Jonathan Schwartz, Chief Operating Officer at Sun Microsystems, was an early entrant in the senior management blogging stakes, and his blog continues to prove incisive, insightful, and refreshingly free of either overhyping his own organisation or over-slating his competitors. Compulsory reading. His latest post takes a look at the role of Government in standards setting, using the public-good arguments that allow mobile phones to make emergency calls whether in-credit or signed up to a talk plan or not as his jumping-off point. “What should we mandate? That all public information, that is, all data and services provided by governments, from 'who to call' lists to video broadcasts of critical information, leverage open, royalty free, freely sublicensable standards. The government should be silent, in my view, on the selection of technologies - that's not their core competence or role. But they have a productive role to play in the standardization and provisioning of emergency services, and the guarantees around service levels and availability. In my view, they have to date underleveraged that role in driving the productive evolution of the network as a social utility.” (my emphasis) I agree. So, I remember, did those behind the gestation of our own e-Government Interoperability Framework(e-GIF). I do worry, though, that there is an increasing tendency to go a step too far, and stray into the fraught territory of over-mandating technology (and applications).
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