Obama and Technology: A little thoughtful risk taking will go a long way

We've got a new President, and there are many reasons to be optimistic that positive changes are in store.

My optimism has increased over the past few months as I've met and seen commentary from the transition team working on the Administration's technology and Web strategy.

In addition to the New Media office that's just opened at the White House, which has been operating as part of the transition team, the transition team set up the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform (TIGR) Team to explore new ways of communicating with the public. Experienced administrators like Julius Genachowski (incoming FCC chairman), former FCC chief of staff Blair Levin and Washington DC CTO Vivek Kundra are advising the administration on how to leverage technology. The TIGR team developed a video that talks about their priorities: http://tinyurl.com/9tk4nj.

What is striking about the video (aside from the embrace of Cloud Computingand other concepts that have been difficult for government to grab onto in the past), is the focus on trying new things. That same focus was evident in Change.gov's embrace of new types of commenting and online voting technologies. I appreciated one link on their site that said, "have a better way of doing this, tell us!" I also noted a complaint on the site about how Change.gov had not gone through enough effort to create a single, shared, login for people visiting the site to use the various pieces of functionality. I smiled because it's that kind of thinking ("let's get this perfect rather than getting something online" ) that has stalled many innovative Web communication projects in federal government.

It is easy in technology to let the better be the enemy of the good, but it's not necessary. As long as critical data is kept secure, Web apps don't have to work perfectly when first released. The Change.gov people know what everyone else on earth has also figured out... you can make changes and improve things more effectively once you have them out and see how people use them. This is not just true in Web communication and technology, but often with public policy as well, something Obama seemed to acknowledge in asking us to be patient and expect some mistakes and false starts as he moves forward with his agenda.

Virtually every agency in federal government has some risk takers who've ignored at least a few rules and put their agency up on Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook. You can see the great progress being made within agencies in social media and read about some of the barriers agencies face at www.webcontent.gov.

These same risk takers have been pushing the envelope for years, but now they have a lot more cover from above with the White House taking the lead on innovation.

At GovDelivery, we've been delivering a Software-as-a-Service (i.e., Web-hosted platform) to federal government for years. Early on, we had many clients who felt uneasy discussing our solution with their security people; they were afraid that it would be beat up because it's not behind the firewall. Years of success working with DHS, DoD, DOJ and others with no security breaches helped us gain momentum, but it took 5 years to reach the point where most federal agencies have embraced our platform. Adoption of social media technologies and new types of cloud computing will happen much faster if the administration continues to encourage the risk takers.