Government 2.0

'We Are the Change We Are Waiting For'.
In recent years, governments have embraced "citizen-centric" approaches to service delivery and emphasized inter-agency collaboration. Some governments have even extended new roles to citizens, community-based organizations, and private businesses in a bid to lower costs, harness new competencies, and leverage untapped sources of innovation.

Despite significant progress, transforming the deeper structures of government is proving to be an intractable challenge. Deep and resilient traditions combine to frustrate progress, including conflicting time-frames and motives, a lack of incentives in the system to innovate, and deeply engrained cultural and institutional legacies. But just as new waves of innovation are washing over the private sector, the imperative to harness new models of collaboration and innovation is arriving at the doorstep of governments everywhere.

Today, four forces are bringing the urgency of public sector transformation to the fore:

* A Technology Revolution - Web 2.0. The static, publish-and-browse Internet is being eclipsed by a new participatory Web that provides a powerful platform for the reinvention of governmental structures, public services, and democratic processes.
* A Demographic Revolution - The Net Generation. The first generation to grow up immersed in digital technologies is coming of age and emerging as a major force in today's world - a generation that thinks differently about the role of government in society and will demand increasingly speedy, responsive, and customizable public services.
* A Social Revolution - Social Networking. Online collaboration is exploding and citizens increasingly self-organize to peer produce everything from encyclopedias to operating systems to advocacy campaigns to stop global warming. With 85 percent of university students on Facebook and MySpace growing at 300,000 new registrants per day, new venues for online collaboration and social networking are a phenomenon that no politician or public official can afford to ignore.
* An Economic Revolution - Wikinomics. Mass collaboration is changing how enterprises innovate, orchestrate capability, and engage with the rest of the world. Networked business models pioneered in the private sector hold promise for the public sector, but the unique public sector environment means the challenges of implementation are different. While the needs of citizens cannot be met by market forces alone, the principles of wikinomics - openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally - provide a powerful manifesto for public sector transformation.

If governments are to ensure their relevance and authority, they must move quickly to meet rising expectations for openness, accountability, effectiveness and efficiency in the public sector. New Paradigm has concluded that a new kind of public sector organization is emerging in response to these challenges---one that opens its doors to the world; co-innovates with everyone, especially citizens; shares resources that were previously closely guarded; harnesses the power of mass collaboration; and behaves not as an isolated department or jurisdiction, but as something new: a truly integrated organization. The breakthrough enabled by new technologies is found in collaborative, cross-organizational governance webs that leave behind outmoded silos and structures.

Source: http://www.ngenera.com/pages/in_government20

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