I was reading over some old links and remembered one of my favourite posts relating to internet startups.

I 100% agree with Mark’s logic. I have lots of ideas which I think would work, but it always depends on if you have the minimum of 3-12 months solid commitment and time required to turn an idea into reality. Almost everyone has some pretty good ideas. But hardly anyone says “I will be the person to invest 6 months slogging my bum off to actually make it happen”. Its all about effort and commitment. A great idea is nothing without hard work (or money to pay others to do that hard work for you). If you go to your full time job every day and call that a day’s work and come home and watch TV, you’re not going to ever get away from that. To make progress you need to be doing extra, work to get your money, but work again at night to put the system in place for your future no-full-time-job plan. Once you’ve done one, you’ll have some money, then with future ideas you have the choice of being able to pay people to implement them for you - just as long as the design doesn’t flog out because you’re essentially buying it rather than writing it yourself with your own passion and knowledge..

Once you have something up there, it gets easier. Collect feedback and ideas -> inject into existing product and refine. Nurture it, baby it for a year or two, walk your users through step by step, ring them up and offer first-hand support, get the thing up there working well with an army of ever-loyal and satisfied users who can’t get enough of it.

Away you go.

The first thought that so many senior government managers seem to come up with in terms of online service priorities is “get that paper up online!”. Firstly, you can’t bag them out. Thesedays, even the old school senior managers are totally on board with investing in internet development. That’s great, but let’s take a step back and make sure all this effort isn’t wasted. As unfortunate as it is, sometimes its the call of a very senior government manager who makes some bold statement without having any technical understanding of the web, and all those underneath must simply follow his/her commandment - “I want all our ABC123 paper forms and letters online by July 2006!”

All key Government services are about input and output. What information do we want to collect from the citizen or customer, and what information should we display back to them. But converting an organisation’s 150 different individual letters into HTML and PDF format and listing them in a sortable datagrid is not necessarily the answer. “But W3C compliant HTML is great for accessibility, so we’re catering for accessibility, as well as supplying a nice printable, saveable PDF format.” - Spot on, but you haven’t re-thought things seeing as you now have a whole new medium to utilise to get this information out there.

Converting existing paper letters to PDF format is the quick win they all seem to get sucked into. I call these the “phase 1″ systems. They’re great, because at least you can go online and deal with Government and get the information you’re looking for.. But think about paper. Its a medium where there’s no constant reference for anyone to check - the way it works is by sending constant updates when a particular business event triggers a letter to be issued. E.g. A piece of paper arrives saying “Your child support payments have been reduced by $10 this month.” rather than the MONTHLY TOTAL field on some central web page reducing by $10 and you seeing the latest amount at any time. Great, but I don’t want a separate PDF file for every time that happens. In the paper world you would need a letter to tell you this, but on the web, why not just update some core web page. What about a single, clever dynamic web page where all my information is visible from this central hub and it simply updates and highlights when anything changes. This is exactly the type of thinking that a lot of Government departments have missed out on this time round. When the thinking has been there, however, I have seen examples of 10+ paper letter templates replaced by a single, clever, dynamic, data-driven web page. The citizen knows to check this core page, everything happens there. Problem solved and everyone wins.

Similarly, this way of thinking exists with input. They say: “Let’s build ‘web forms’ of all our paper forms”. I’m absolutely not bagging it out, because its great to be able to find every single paper form online in a streamlined web format that you can fill in and hit submit.. But this 1-1 mapping of every paper form to every new web page form is not a decent solution. Perhaps 10 forms could be combined into a new clever application for the citizin like a diary or command center for them to deal with all transactions with a particular agency. There are forms made into web pages named and labelled exactly the same as their paper ancestors. E.g. “KA01 form”. People are really going to find KA01 in the search engines aren’t they.

The worst case is that departments waste a couple of years building these “Phase 1″ secure online systems. Login to read your letters in PDF format etc. Its not the end of the world, but its just frustrating. But as I mentioned, its still progress. The only logical thing left to do after that is make the systems even simpler and better. The information is already on the web servers, just in a different structure, so it isn’t going to be as hard as this initial leap of stepping away from paper everything.

From my involvement with Federal Government, a couple of things have left me positively charged of late.

First of all, Federal Government seem to be really getting on board with RSS feeds. I know of a couple of departments working on the launch of upcoming RSS services in the not too distant future. There are already a fair share of government sites utilising RSS, but its just promising to see it spread so widely, so quickly of late, which leads me to think that its going to be a standard part of all key Government sites before too long. You know what its like with Government, once a couple of key departments have taken the leap with any given piece of new technology, the rest use that as grounds to plough ahead and do the same.

Federal Government development of key online services is alive and pumping. Its a time where the biggest, most well-funded departments already have reasonable, secure online systems in place for clients to do business with them electronically. While most of the others that haven’t are spending serious dollars to get to that position. In a few years you should be able to login to most agencies that you need to deal with as a citizen, and even authenticate through generic government portals grouped by political portfolio or perhaps even one big secure australia.gov.au hub.

To implement all this great work, I am seeing Federal Government attract more and more highly skilled technical people and become more receptive to the innovation that these workers are bringing with them. The salaries of government ICT positions have been steadily climbing for quite a while, overshadowing the remuneration of many corresponding private sector positions - and the working conditions are good. This makes these roles more attractive to skilled workers sick of working until 10pm for a proft-driven firm that doesn’t pay overtime and probably pays less money anyway.

The work going on is very promising, and as a result Canberra is buzzing with web-related activity and opportunity.