Innovation in the government space
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.
Tags: Consulting