most important steps for getting government IT up to speed.
Kundra—who according to FOSE public relations representatives is now scheduled to keynote on Thursday morning after having had to bail out of a panel on Wednesday—will be leading the charge, Anderson said, and he understands that it's not all going to work immediately. The next generation of Web business hinges on revision and, more importantly, adaptability.
"Fail fast," Anderson said. "That may sound bad, but there's going to be failure and it's best to do it quickly and cheaply. It's always better than failing slow and expensively."
