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It’s an exciting area because it channels these different camps of technologies towards a primary business benefit that every one shares and understands: High Performance Organization. Improving the effectiveness of sales teams is one example.

‘Enterprise 2.0′ is the other main concept involved, it provides the headline theme of how the corporate use of social media software is also included in this mix.

Coined by Andrew McAfee and conceptualized in this MIT Sloan Review white paper ‘Dawn of Emergent Collaboration‘, it explains how the process of “collective intelligence” can be harnessed for greatly improved knowledge management, using tools like blogs, wikis, RSS feeds et al.

Microsoft “PeopleWare”

The Microsoft suite of software includes the new Lync server for Unified Communications, and also Exchange email and Sharepoint collaboration for a complete E2.0 environment, and this can be used to better exploit the expertise of an organization.

In 2003 McKinsey asked ‘Do you know who your experts are?’, highlighting that many organizations don’t have systems for organizing and utilizing their intellectual knowledge, the catalogue of their ‘Human Capital’.

In essence Enterprise 2.0 represents “People ware” to address this. It’s automating the work of people, including their social exchanges, in the same way ERP systems automate warehouse logistics.

In their white paper People working together (13-page PDF) Microsoft describe how their ‘Information Worker’ product set (Office, Sharepoint, Unified Comms etc.) is ideal for tackling this subject expertise challenge and how it can help deliver other Business Value drivers such as:

• Increase the revenue yield per employee
• Reduce the time taken to respond to customer enquiries
• Capture employee knowledge to eliminate ‘brain drain’
• Enable more global dynamism
• Attract and retain top talent
• Increase employee engagement

This is mainly because of the nature of this type of information. Expertise about products, technologies and various other skillsets is hard to record in ‘structured’ database type applications in the same way it is achieved for stock control ERP type applications.

In contrast ‘social media’, tools like blogs, wikis, online communities, Twitter et al, are ideal for doing so, they are so popular because of this natural fit for how people communicate and share knowledge.

This video presentation provides a great demo to introduce the key new features of Microsoft Lync and the role of UC tools in this expertise system.

The value of these applications is magnified when they are used together. Sharepoint offers various Enterprise 2.0 features that enable staff to self-describe what organizational expertise they have, to create an ‘expertise index’, and the Lync client can be used as a ‘quick find and contact’ tool to search it as the video demonstrates.

Harnessing the Cloud

Cloud computing can play a key role in this equation. The quick example is that service providers offer a SaaS version of Sharepoint and Lync so that you don’t have to install and manage them yourself.

In addition to this there is a broader integration of these tools with “the Cloud”, best explained through this overall Enterprise 2.0 context, particularly how it can enable the headline theme of High Performance Groupware.

Back in 1992 the original technology innovator Douglas Englebart (inventor of the mouse and GUI) wrote a similar paper to McAfee, entitled Towards High Performance Organization, a Strategic Role for Groupware , where long before Facebook or even the web he envisaged the same environment and the collaborative models it would enable.

He described an OHS – Open Hyperdocument System, online file sharing, a hyper-linked journaling system, personal signature encryption and more, that became the Web 2.0 environment that McAfee described. It even included the headline desktop videoconferencing feature that Lync now offers, what he called ‘Shared Window Teleconferencing’.

Englebarts core idea was that this would augment the capabilities of the people using it in such a way as to improve the overall Organizational Intelligence, via a ‘CODIAK’ framework: The concurrent development, integration and application of knowledge. Ie. Users would be much more enabled to learn, share and act on a collective knowledge, to better achieve the organizations goals.

Underpinning both Englebarts and McAfees proposals is that the web itself is evolving to provide this environment, it’s the Cloud that’s the central smart environment we can all share.

The idea of the web acting as this augmentation platform was built upon further in 2003 when social media was first exploding, via the concept of the ‘Augmented Social Network‘. Again before Facebook the early community users identified the same core functions of Englebart, like a unique knowledge addressing and linking system through ‘XDI’.

These technologies are now manifest through products like Microsoft’s ‘Infocard’.

