Government Resource Planning (GRP) and government technology news, found by the FreeBalance Strategy & Innovation Group.
WILL APPLE KILL GOVERNMENT AS PLATFORM? “An effort by Apple to prevent spam may unintentionally undo years of digital government app development,” wrote Jennifer Pahlka of Code for America. Pahlka described how the Apple AppStore will ban “white-labeled” applications in order to reduce spam. “Apple has decided to include white-labeled government apps in this category. In other words, cities will no longer be allowed to have branded apps of their own, unless they create them entirely from scratch AND promise that these apps do not share any code.”
POLITICAL DANGERS OF ERP FAILURE IN GOVERNMENT: The Editorial Board of the Ottawa Citizen warned the Liberal Party of Canada of potential losses of seats in Parliament in the National Capital Region because of the failed implementation of PeopleSoft ERP payroll systems. The “privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien found at least 11 breaches occurred and the personal information at issue included employee names and salary information,” in the PeopleSoft implementation, code named “Phoenix Pay System”, reported the Canadian Press.Revelations by Julie Ireton of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, found that the systems integration implementation contract for IBM ballooned from $6.7M to $185M. Ireton also reported on “creative accounting” from the government that the project is running under budget.
VERY SMALL STEPS TO GOVERNMENT TECHNOLOGY MODERNIZATION: The US Senate passed the Modernizing Government Technology Act (MGT) last week. Jerry Bowles of Diginomica was underwhelmed: “In the context of aging and insecure government IT infrastructure, the funding involved is a drop in the proverbial bucket. A similar IT modernization legislation passed the House last year, but died in the Senate when the CBO estimated that modernization would cost $9 billion over five years. This time around, CBO estimates the fiscal 2018 and 2019 cost at $500 million to finance a yearly $250 million IT modernization fund administered by a Technology Modernization Board.” Cloud adoption in the UK government is also underwhelming. Mark Say in UKAuthority described a study from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) and UKCloud about shallow cloud adoption.
GOVERNMENT AND GAMIFICATION: “Nudging resident behavior through friendly competition can encourage participation in activities with social value, while simultaneously improving people’s relationship with government,” wrote Stephen Goldsmith and Chris Bousquet in Government Technology. The authors described how gamification can improve citizen engagement, health outcomes and reduced citizen services costs.
