Helping Government Keep Up with Moore's Law
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My talk at the World Government Summit in Dubai on February 8, 2015. I talk about the pace of Moore's Law, and how AI, sensors, and on-demand are raising consumer expectations of government software. I go from there to my notion of government as a platform. PDF with Speaker notes - read the notes for the narrative that goes along with the slides.
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Helping Government Keep Up with Moore's Law
- 1. #WorldGovSummit Helping Government Catch Up with Moore’s Law Tim O’Reilly @timoreilly World Government Summit February 8, 2016
- 2. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit “Senator, you have to understand…” 2 Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI
- 4. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit Moore’s Law has been responsible for a cascade of miracles.
- 13. @timoreilly #BitcoinSummit @timoreilly#CASBSSUMMIT @conference @timoreilly
- 15. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit How things ought to work
- 17. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit Rockstar tech talent in government
- 18. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit Modern Technology Best Practices • User centered design • Agile, data-driven development • Cloud deployment and modern technology stacks • Open source software • Open data • Citizen engagement
- 20. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit Government as a Platform 21 Government as a platform means an end to the design of only complete, closed “applications.” The government should provide fundamental applications, and services on which we, the people, can build additional applications.
- 22. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit GPS: A 21st century platform launched in 1973 Massive investment for uncertain return Policy decisions can have enormous impact Marketplaces take time to develop, and go in unexpected directions 23
- 23. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit “We’ve opened up huge amounts of government data to the American people, and put it on the Internet for free.... And what’s happening is entrepreneurs and business owners are now using that data -- the people’s data --to create jobs and solve problems that government can’t solve by itself or can’t do as efficiently.” 24 President Barack Obama
- 24. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit What’s Still Missing? 25
- 26. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit Some of what that entails Low level “infrastructure as a service” Storage Computation Internal “Housekeeping” services Security Performance monitoring Connection to other services Insurance providers State exchangesrvice Identity Location Employment status Income verification User Interface Web site Email Call Center
- 27. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit Do we do all that just for healthcare.gov, and then do it all over again for immigration reform?
- 29. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit I’m not saying changing the way government contracts for and manages major technology programs will be easy. 30
- 32. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit 33 “A platform beats an application every time.” Tim O’Reilly and Jeff Bezos Photo: Duncan Davidson
- 33. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit Jeff’s Memo 34 • “All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. • Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. • There will be no other form of inter-process communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. • It doesn’t matter what technology they use. • All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. • Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.”
- 34. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit Create a modular set of fundamental services that can be used like building blocks 35
- 35. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit You must build on them yourselves. 36
- 36. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit And only then open them up to the world. 37
- 37. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit You will do this or you will be fired
- 38. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit Write RFPs to require government sites to be built on top of internal APIs that can also be used to support external 3rd party sites. 39
- 42. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit “The legitimate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.” -Abraham Lincoln, July 1, 1854 43
- 43. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit Data is the 21st Century Platform We need standards for: •Identity •Payment •Location •Credit history •Health history •Privacy •… 44
- 44. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit Right now, these standards are being set 45
- 45. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit Who sets the gauge rules the world Sixty per cent of the world's railways use 4 ft 8 1⁄2 inch standard gauge, developed by George Stephenson in 1822. 46 rerailways.com/lms/lnwrns305.htm
- 46. @timoreilly #WorldGovSummit You standardize railroads by building tracks “The strategy is delivery!” 47 UK GDS Director Mike Bracken
Editor's Notes
- Four or five years ago, I was at dinner with Reid Hoffman, the founder and chairman of LinkedIn, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. In the course of the conversation, I remarked, “We need a Moore’s Law for healthcare.” The Senator asked, “What’s Moore’s Law?” Reid’s answer was classic. “You have to understand, Senator, that in Washington, you assume that every year, things will cost more and do less. In Silicon Valley, we assume that every year, things will cost less and do more.”
- Of course, Moore’s Law is that famous doubling of chip density every 18 months that has enabled the computing revolution, that, as everyone says, means that your watch has more computing power than we used to get to the moon in 1969.
- Oh, wait. That’s supposed to be a cheap watch, not an Apple Watch. The Apple watch has WAY more computing power than we used to get to the moon.
- Moore’s Law has been responsible for a cascade of miracles.
- Who’d have thought that we’d be talking to our phones and asking them questions in plain language?
- Or that our phones would interrupt us to warn us of a change in the weather or the traffic from the expected everyday pattern? One of the biggest changes in user expectation that technology will bring into our everyday lives in the next few years is going to be via “agents” like Siri and Google Now, which will bring predictive analytics to bear on routine tasks that we already depend on our computers for.
