WRITTEN ON March 22nd, 2010 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Ideal government IT strategy

As the next step in the “courteous and mutually respectful dialogue” #CMRD Jerry and I have 30 mins booked with Jim Knight, the DWP Minister responsible for digital aspects of Smarter Government tomorrow Tuesday.

It’s not long, and here’s how we plan to use it:

Aim: make constructive start to respectful, creative “crowd-sourced” IT strategy dialogue which he see value and integrity in and wishes to continue

How we do it:
– seek to understand what he really needs at this stage of the cycle
– brief him on the crowdsourced policy process (with some context relating to his own priorities)
– set out specifically where #idealgits has got to and how
– explore as examples two themes:
i) the most profound issue: (restoring integrity by fixing the rupture between IT Strategy and real-life priorities, drawing on the Governance & Architecture sections)
ii) the simplest and most radical: (personal data based on restoring control to the individual; the VRM angle)
– any recommendations, take-aways, next steps

There just won’t be time for anything else.

The commentable current version (which we’d still describe as far from final) is here.

Meanwhile I’m gobsmacked and thrilled by the progress Rewired State is now making eg demo-ing an email-based solution to TellUsOnce. Well done to the team for putting it on , and to the officials who are engaging with this.

Clearly it puts radical geekery firmly on the agenda. So it would be great to see this get into the IT strategic planning process also. There’s some evidence this is starting to happen (eg DWP’s IT strategy crowd-sourced from staff) but at the moment the platform we have, and the plans, appear disengaged from real contempory priorities and unlikely to deliver the real savings, change and agility that public serviecs need.