FCW's Fall CIO Summit: Disruptive Technologies in Government

I mentioned yesterday that we are busy working on FCW's Fall CIO Summit agenda. (These things just seem easy.)

And I promised that today, we'd give you some insights about what we are looking at talking about...and how we are trying to do this in a Web 2.0 way.

So our topic for the Fall CIO Summit is: "Disruptive Technologies in Government: Risks, Rewards, and Strategies."

As I mentioned, in the Spring, we focused on Web 2.0. So, for the upcoming Summit, we want to focus on Web 2.1, for lack of a better term, and how government agencies deal with these kinds of disruptive technologies. The idea is how can government leaders adopt and manage some of these disruptive technologies -– everything from GIS to Google Docs -– and what do they mean for how government organizations must evolve to meet the challenges of the future, meet customer needs, and hire the government workforce of the future.

This is spurred by a few things. One is a story that one a big city CIO we spoke to at the last Summit. He said that they find many of the city employees are sending their e-mail to their GMail accounts. GMail offers them essentially unlimited storage capacity, something that their IT shop does not offer. The problem: All of the sudden, that e-mail is no longer under the control of the city. It is subject to different security and privacy rules that may not fit with the city's rules, regulations or laws.

In fact, yesterday, the WSJ had a special technology section that literally offered up "10 secrets your IT department doesn't want you to know, the risks you'll face if you use them -- and tips about how to keep yourself (and your job) safe while you're at it."

Talk about disruptive...and talk about validating this idea.

But I think this is true with many of these Web 2.0 technologies, particularly those where there is more user control. All of the sudden, there is less of the traditional top-down control. What does it all mean?

Well, we're going to try and ask that.

Here is the initial blurb that FCW's Paul McCloskey put together to capture what we going to try and look at:

"Disruptive Technologies in Government: Risks, Rewards, Strategies"

The emergence of new Web 2.0 technologies giving citizens greater access to and control over public information represents an exciting challenge and opportunity for government business managers.

Today, innovators are mashing together obscure government databases to provide ingenious new public services. Citizens -– and soldiers -– can take to the airwaves at a moment's notice to promote or critique government policies and programs. New search and sifting technologies are exposing new fault lines between what's public and private information.

One thing's for sure, the genie is out of the bottle. Government CXOs must now catch up to new ways and policies for managing and exploiting these new Web technologies in the enterprise or risk losing public confidence in their organizations.

How are you addressing the new "disruptive technologies" in your agency? What are some of the ways you can use Web 2.0 to your organization's advantage? How flexible is your enterprise for responding to this challenge? What is your strategic vision for managing these tools in your organization's enterprise?

Please join us at the Fall CIO Summit, Nov. 11-13 in Phoenix, Ariz., where we will gather top executives from both government and industry who are using innovative approaches to address these new challenges.