The federal government - under what appears to be the excellent advisement of Federal CIO Vivek Kundra and at the behest of a techno-savvy president - has set up a clearinghouse of information and services for federal agencies to move their IT services into "the cloud".
For those who don't know, cloud computing is the principle where instead of keeping all your information and programs on your own computers to be managed by your own paid staff, you and many others put your information on the internet, sharing the same system to deliver your services wherever you need them around the world. For those who don't care, this means you get similar services at a fraction of the price that are easier to access and allow for greater flexibility and collaboration among your staff.
Already I'm in shock. The more adventurous among us have been moving ourselves into the cloud piece by piece over the last several years, (Moved my organization's email services over to Gmail about a year ago) and I haven't heard of anyone ever looking back. I've had many a hyperbolic conversation on how backwards the government when it comes to IT, and how much more efficient America could be if the USG would just keep up with the Jones (or the Pages and Brins, as the case may be). Surely we glossed over some of the technical, or more likely the legal challenges such a shift would pose, but the challenges seemed utterly surmountable, and the principle perfectly sound. But even as senators started using Twitter and I'd heard that whitehouse.gov ran on an instance of Drupal, I still felt a sense that the feds were dragging their feet and using new technology only as a show piece with no plans for major overhauls.
So imagine my surprise when I came across an article (found through Google's new FastFlip, by the way) heralding the arrival of the federal government's new "...one-stop source for cloud services." And more than a one-stop source, I might go so far as to call this one of the most comprehensive, and better organized repositories of web-based products and services I've ever come across. With the ability to drill down through likely department of use, type of service, and other categorizations, you can find an app (or a promise that one is coming soon) for just about anything an organization needs to do. And they're even getting outside the straight-laced, run-of-the-mill box by recommending some pretty esoteric technologies like "mind-mapping" and virtual worlds.
And perhaps most importantly, I don't think this is NOT some conspiratorial black book of fat-cat cronies and pet contractors who are on the "approved provider" list because they got a $10 Million contract to write the list in the first place... At first glance it looks like a genuine directory of the most recommendable and reasonable services for departments that should be striving for effectiveness and cost-efficiency. And the part that got my attention: Google Apps is top of the list for a lot of the collaboration and productivity categories that I (and I expect many federal departments) would be most likely to need.
Thats right all you friends in the federal government who have .gov email addresses, but use your gmail account to actually communicate effectively (with chat and all that cloudy goodness), this heralds a day when the two may be one and the same.