Sharepoint Private Cloud

In practical terms any business will be able to tap into these significant capabilities through Cloud services like a Sharepoint Private Cloud.

This offers your own version of a hosted version of Sharepoint where you can employ your own Facebook-like social network for better collaboration.

You can then integrate in Lync and the UC tools to embed dynamic ‘Shared Window Teleconferencing’ et al.

The broader Augmented Social Network can then be tapped through tools like the Social Media Connector. This brings in the external social networks into this mix too. For example tools like ‘LiveWIRE‘ can automate the synchronization of contact data across public and private social networks this way.

Image via Wikipedia

With an annual budget of over $80 billion the US Government is the largest IT buyer in the world, and they are looking to Cloud Computing as the strategic technology to enable this cost base reduction.

The state of Michigan is an excellent example of the best practices that agencies can adopt to achieve this locally.

Read the MiCloud Case Study to see how their approach tackles

• rogue cloud sourcing,
• automates user provisioning,
• frees up staff to work on more innovative projects
• how they integrate Cloud procurement into their project management SDLC,

and how this can be used as a baseline to define ‘Government Cloud Storage‘.

Government Cloud Storage

Government Cloud Storage (GovCloudStorage.com) is a key example of the business benefits of Cloud Computing, and the technical features that need to be in place to realize these benefits securely.

The US federal government spends over $80 billion each year on IT, with $20 billion going on server and storage hardware that at times is only utilized to levels as low as 7%. They have announced a “Cloud first” policy to begin reducing this expenditure by leveraging the cost-efficiencies of a growing Cloud supplier marketplace.

The primary mechanism that enables these cost-savings to be achieved is the core of what Cloud Computing is all about: Multi-tenancy.

Suppliers can only offer reduced costs when they are able to create economies of scale, where multiple customers can be run atop one single physical platform.

This immediately raises concerns over data privacy leaks in shared environments, and the combination of best practices, open standards and technologies required to protect and assure against this are what makes up the Government Cloud Storage definition.

Hybrid Cloud Storage

The best practice open standards for building this type of storage outsourcing is known as ‘Hybrid Cloud Storage’, defined by the SNIA – Storage Networking Industry Association.

This is explained in their white paper ‘Managing Private and Hybrid Clouds for Data Storage‘ (12-page PDF). They explain how an IT organization can incorporate storage from Cloud providers into a single framework that includes their own local SAN resource too. This can then be applied for scenarios like backup, virtual disks and e-archiving.

This is based on their CDMI standard (Cloud Data Management Interface) so that they can implement Private Cloud as a means of standardizing vendor storage interfaces, integrating legacy systems and includes an ‘export’ function to link in Cloud based services.

MiCloud Services

The MiCloud best practice case study can then be used to identify the other best practce open standards and services that can be applied to achieve a ‘Government class’ utility.

We’re incubating new Cloud Venture protocols to enable:

• End-user controlled encryption
• Virtual Machine Privacy – The ability to assure the data privacy of multi-tenant environments
• Compliance with Identity Access standards
• Data replication across multiple sites
• Record integrity systems, audit facilities, to ensure IM compliance

Service providers that adopt these configurations will be able to offer Government-ready storage utility.

Cloud Open Standards

They’re very influential in other ways too, and are growing to become a beacon of light that lays out a framework of global best practices for all other governments to follow.

Hand in hand with their pioneering adoption of this technology, they’re also pioneering equally innovative ‘Open Government‘ business models as well, that entirely transform how agencies perform their core workflows.

Furthermore they will play a central role in driving the development and adoption of Cloud standards that all other corporate users will benefit from too.

At their recent NIST workshop they begun the process of priming the industry to work together this way, creating the opportunity for industry leadership to develop Cloud Roadmaps. Having awarded their GSA schedule to a short-list of suppliers they want to avoid this growing into ‘Cloud siloes‘ through creating an open government reference architecture.

Portability is the key goal, the ability to transfer between different Cloud providers so that they’re not locked into one as a defensive measure, and in more practical terms a way of inherently achieving very high-availability because data is spread across multiple providers.

