Research company sees acceleration in federal innovation
- By Alice Lipowicz
- Jun 01, 2011
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.
About the Author
Alice Lipowicz is a staff writer covering government 2.0, homeland security and other IT policies for Federal Computer Week.