Research company sees acceleration in federal innovation
The federal government has become more innovative in the past 24 months and looks likely to continue on that path, according to a new report.
The pace of innovation in the federal government has picked up in the past two years due to the adoption of new technologies such as social media and cloud computing and new policies for the transparency and release of data, according to a report from Forrester Research.
Agencies are becoming more efficient by embracing many of the same technology trends found in the private sector, wrote Chip Gliedman, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, in the May 31 report “Industry Innovation: US Federal Government.”
Many of the changes in recent months are being driven by the White House and Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, the report states.
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“The pace of innovation in IT has greatly accelerated over the past 24 months and looks to further accelerate over the next 24 months,” Gliedman wrote.
Future acceleration depends on the success of Kundra’s 25-point plan to revamp federal IT management, announced in December 2010, Gliedman added.
Meanwhile, agencies are moving into cloud computing. The General Services Administration moved USA.gov into the cloud in 2009 and recently signed a five-year deal with Google to move e-mail systems into the cloud.
Forrester projects that cloud services, also called software as a service or infrastructure as a service, will grow tenfold in the next decade for corporations and the public sector.
“Spending on these services is [forecast] to grow from approximately $28 billion today to $258 billion in 2020" — reaching 45 percent of total IT services spending, the report states.