Last week, Federal CIO Steve VanRoekel released a Roadmap for Digital Government, entitled “Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People.” The strategy document provides agencies with a 12-month roadmap that focuses on several priority areas and seeks to enable more efficient and coordinated digital service delivery by requiring agencies to establish specific, measurable goals for delivering better digital services; encouraging agencies to deliver information in new ways that fully utilize the power and potential of mobile and web-based technologies; ensuring the safe and secure delivery and use of digital services to protect information and privacy; requiring agencies to establish central online resources for outside developers and to adopt new standards for making applicable Government information open and machine-readable by default.
The strategy is the result of an Executive Order (EO 13571) issued by the President in late April to require executive departments and agencies to identify ways to use innovative technologies to streamline their delivery of services to lower costs, decrease service delivery times and improve the customer experience.
Importantly, with the release of this Roadmap, VanRoekel has declared that agencies will increasingly open up their valuable data to the public and set up Developer pages to give external developers tools to build new services, which will include a transformation of Data.gov into a data and API catalog that in real time pulls directly from agency websites. Additionally, adopting the incremental approach articulated in the Cloud First Directive, agencies have been directed to mobilize two of their priority customer-facing services in the next 12 months, and a wholesale reworking of the Federal government’s own use of mobile technology.
David LeDuc is Senior Director, Public Policy at SIIA. He focuses on e-commerce, privacy, cyber security, cloud computing, open standards, e-government and information policy.