

How Tim O'Reilly Aims to Change Government - vibhavs
http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/08/20/20readwriteweb-how-tim-oreilly-aims-to-change-government-85919.html

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TomOfTTB
I don’t disagree with the sentiment. But as someone who has made his money in
IT since the age of 16 I find the whole process here kind of obnoxious.

This isn’t rocket science. O’Reilly is turning this into a means to bolster
his profile and sell his conferences but in the end it’s just an issue of IT
planning. Good businesses do this sort of thing every day and they don’t need
to hold a conference to do it. Whether it’s Government or private business the
process is the same.

* Talk to your customers (not pundits) and see what they want

* Look at your database and fill in the blanks to make sure you are collecting what they want

* Plan a delivery mechanism that best fits the needs of your customers

* Implement

It doesn’t take a bunch of conferences and pontificating to make this happen.

~~~
frossie
_"it’s just an issue of IT planning"_

I don't think it is. I think I recognise this problem - this is a case where
the customer does _not_ know what they want, because they lack the necessary
background to formulate their needs or define their future direction. People
without systems engineering experience usually constrain themselves to their
perceived understanding of a solution when trying to express their needs.

For example, if you went to a customer five years ago and said "how would you
like to edit your documents" they would have described a word processor to you
- not Google Docs or Zoho and certainly not Etherpad - it would never occur to
them to ask for those features. But show them those features, and they love
it.

I have come to believe that you don't ask your customer what they want. You
try and guess what _you_ would want in their position, and put that forward as
a straw man proposal. The customer has enough mission-specific knowledge to
help you perfect your mental model, but they are rarely going to ask for
anything innovative of their own accord.

There is a _huge_ potential payoff in banging the right heads together. I have
knocked months off a schedule that way. I don't know O'Reilly so I can't tell
you whether he is the right person to be doing that, but we definitely could
do with someone.

~~~
TomOfTTB
Your post just made my point perfectly. Your experience has allowed you to do
your job better. That's the point. O'Reilly is a book publisher and a pundit
whose pulling together bloggers to have a Government 2.0 conference which he
thinks will somehow solve the problem because, imho, he has no idea how to
actually solve the problem. I mean, this is a guy who lists coining Web 2.0 as
one of his accomplishments in life

On the other hand someone who actually does this sort of thing for a living
and has experience would realize what the problems are and be able to address
them appropriately.

~~~
frossie
_"Your experience has allowed you to do your job better. [...] O'Reilly is a
[...] pundit"_

Well the thing about pundits is, they know people, and people listen to them.
Now don't get me wrong - I see inefficiencies in IT infrastructure everywhere
I look - government, healthcare, even large areas of science - but nobody asks
_me_ my opinion. Maybe if O'Reilly could inflict me on those people for a
couple of hours, they would learn something.

[for "me", read "people in our position", not personally me]

I have a lot of sympathy for what I think you are saying - that certain
classes of people have a gift for self-promotion and get a lot more credit for
things instead of the real technical/systems talent, which makes us feel they
don't "deserve" it, but that doesn't mean they bring zero to the table,
either.

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rfreytag
O'Reilly's attempting to fix Government caused me to suddenly remember
Buffett's saying "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a
business with a reputation for bad economics, it is usually the reputation of
the business that remains intact."

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martey
Why not link to the original article at
[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_tim_oreilly_aims_to...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_tim_oreilly_aims_to_change_government.php)
?

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davidw
> O'Reilly is talking to people, but he's helping people talk to eachother as
> well. He's introducing officials like Vivek Kundra, the new CIO of the
> Federal government, and Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra to ground-breaking hackers
> like geek rennaisance man Chris Messina and YCombinator founder Paul Graham.

I was going to flag it as being about politics, but that was kind of
interesting to read, and I guess you could say it's on topic.

