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Open ICT ecosystems fuel efficiency, innovation and growth
An open ICT ecosystem is interoperable, user-centric, collaborative, sustainable and flexible. Open ICT systems have many benefits for modern societies - from enabling governments to provide better services to citizens, to enhancing the sharing of information, to avoiding imposing costly proprietary technologies on individual citizens. At the same time, adopting open ICT systems can help governments to save money which can be used for other purposes. The Open ePolicy Group sets out guidelines and best practices for the implementation of open ICT ecosystem in the public sector.
When Thailand's southern islands were struck without warning by a thirty-foot high tidal wave on December 26 2004, the
country's government, aid agencies and volunteers responded instantly to the crisis.
Yet despite the overwhelming inrush of aid, the task of identifying the victims, reuniting families and assisting survivors was hampered by a critical inability to share information. Different agencies and non-governmental groups were using different data and document types, slowing down the relief effort and making co-ordination difficult. As a direct result of the tsunami disaster, the Thai government created a single web site for the registration of missing persons, and made the use of open file formats an immediate national priority.
The benefits of adopting secure, open systems for information exchange, collaboration and service delivery have been well demonstrated not just by the Thai government's experience, but also by governments around the world. However, moving to an open ICT ecosystem is not always an easy task. To assist governments and other stakeholders, Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, with support from Oracle and IBM, founded the worldwide Open ePolicy Group in 2005 to create a best-practice roadmap for
implementing an open ICT ecosystem.
The 45-page roadmap was published with the help of experts from governments, private sector companies and academics from around the world, including representatives from Denmark, the Netherlands, Jordan, South Africa and the European Commission. It provides an introduction to open ICT ecosystems for "policymakers, manager and other stakeholders from civil society," enabling them to "create secure and open ICT systems for access, transparency, collaboration and
productivity."
Open ICT ecosystems can bring a wide range of social benefits, from increased efficiency and cost savings to the fostering of innovation leading to economic growth. The roadmap document provides comprehensive guidelines for achieving an open ICT ecosystem, from the initial project scoping and selection of appropriate technologies, to best practices for defining and communicating the ecosystem's usage and participation policies. It also explains the role and importance of concepts like open standards,
open source, open file formats and service-oriented architecture.
As many organisations already have some of the technological elements of an open ICT ecosystem in place, the roadmap provides a new 'openness maturity model' that allows organisations to assess their current state of readiness for open
ICT, and define how they need to proceed accordingly.
Short case studies (editing problem here)from around the world show how governments are using open ICT platforms to deliver better services to citizens; standardise processes for greater efficiency; ensure a high level of two-way communication between citizens and governments, and allow for close and secure collaboration on important civil projects, for example in the case of public-private partnerships. One of many examples is Denmark's eBusiness Initiative, a
central procurement system that is saving the Danish government €160m a year.
"Increasing an ICT ecosystem's capacity for openness can yield efficiency, growth and innovation in government across society," said Jeff Kaplan of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and the author of the roadmap. "This Roadmap is a tool to help people use open ICT ecosystems to transform their society and their lives."
Download the full Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems by clicking
here.
The
Open ePolicy group web site is at
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/policy
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