Missouri’s state government is struggling to manage the need to competitively attract and hire IT professionals in the face of a wave of baby boomer retirements. Their solution, as detailed in the NextGov article, Cat’s in the Bag!, has been to explore new (and cheap) ways to reach young professionals – even when they come…
Yesterday (Wednesday) I was privileged to attend a think tank in Melbourne discussing the future of the Victorian Government’s whole-of-government intranet, CentralStation. Being the only state government in Australia I am aware of with such a tool, I was surprised to learn that it had been originally created in 1996. To my knowledge that makes…
I have participated in the beta testing of software for over 20 years now – it’s a great way to get an early look at new developments and to have a level of influence over the development process as a customer (in one case I was even hired as the lead designer on a subsequent…
The first public comments from the government on the Gershon Report are beginning to emerge, with The Australian reporting on Thursday, Tanner targets agency wastage in bid to save $1bn. The article basically focuses on duplication of effort and costs by departments who separately procure IT equipment, software, services and office rent. My feeling is that…
Over in California a controversy over the level of public access to public information flared up where the The Bee newspaper in Sacremento published a searchable online database of public sector officials and their salaries. The newspaper simply pulled publicly available information together into a single source – no information was assumed or obtained illegally. This has…
Futuregov has an excellent article, An Australia quest for e-health discussing progress in the Australian e-health scene. It is good to see that there is a clear understanding of the need for a national approach – tying states into one consistent system, rather than individually building separate systems in each state at additional cost. In…
The US Patent and Trademarks Office (USPTO), is trialing opening the patent examination process to public participation. This allows members of the public to review pending patent applications and provide input and feedback into the process of assessing patent claims. In effect, the patent office is acknowledging that the US public has the capacity to…
The European Journal of ePractice has published an intriguing article by David Osimo exploring a new approach to benchmarking eGovernment provision in the Web 2.0 world. Moving away from measuring the number or complexity of government services made available online, David proposes that the transparency of public data should be considered as a flagship goal…
I’ve spent about four hours putting Google Chrome through the wringer and overall are impressed with the browser, despite some rather large functional gaps. In checking a range of Australian government sites I did not observe any significant usability or display issues – none more than users of Safari (which uses the same renderer, WebKit)…
Trevor Cook has posted a great summary of the benefits of online employee communities, as discussed in a presentation by Alexei Fey, Senior Manager eBusiness, Savings & Loans Credit Union at the Enterprise 2.0 for Information Professionals conference in Sydney on 14 August. Entitled Building online employee communities, the post covers many different ways of…
This archive mirrors the original eGov AU blog — Craig’s professional commentary on AI, digital government and technology in public life, running since 2006.
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