Ottawa – A leading Internet authority is joining the call for government technology managers to take a new approach to their jobs.
A day after Greg Parston of Accenture told them it was time to move “from e-government to e-governance,” Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of the respected O’Reilly Inc., described government as a software platform.
The most important lesson to be drawn from Web 2.0, O’Reilly told the Government Technology Exhibition and Conference (GTEC) in Ottawa, is that “you build a platform and let others add value.”
Networks generally are platforms, he said, “driven by huge databases that literally get better the more people use them.”
O’Reilly contrasted the notion of government as a platform with what he called “vending machine government – we put in our taxes and we take out services.”
The alternative: “Throw open the doors to partners,” much as Apple did in calling on the public for applications for its iPhone.
“Government as a platform means an end to the days of closed one-way systems,” O’Reilly said.