- We can even set conditions that are triggered only when we are in certain locations. It is quite remarkable to be able to say to your phone “OK, Google Now, remind me to buy currants next time at Whole Foods” and have an alert show up the next time I am at the store!
- Who would have thought that we’d be seriously talking about self-driving cars?
- In a world with connected sensors everywhere, on demand services, and AI in our pockets, every industry and every organization will have to transform itself in the next few years. The internet is not just something that affects media. It’s coming to every real-world service. I’ve organized a new event on this subject - how are AI, robotics, platforms for on-demand work, augmented reality, and other Unicorn technologies going to change the way we work, the way our companies are organized, and the kinds of problems we can solve?
- I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that technology is changing the very nature of the firm
- and the way work is organized.
- Government too has to change. I took a look at the Dubai government home page, and it looks pretty good. What I like is that it is user-centered rather than government centered. It’s about what the visitor to the site wants to know, rather than what the government wants to say about itself. Far too many government sites are brochures for their agencies, rather than applications to serve their users.
- But the bar is constantly being raised. You have to ask yourself. In a world where services like Uber put location intelligence, automated routing, on demand labor together into an app that completely rethinks an industry hundreds of years old, creating a magical user experience where a car can find a passenger for pickup in real time…
- Why does government technology so often still look like this? This is the online application for food assistance in the state of California.
- Jake Solomon, who works at Code for America in the area of digital access to social services, asks why the process doesn’t instead look like this: the government knows you’ve left your job because your employer is no longer filing their regular payroll tax contributions - or perhaps you simply text the fact in - and the state, which knows your income level, automatically starts your benefits.
- My colleagues at Code for America, the United States Digital Service, and other similar organizations around the world, are working on problems like this - rethinking the way that government delivers services, so that they are developed in a way that is simple, beautiful, and easy to use, just like the best apps of the modern consumer technology world.
- Part of Code for America’s dream was to make public service “cool” again for technologists. Seven years on, we are seeing the fruits of that effort. Around America, rockstar tech talent is choosing government for the next act of their career. Above, from left, Mikey Dickerson (ex Google), head of the new US Digital Service, DJ Patil (ex-LinkedIn), first US Chief Data Scientist, below, Jascha Franklin-Hodge (ex Blue State Digital), CIO of Boston, Megan Smith (ex Google), US CTO, below, Twitter co-founder Jason Goldman now first White House Chief Digital Officer, and last but not least, successful Puerto Rican tech entrepreneur Giancarlo Gonzales, who became CIO of Puerto Rico.
- These people are bringing modern technology best practices to government: User centered design Agile, data-driven development Cloud deployment and modern technology stacks Open source software Open data Citizen engagement
- And the new US Digital Services Playbook, authored by Jennifer Pahlka while she was Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer, is being used to guide the development of new digital services at the Federal level and elsewhere around the US. In addition, Pahlka, who is also speaking here at the Summit, authored new guidance for Federal IT acquisition, and laid out the vision for the creation not only of the USDS but 18F, the new implementation unit at the General Services Administration.
- But you should hear about those things from Jen. One of the key ideas that we haven’t yet talked about today is that the most successful Silicon Valley technologies are platforms, and that government programs (both technology programs and real world programs) are most successful when they think of themselves as platforms as well. I wrote an influential essay on the subject, which I published as part of a book called “Open Government.” In it, I said:
- When I wrote that piece, I was using a lesson taught us by the Apple iPhone. The iPhone came out in 2007, and it was an amazing new phone. But then, In 2008, Apple launched the App Store, and it was that, almost more than the phone itself, that transformed the smartphone market. Rather than the few dozen apps provided by Apple and the phone carriers, suddenly there were thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and eventually over a million apps. And customers went crazy. The center ad from Apple was the notice of 25 billion downloads. We’re well over 100 billion now, and there are 1.5 million apps. This looked like a great target for government to emulate. Some critics have interpreted this ideas as saying that the government should get out of the provision of services, and leave them to the private sector. This couldn’t be more wrong! Think of the iPhone. Apple didn’t ship a bare phone with no applications! It delivered first class applications that fulfill all of the basic services, beautifully and well. And then they let the market add services that they would never have dreamed of. That is how government as a platform should work as well.