Best practice solutions

To help co-ordinate some aspects of this we’re now launching the ‘Open Government Innovation Network‘.

This will act as a best practices community, cataloguing various use case scenarios from the US and other governments, and linking these to Cloud product development programs. This will enable Cloud service providers to proactively deploy the applications, infrastructure and security practices required to become Open Government Cloud Providers.

How best practice case studies and industry standards can be used this way is effectively explained through one of our first solutions – ‘Government Cloud Storage’.

As Vivek Kundra, Whitehouse CIO explains in this news article, the only way they’ll realize the desired cost savings from Cloud Computing is if they can shift from in-house hardware to utility suppliers, for key requirements like e-archiving storage for their Exchange email,  replacing out-dated technology and migrating 15,000 mailboxes to the cloud.

Cloud service providers can offer this capability through the ‘Hybrid Cloud Storage’ architecture, from the SNIA standards organization, explained in their ‘white paper‘ (12-page PDF).

They explain how an IT organization can incorporate storage from Cloud providers into a single framework that includes their own local SAN resource too. This can then be applied for scenarios like backup, virtual disks and e-archiving.

This is based on their CDMI standard (Cloud Data Management Interface) so that they can implement Private Cloud as a means of standardizing vendor storage interfaces, integrating legacy systems and includes an ‘export’ function to link in Cloud based services, in essence establishing a ‘Cloud File System’.

Furthermore, the recent Cloud Management Standards published by the DMTF can further tailor this for the unique security and compliance requirements of government :

Cloud service providers should utilize encryption and key management technologies in line with government standards.

Encryption and key management should be able to handle data isolation for multi-tenant storage and seperation of customer data from operational data of the service provider.

Data retention and secure destruction capabilities should be provided.

The cloud service provider should provide customer transparency regarding how data integrity is maintained throughout the lifecycle of the data.

Cloud cost-efficiencies

This is a simple scenario that illustrates the powerful potential of Cloud, the win/win factor is key.

Government Cloud Storage will be low-cost and very easy to deploy and manage. Any commodity hardware SAN or NAS can provide a baseline of storage, and servers are provisioned merely by replicating Virtual Machine images, attaching them to virtual storage resources and recording their connectivity details.

Fifty servers can be managed by one entry-level systems technician and no new engineering is required to extend storage capacity, so service providers have a low barrier to entry. As more enter the market they’ll grow a critical mass that means government users can gain access to a growing market of low-cost service supply so that they can realize the tangible cost savings promised by the hype of Cloud .

Image via Wikipedia

It may seem like blasphemy, but actually the ability of Cloud Computing technologies to virtualize applications and gain resulting hardware efficiencies, and thus cost-savings, is not actually the most interesting part or compelling business reason for its adoption.

Sure a ton of money is spent on under-utilized servers and storage and of course the cost savings are there to be had, but these benefits pale in comparison to those that can be enjoyed through the ability of the Cloud to accelerate application software innovation.

Building better integrated, more user-centric applications faster, is the killer Cloud use case.

Open Government Innovation

Naturally to achieve this a new paradigm in software engineering is involved, but actually the bulk of the benefit will come from re-engineering organizations and SDLC processes, especially procurement and enterprise architecture of LOB (line of business) applications.

The reason for this is to unblock ‘Innovation Gridlock‘. The stickiness that builds up due to years of legacy applications layered atop one another.

For example in government, like most large organizations, they typically have a very slow-moving enterprise application deployment process. If the Social Welfare unit decides it needs a new case management system to improve how effectively they deliver care services, then a sequence of business analysis, RFP writing, supplier review and decision, purchase and project implementation is carried out and can take many months and years.

Add in that any number of these might be in effect at one time and the rate of “innovation enablement throughput”, the amount of new software being deployed to enable new innovations,  grinds down to near if not entirely zero.

Et voila: Innovation Gridlock.

