Springboarding on the back of today's announcement it would be good to see some equally bold initiatives focused not so much on conservation but on the use of technology to tackle the underlying issues. However much we conserve, the demand in energy growth is not going to abate. Some projections talk of a relentless 40% or more growth in energy demand over the coming years. The UK's green computing competition challenges entrants with coming up with ideas of how to use technology to produce a greener planet, just one practical example of an open door for those with innovative ideas of how we can use technology in smarter ways.

Talking with a wide range of technologists and scientists both here in the UK and overseas, it's clear to me that the current oil price hikes and downward economic cycle could actually be an opportunity not a threat. Many of us have wondered for years what sort of disruption it would take to break out of our current out-dated models of working, such as the rush-hour commute to work in inefficient office buildings, all of which are major contributors to the UK's current carbon footprint.

Well, now we may be at the point when we have an answer. If we can seize the current opportunity, we could enable technology to deliver the transformational changes in our working models that companies such as BT have already delivered inside their organisations.

In "truly green computing" back in 2006, I wrote:

Flexible working is much spoken of but in reality little delivered. Yet its impact on patterns of road utilisation and hence the environment could be significant. There are also much broader, negative impacts that arise from our out-dated work model: such as the growth in commuter villages, with no shops, schools or other community facilities. Enabling some of the active workforce to remain within such communities during the working day would have the potential to help re-energise them and result in more equitable economic distribution and improved, more sustainable communities.

So what is it that prevents us embracing the radical impacts that new technology can have on the way that we live and work? It's not a new problem: in the mid-eighteenth century, no-one foresaw that a little over half a century later one person would be able to do the work of two hundred.

So, yes please: let's adopt a green agenda for IT. But let's not go for an easy, marketing-led and superficial answer that takes a narrow view of the problem. Let's really show the potential of IT and our industry to play a leading role in rethinking the way we operate as a society and in addressing our own operational impacts.

What was missing back then was the pivotal event that could make this change happen in a sustainable, large-scale, UK-wide way. I think in the current climate of rising energy prices and economic downturn we may finally have an answer. An answer that could enable us to both soften the impacts of these global economic forces and improve the way the UK lives and works in sustainable ways that will benefit us for generations to come.

Now what it needs is the will to take advantage of the opportunity before us. Hopefully today is just the start of something much, much bigger.

Technorati tags: innovation environment sustainability carbon emissions technology policy

Here are a few of the soundbites I captured (all errors in transcription are entirely my own work):

"... interoperability is a headache when it comes to accessibility: it means what works on one platform won't work on another ... attempts to impose standards always end in disaster ... citizens seem confused, on the one hand worrying about sharing of personal data, on the other annoyed when information isn't shared smartly resulting in them having to repeatedly inform numerous organisations of the same thing ... key to citizen trust is enabling them to decide who can share what with whom, and when, rather than organisations taking it upon themselves to decide what they can and can't share ...governments should never cherry pick technologies: industry will drive change anyway ... governments should always adopt a market-led approach: if there is demand for a change, such as interoperability, it will happen anyway ... government should not engage in the technical issues of the marketplace, just set out what it needs to achieve and demand the market delivers to those needs ... the technology industry has a better informed perspective than any single government since it services over 140 governments and markets around the world ... standards need to be flexible and extensible ... governments should never specify standards (remember the costly disasters of OSI and GOSIP), they should make use of what's there but provide clear feedback to suppliers ... cultural issues, not technical, are the biggest blockers to interoperability ... why did it take 60 years for the technology industry to evolve some standard file formats? ... we now have effective, two-way mechanisms in place to better inform product design and ensure interoperability amongst technology vendors, but standards bodies are stuck in the past: they need to be more agile, more focused and more in touch with the realities of the market ... the IT skills gap in the UK is a growing disaster."

Our own commitment and work on interoperability, if you're not already familiar with it (and would like to be) can be found here. I'll also mention the paper I wrote in 2005 on Government Interoperability: Enabling the Delivery of E-Services which I think is still largely as relevant now as it was then.