- People forget that government at its best does the same thing. Global positioning satellites are a great example. Here government investment in a hard, long term project, is paying off in uncounted new private sector developments. A huge project with uncertain return, started in 1973 and now showing enormous fruit in the 21st century, with huge value add from the commercial sector. Everything from maps and directions on your phone to future self-driving cars spring from this platform investment, and the key policy decision to open the data and make it available for commercial use. No one dreamed of the unexpected applications that became possible by opening up this data. That’s why we need open web services by default.
- After the 2012 election, when President Obama talked about his second term management agenda, open data, and its role in enabling private sector to build on government as a platform, was a key part of the message.
- So what’s still missing.
- Let’s look at the current healthcare.gov and think about it a minute. It’s an information site, but it also helps you to connect to government workers, insurance sites, and perform actual transactions.
- Here are some of the many things that are going on under the covers.
- Do we do all that just for healthcare.gov, and then do it all over again for immigration reform? Why does every government agency, every state, and every city contract for its own unique apps, which don’t work the same way or build on the same platform?
- The UK government has asked themselves this same question, and has come up with a better answer. Please roll this short video on the concept that was created by the UK Government Digital Service. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzPU6Pdw05s
- I’m not saying changing the way government contracts for and manages major technology programs will be easy.
- If we want to understand how sites transform themselves from applications to platforms, it’s important to study another great technology platform success story: Amazon. It’s not just the ubiquitous e-commerce site.
- It’s also a platform on which nearly every Silicon Valley startup, and many giant enterprises (and even government departments) build cloud services. Amazon was a pioneer in defining what we now call Cloud Computing. How did this happen?
- I’m proud to say I played a small role in this transformation. Back in 2003, I gave a talk about the coming transformation of the web into a platform (which I came to call Web 2.0), and in it, I said: “A platform beats an application every time.” Jeff heard the talk, and asked me to come give it to his tech team, and then to an All-hands meeting at Amazon.
- With characteristic insight and decisiveness, Jeff thought through what this meant, and then had the discipline to rebuild his company as a platform. As reported in Steve Yegge’s Platform Rant https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX, he wrote a memo that went something like this.
- They forced themselves to think through how to create a modular set of fundamental services that can be used like building blocks
- They not only were required to use them themselves - no more silos or custom services that no one else can use —
- but they also had to be the same services used internally that they would ultimately open up to the world.
- This of course is the hardest part of Jeff’s prescription for government to copy
- So this is my advice to government: Write RFPs to require contractors to build government sites on top of internal APIs that can also be used to support external 3rd party sites and services.
- This is the model that has given us travel aggregators like Travelocity and Expedia and Kayak, allowing us to book flights, hotels and more without going to every individual site. American Airlines provides both bulk data to resellers as well as offering its own retail site. Think of this as a Wholesale/Retail model.
- This is the same model used by government open data systems. The National Weather Service both runs its own retail weather site, but also is a wholesaler providing data to radio and television stations, internet weather services, smartphones, and even specialty sites for wind and kitesurfers. This is exactly the richness of delivery options that you get when government acts as a platform.
- Alyssa Ravasio of hipcamp.com (disclosure: I am an investor) has been leading an effort to implement this model for a new RFP from the department of the Interior for the site recreation.gov, which provides camping reservations for National Parks. She has put together a consortium called accessland.org to create a standard that will allow third party “retail” sites like Hipcamp to offer access not just to National Parks but also state and local parks, and even private campgrounds.
- I want to end on one further note, about the urgency of government getting deeper into the data platform business. Abraham Lincoln said. One role of government is to look out for the interests of everyone.
- Data is the 21st century railway. We need standards for things like identity, payment, location, credit history,health history, and many other specialized types of data that help us manage the services we deliver to citizens and other residents.
- Because unless government gets in the game, the rules and standards are going to be set by private companies, like Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Uber, who don’t always have everyone’s best interests at heart.
- There’s something else I should have talked about: a lesson from British history and the design of real world platforms. Most of the world uses a standard gauge of railroad track originally developed by George Stephenson in 1822. It was a foundational tool for the British Empire, and was eventually copied by other nations around the world.
- But ultimately, the lesson of the railroads, going back to George Stephenson, is that you standardize railroads by building tracks. This was also key to the success of the Internet. While other networking groups went into excruciating detail of pie-in-the-sky standards that were never built, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) model was (as articulated by Dave Clark) “No kings, no priests. Just a rough consensus and running code.” That’s why GDS director Mike Bracken is speaking such an important truth when he says “The strategy is delivery.” So go forth and build the future!
- Every platform needs to set policy.
- Every platform needs to set policy.