This is why similarly with developments like Open Data it’s not the technology that’s the most interesting part. Rather it’s the open source development model that is, the fact that the creation of new software capability for online government systems is happening outside of the government IT department.

By publishing open data sets the goverment is enabling “citizen developers” to create software for them, meaning the innovation enablement throughput rate is no longer constricted by their internal process.

It’s also an approach of lots of small code projects, rather than one huge enterprise effort. These developers are quickly publishing lots of useable services that provide citizen value. The innovation throughput rate is high.

As this blog from Microsofts Open Data expert highlights, it’s this combination of open source software and open data and the ability to publish to the Cloud that makes all this possible.

Open Linked Data

In the introduction I also said “better integrated” applications, highlighting the other critical value of this Open Data approach.

The other heavy price that the large enterprise pays for their monolithic application deployment approach is that they’re typically driven by their departmental hierarchies too, ie. Social Welfare wants their own case management system, on their own hardware and their own database. That’s how they end up with an estate of all this under-utilized hardware!

In business process terms it also results in a situation where customer information is duplicated across them. John Smith may receive Healthcare treatment as well as Social Welfare, but these systems have no knowledge of this. Each John Smith is entirely unique to them, as far as they’re concerned, and this is how government processes become disjointed.

The remedy to this will come in the form of Internet standards for identifying these attributes and sharing them across multiple systems, what is known as ‘Linked Data‘. As the Open Data approach matures so it will come to use these methods and thus become Open Linked Data.

Cloud Aware Applications will be better integrated, more user-centric and deployed much faster than the legacy enterprise app approach.

iFOSSF has a social mission to leverage open source for repeatable solutions to achieve the UN’s Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), and it’s an exciting area where the two overlap. Cloud computing can accelerate innovation, and that can include ‘Social Innovation’.

It can also accelerate more ‘Open Government’, which is the most powerful model for re-engineering how government works, and Social Innovation can stipulate what the end result of that re-engineering should be.

Open sourcing best practices

We’re now applying for various grants to fully launch iFOSSF in 2011, such as the Landmark ‘IT for Good’ RFP: Read more here.

To build a partner group to respond to these projects our main activity will be building a Global Best Practices system, a community and knowledge base, where locally developed innovations can be globally replicated using open source as the distribution mechanism.

The objective is to build a repository of Open Government case studies from all over the world, and define how these can be repeated elsewhere.

For example Tami won the AOL Innovation in the Community award for the use of open source technologies in the ‘Guid Life‘ project, and other social groups could use the same software the same way.

The open source software ecosystem caters for this naturally, and so our ambitions for an additional best practices network is to augment this process with more structured adoption processes. For example including the business reference materials and technical support help.

Open Data Innovation

The objective of this best practices community is to harness and integrate a number of innovative trends, and direct them towards pioneering Social Innovation in a repeatable manner.

Throughout the world there are a multitude of pioneers leading the way in different but related areas.

For example in British Columbia they’re pioneering the adoption of ‘Open Identity’ Infocards for their online citizen identity systems, and in Toronto and Warwickshire they’re pioneering Open Data projects.

These are just a few of many thousand, but typically the remain isolated projects. So the objectives of a best practices system is identifying each of these individual advances and then providing the mechanisms for replicating them globally as part of one overall joined up system.

So the partners we’re looking for include roles such as:

• Policy leaders and social entrepreneurs – Groundbreaking individuals with a vision for how the system can be changed to achieve the MDGs.
• Institutional ‘intrapreneurs’ – These new models should drive enterprise transformation of the government behemoth administrations, requiring internal ‘institutional entrepreneurs’ to drive these changes.
• Software innovators - Developers creating the new software to enable these new ways of working.

In particular we first need the technical experts who can design such a best practices sharing system…..

In their Reach for the Cloud analysis, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada says that:

“it is also possible that the Government of Canada might create a “private cloud” infrastructure internally to facilitate information sharing, or even that some or all government institutions might make use of a cloud infrastructure for data processing or storage.”

The key question is how might this be sourced from external outsourcing providers, ideally in a manner that stimulates the economy?

