The incoming government faces a wide range of challenges, among them the need to reduce expenditure, maintain quality of key services, and stimulate growth and recovery. One of the areas where these challenges need to be urgently faced is IT.
Open Computing offers a way to do so – just as it has for many other governments around the world, both new and old.
Open Computing is a vendor-independent approach based around choice, flexibility and interoperability – the ability of different applications to interact easily and exchange information. It puts the government in control, avoids dictating vendor lock-in and imposing costs not only on the public sector but also on citizens. It recognises the need for governments, businesses and individual citizens to share, exchange and protect information and do so in a non-proprietary way where everyone can participate. It maximises the opportunities to ensure non-confidential government data is available and useable in many ways by the wider population. And above all, it realises the benefits of community – working together for a common goal.
Open Computing has three main elements which can help to reduce expenditure, improve quality, and stimulate growth. They are: open standards, open source and open community.
Open standards are the first building block, since they enable interoperability and allow choice. If documents are going to be able to be interchanged easily between governments, businesses and citizens, then they need to be in an open and standardised format. Any user and any computer should be able to access public information on an equal basis, and the data format should not dictate the software or hardware used to create, view or change the document. It's open standards which have enabled the Internet – now we need open standards on the desktop and in the Cloud as well in order to reduce the costs and unlock the creativity.
Imagine the money that could be saved if computer users could choose which office software to use in the knowledge that the documents they create can be read and updated by anybody else, including those who have made a different choice of office software.
Open source is the second element of Open Computing, and in essence it offers a different approach to licensing and development of software – leading to potentially lower costs and higher quality. It's not the only way to achieve Open Computing, but it's a good way. The licensing approach enables re-use, and the development approach encourages community development and peer review. The open source Apache web server powers the majority of web servers in the world, Linux today provides the basis of most public Clouds, and Eclipse is the most popular Java integrated development environment. In reality, most organisations will use a mixture of open source and closed source software, integrated through open standards.
By levelling the playing field for open source alongside proprietary products in government, there is again an opportunity to reduce costs while preserving quality and encouraging innovation.
Finally, open community is key to Open Computing. The old proprietary world order is transforming to the new open world where different groups work together to solve common challenges, and so are able to achieve far more than they could do on their own. The phenomenal success of Linux has shown what is possible when individual developers and competing vendors learn to work together. Of course there will still be competition, differentiation and innovation, but this will be in areas where it delivers incremental value. In a similar fashion to the road network, the infrastructure is common leaving people the opportunity to choose whether to travel by car, drive a minibus or share a coach.
All this came together recently with the incoming US government on their new website at www.whitehouse.gov. Built using Drupal – the open source content management system – the team reduced expenditure and maintained quality. And recently they announced that they were starting to contribute back to the open community a number of enhancements that they had made – so completing the circle.
Today we need Open Computing more than ever. Our world is changing technologically at an incredible rate and this change is getting faster. Just think how different our world is today compared to 10 years ago. Billions of microprocessors are being embedded in devices from cars to traffic sensors, and they're all communicating. Today's teenagers have grown up with IT, and most cannot remember a world without mobile phones or the Internet. Most homes have more computing power than used to fly to the moon, and many people have that power in their pockets. All this leads to a vast amount of data, which need to be shared, exchanged, and turned into useful information and insight, so we know the traffic jams to avoid before we start our journey.