Technology Opportunities & Challenges
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Web 2.0 technologies and low-cost online collaborative tools can fundamentally alter the way government and its agencies carry out their business. They have the power to eliminate barriers and walls and liberate the processing and movement of information in the public sector. Social media technologies could encourage unprecedented collaboration between individuals within agencies, between different agencies and jurisdictions and between government, its partners and its constituents. This potential cannot, however, be harnessed without organizational changes that now impede its realization. Government leaders will need to develop a business case for change, as well as overcome cultural resistance to requisite organizational changes.
While the Internet can serve as a platform to promote unprecedented collaboration, rapid growth in the Internet also brings with it certain risks. Cyberspace is growing; the number of organizations that use it extensively is growing; and the amount of sensitive information it contains is growing, as is ease of access and distribution. While these are all good things, what makes this growth alarming is that it is stronger and faster than the growth of security and monitoring. Private data, intellectual property, cyber infrastructure and even national security can be compromised by deliberate attacks, inadvertent security lapses, and the vulnerabilities of the relatively immature, unregulated frontier — the global Internet.
As companies and jurisdictions grow more internationally interdependent and data systems more interlinked, data protection needs to become a top global priority. Data drives our enterprises; we need to understand and mitigate the risks that cyber-criminals pose to government operations.
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