An anatomy of the key factors involved can answer this, highlighting how a number of different trends, like open source software, Open Data standards and Cloud Computing can be combined within an entrepreneurial context to enable not only more efficient IT, but an overall national innovation program too.

Business Transformation

The Canadian Open Government resolution might not have quite the same fanfare as the USA equivalent but it still contains the same equally powerful ideals.

This highlights the first and main headline point, that while Cloud computing is a very technical proposition, the large-scale adoption of it will be driven from the senior business executive level, meaning we have to first quantify what these business benefits will be.

In the case of government these drivers are articulated in this Open Government call.

Proclaimed by the Privacy Commissioner it highlights how this is first approached from an IM (Information Management) point of view, in terms of regulating the privacy implications of data hosted in the Cloud.

However as it builds on this to emphasize the shift from reactive analysis of data privacy implications to the need to take proactive steps to openly share information, it shows how this is more an exercise in a larger organizational transformation, rather than simply a question of where an application is hosted.

Open government is linked to access to information legislation. However, it extends the concepts inherent in these laws to promote an entirely new way of viewing the role of government and the participation of citizens in it.

For governments this represents the deepest change in their most fundamenal nature, where this technological trend is reinventing their entire mode of operation. The call understands that a more collaborative approach with citizens:

• improves communication channels
• promotes citizen engagement
• instils trust in government
• fosters economic opportunities and
• ultimately results in more open and responsive democratic government.

These are extremely powerful drivers and justifications for transformation, with the essential statement that the capability will:

support the renewal of the social contract between government and citizens.

Open Government Outsourcing

The Privacy Commissioner makes a strong point of calling on all levels of Canadian Government to declare the importance of Open Government, and to promote it as a means of improving transparency and setting higher standards for democracy and public participation.

This includes senior executive commitment, engagement of broad-based public consultations and the adoption of reuseable Open Data.

This of course leads to the million dollar question, and the context setting for Cloud Computing: How?

As this diagram shows, next to zero Canadian Government organizations are active with this type of technology right now; indeed many are still yet to e-enable even their most basic of business processes.

Which is exactly the point of Cloud Computing: Outsource to gain new technologies quickly that you don’t have in-house skills for.

And better yet, do it in a manner where your streamlining costs via a utility model, so that you save money at the same time.

Although a technical how-to, this short blog from Microsoft’s Open Source Strategy lead in Canada, provides a great, quick synopsis of how component parts can be assembled to achieve this, like Microsoft’s Open Data program, their Azure Cloud and the open source package Drupal.

This shows how the Open Government model can be achieved. Drupal provides the web site software that would enable the broad-based public consultations, and Cloud-based Open Data the plumbing to link these to the back-end business process systems.

Conclusion: Innovation Nation

If governments obtain these capabilities by outsourcing it to local Cloud providers, then they’re also providing a direct stimulus for their own technology industry.

All other governments throughout the world will require the same solutions, and locally developed solutions can be exported internationally.

Furthermore these are the hottest, leading edge technologies in the world right now, and so would create an equally powerful skills program too. Abilities developed with Drupal, Open Data and Cloud will be highly attractive to commercial organizations too.

Image via Wikipedia

As part of launching the ‘Open Government Innovation Network‘, I have also started the process of organizing a conference for here in Toronto :

Open Government Canada – Achieving the Millenium Development Goals.

If you’re interested in participating, just reach out to me or join the Linkedin group.

Transformational policy leadership

As well as covering the main component parts of Open Government, like Cloud Computing, open source software, open data and open innovation models, it will direct these towards a headline theme of ‘Achieving the Millenium Development Goals’.

While these new technologies are all very cool, it’s really the political policy leadership that drives its adoption that’s the critical success factor of what benefits it will bring. The social organization iFOSSF is sponsoring the work and their remit is how these new systems might be applied towards these MDGs, and replicated via Open Solutions.

The MDGs have a deadline of 2015, and as recent Canadian news highlights these are easily missed.