Technorati tags: standards interoperability technology policy

In setting out some initial thoughts to seed debate, I'm going to draw upon a wide variety of ideas and initiatives I've encountered in over 20 years of working in the technology industry across both private and public sectors. And 30 years plus of designing and using technology if you include my early encounters with the North Kent Amateur Computer Club, a UK 101, a soldering iron and a Commodore PET.

I'm incorporating some of the technology policy vision and ideas set out by Craig Mundie, our Chief Research and Strategy Officer, in various speeches around the world since he often puts his finger right on the pulse. And it was Craig, after all, who created my current role, and indeed the concept of establishing lead technology advisors based in countries such as the UK in the first place.

But I don't want this to be a one-way process. Alongside welcoming all comments either directly to me or via the comments facility on this site, I intend to work with an eclectic mix of collaborators to seed an upcoming wiki where anyone interested in developing the thoughts and ideas can contribute. The initial outcome will be a mix of online content and a more traditional, but snazily designed, booklet that brings together the best ideas. The optimal outcome however I see as being an impact on policymaking itself as the ideas are adopted and find their way into the mainstream. This is the only outcome that truly matters.

I want to start with some facts, not to send people scurrying away for a coffee and a headache tablet but to place some of the ideas I want to see around technology developed in context (including for example health and education).

It's already clear that Information Technology (IT) is an essential, integral part of our UK economy. In 2007, IT spending was some 45.7 billion GBP, running at around 3.4% of GDP (compared with an average of 2.5% of GDP worldwide). In 2007, IT employment also accounted for some 1,374,000 jobs. To put that in a comparative context, that's 300,000 more people than worked in the coal mining industry at its peak. IT is serious, big business in the UKs new economy. And over the next four years, the UK's IT industry is expected to generate 14.4 billon GBP in new tax revenues and contribute new revenues of 27.8 billion GBP to our GDP.

As well as a significant contribution at the UK macro economic level, technology also enables organisations to increase their efficiency and productivity. It contributes to network effects like lower transaction costs and faster innovation. The Internet promotes global trade by better connecting buyers and sellers and by cutting market entry costs. IT investment and use cause a shift toward workers with higher skill sets and higher wages. And, as is evident in the UK figures above, of course a thriving IT industry is itself a key driver of growth. Taken together, all of these help attract additional investment, both local and foreign.

If used smartly, technology now provides almost every country with the opportunity to compete with established global competitors, something that just wasn't feasible in the past. But it's not quite that simple because, to make all this possible, we first need to resolve fundamental issues such as education and healthcare.

Why do I believe that? Because without an education system that produces skilled workers, countries can't create the pool of talent that they need to compete globally. And without adequate healthcare, society as a whole will find it hard to thrive.

Information technology has a vital role to play in solving both of these problems. To do so successfully, modern governments need to develop a better understanding of how to integrate technology as a fundamental policy lever rather than persist with an out-dated view of IT as merely a "necessary evil" or overhead for administering and operating aspects of policy.

So over some of my next postings, I'll consider some of the issues around health and education in particular before going on to look at some of the wider aspects of technology as a policy lever.

Technorati tags: UK future Britain manifesto for technology policymaking politics Microsoft technology policy

After all, none of this is new: the idea of opening up public sector data and providing open interfaces dates back to at least the 1990's and over the years many of us have tried to chivvy things along, notably IdealGovernment and mySociety. And of course the US and others have been there before us (and hopefully we'll be smart enough to learn from their lessons, such as the naive mistakes some made in publishing detailed crime figures that went right down to identifying individual properties. Ouch).

All of which perhaps proves the point I've often made that it takes 10-20 years from IT innovation to mainstream understanding and adoption (which places us at about the halfway point towards what we wanted to happen back in the 1990s, so I guess in another 10 years I'll finally see some of the outcomes I've long been waiting for).

Neither too do I mean just the type of smart use of the Internet and the Web that is attributed with having helped Barack Obama's campaign in motivating the technorati to become more engaged with the political process in the US.

Of course, all of these aspects are important in ensuring that technology plays a positive role in our society. But they're not my main focus when I consider the question of whether technology could swing the balance at the next general election.

