Professor Mark Thompson and Will Venters’ previously released opinion piece ‘Six strategic plays for UK government IT initiatives and their implications for policy‘ in Government Information Quarterly, has been published in Computer Weekly this week.
The thoughtpiece asks the question “what is ‘digitising government’ “, and looks at published academic research that identifies a “spectrum of very different ‘plays’ for government” with one end of the conversation about “government building digital technology to build better public services, but without making fundamental changes to how things are done now”, and the other end, “the aim is to reinvent, or “transform”, the business model of government itself to be a “platform” at the centre of a fast-evolving ecosystem of public, private and third-sector activity”.
Mark and Will discuss how each end of the conversation shows the “obvious and very different ideas about the purpose of government within the emerging digital economy”, and outlines “that these roles are often confused by policymakers and industry alike, with adverse consequences”.
An informative read that looks to provide clarity to the still fairly confused policy landscape in terms of how government should behave with regard to technology suppliers and its own capability/function.
You can read the synopsis in Computer Weekly here, and the full paper here.