This week Campaign 2000 released their report showing that, like many other countries, Canada has made no progress in tackling poverty. Started in 1989 to address child poverty in Canada they’re reporting next to zero progress twenty one years later. As this news highlights it’s actually getting worse, key social groups like the elderly and single mothers increasingly are suffering from this torture, and the divide between rich and poor continues to grow.

Despite its vast wealth and modernity Canada still lives with the shame that one in ten children today live here in poverty.

Open Government Innovation

This is why initiatives like Open Government Innovation are key.

If the current policies have failed to achieve any success then clearly new ones are needed. Cloud-powered Open Government is key because not only it itself a new and innovative policy, but it can play a role in creating and sharing others too.

How new policy ideas are conceived, trialled and replicated globally can be accelerated through Open Solutions on Cloud platforms.

Like the Peer to Patent case study these technologies can reinvent government processes from slow, private activities to Open and agile ones, where the ‘wisdom of crowds’ is leveraged to bring much more brain firepower to each situation.

The technology can be used to brainstorm the ideas and then also to implement the new models conceived, in a manner that is much cheaper and more efficient than the traditional systems that are currently used, cost so much more and are so bureaucratic.

The most painful part is the solution ideas are out there. Ideas for models like the Guaranteed Annual Income offer the real potential to do something about the situation right now for these poor people, but currently there is a lack of the political will supporting their trial and adoption.

We can change that.

LiveWIRE 365 is our new Cloud Venture that will enable service providers to offer value-add Cloud apps that augment 365 and help encourage more adoption of it.

It synchronizes your contact data across 365, desktop and other key applications like Linkedin.

Collaboration 2.0

Microsoft’s new applications like Lync and Sharepoint provide a “collaboration OS” for the enterprise, the building blocks of modern collaborative workflow systems. These can be installed on-premise or accessed online via Office 365, which also makes available new models for the desktop tools that use them.

The other key dimension to modern collaboration methods is the use of the public Web 2.0 social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, and for business professionals sites like Linkedin.

LiveWIRE is based on the SaaS software VirtualCONTACT. As it sounds VirtualCONTACT.biz provides the web 2.0 version of the oldest business traditions, swapping business cards. It provides a simple CRM system ideal for small businesses, that can then be further leveraged as a contact synchronization framework that keeps your tools like Outlook updated dynamically.

Via Web services interfaces and other tools we’ve created an extensible framework called LiveWIRE that can be set up to synchronize contact data across multiple address books both on and offline.

In short it will enable you to connect to individuals via Linkedin, and then use this relationship to keep the underlying contact data synchronized with Office 365 applications like Lync. You’ll be able to connect via Linkedin and communicate via Lync.

Venture specification

LiveWIRE 365 delivers:

• Full Contact Management & Sales Forecasting
• Seamless Integration with Microsoft Outlook (Desktop and/or Hosted)
• Full Collaboration via Microsoft SharePoint
• Full Integration with Social Media (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace & Twitter) – Imagine being able to see what your Contact has been up to without having to click a thing!
• Unified Log-in via InfoCards/OAuth (Eg Use your LinkedIn log-in for LiveWIRE)
• Fully integrated web sign-up forms
• Fully integrated email marketing/marketing automation

Integration and Mobility

LiveWIRE 365 also provides interfaces to Microsoft Office, including Outlook Social Connector, SharePoint and most mobile phone manufacturers; Android, BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows 7 Mobile. Additional, secure interfaces can usually be written in a matter of hours by using LiveWIRE’s powerful WebService.

One of our key project areas is to help Canada develop a significant presence in the Cloud Computing industry, and towards this end we’ve started a simple, fun and hopefully very productive site, the Canada Cloud Business Plan.

As the name suggests the idea is to bring together a team who defines a strategy for how to make this happen, and critically acts on it to realize it too. The “living” part of this is that it’s an online document, with wiki features so that any one can join and add to it, so equally the team can be as dynamic as the ideas it collects.

In the ‘Your Action Ideas‘ section any one can click ‘New Page’ to add and edit their own page of this world domination plan!