No, what I mean is that I see a growing and serious appetite in some quarters to take onboard the lessons about how technology needs to become part of policymaking itself at its inception rather than as something to be thought about afterwards (generally, it seems, in terms of constructing large, monolithic, centralised databases that appear to be modelled on a 1960's "Boys Own" understanding of how computers work).

What I sense is an appetite among some politicians and advisors for a better understanding of how technology can fundamentally alter the very nature of policymaking itself. When, that is, it is properly understood prior to and during the policymaking period, rather than, as at present, something you throw at implementation of a policy downstream. Yet all too often technology seems relegated to little more than the digital age equivalent of the typewriter and the filing cabinet, and narrow discussions focused on cyclic technology fads rather than user needs and long-term strategy.

Information technology has great transformational potential across our society. In particular, it has the power to transform education, healthcare, and the economic development of our future Britain. Yet current policy-making all too often continues much as it did before the advent of the current digital age.

Technologists, policymakers and civil society need to find a new way of communicating and working together to decide just how our new digital age should be shaped. And what sort of world we want to live in over the next five, ten, twenty and more years.

We are about to experience a change as dramatic as if we were moving directly from the Stone Age into the Industrial Age. Yet this coming technological revolution is little understood and little prepared for. If the UK is to take true advantage of this coming era, we need to understand technology's potential far better (and, equally, we need to be honest about its propensity for more "toxic" outcomes). We need to challenge our long-held, reactionary instincts about the nature of society and how we live, learn, work and play. And we need everyone to understand far more clearly the implications of this era and how technology can be harnessed for good, enhancing our wellbeing, security, privacy, prosperity and society.

I think it was the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson who first used the phrase "the white heat of technology": adopting technology as a true technology lever and as an inspiration for improved policymaking. That vision has waned in the intervening years and some forty-something years later here in the UK we still may not have achieved "most wired nation" status (as South Korea has), but we are finally seeing serious levels of broadband penetration, ensuring more and more of the UK has higher speed access to the Internet.

Like the impact of the railways and later the roads, as this infrastructure becomes embedded across the country, it will set in motion a chain of changes beyond anything we might imagine today.

I'm going to use a few of my upcoming blogs to set out ideas for how we might deliver the type of technology-enabled policymaking in key areas such as economic development, healthcare and education. The sort of vision I allude to in my "manifesto for technology" teaser (requires Silveright).

In a world where the UK's competitors are making smart use of digital technologies, relegating technology to a secondary function of merely assisting with administration and operational processes is no longer a sustainable method of policymaking.

Technology belongs in the policymaking forge itself: at the very centre of the whiteheat.

Watch this space ... and I look forward to a lively, informed discussion.

Technorati tags: UK future Britain manifesto for technology policymaking politics Microsoft technology policy

More details are available here and here.

This is the second grid competition with which I've been involved and I'm confident that it will provoke even greater interest and participation than the original did back in 2006. Last time around the competition was not themed in this way and there were a wide diversity of entries from using grid computing for incoming asteroid tracking to combating terrorism.

The winner in 2006 was Gokop Goteng, who proposed the use of grid's processing power to crunch real time CCTV footage and biometric data to identify potential high-risk incidents. As part of his prize Gokop went on to present his solution at our annual European Research and Innovation Day in Brussels in the presence of folks such as Bill Gates.

So check out the competition rules. And if you've got some smart ideas about how to apply grid computing to one of the most pressing issues of our age, get cracking!

Technorati tags: innovation grid computing competition technology policy environment sustainability

The article reported how the "alleged fraudster" had forced online publications to retrospectively remove information they had published about his activities, including a genuine fraud conviction in another country.

The issue was less the specifics of this case, but the fact that the articles, as originally published, were retrospectively altered. In the "old days" it would not have been possible to have physically removed or altered every printed copy already out there in the wild: our official records could not have been modified in the way that the digital age now makes possible. Researchers would have been able to track down the original article, as well as any later updates. Now online digital records are as accurate and authentic as the changes made by the last person to edit them. Records can be edited on a whim and at a moment's notice.

Our concept of history and the historic record suddenly feels highly transient and highly vulnerable. And the problem is more widespread. What happens, for example, if you order something from an e-commerce site based on a description online at a particular moment in time, but receive something different? Yet when you try to complain, the site has been altered and no longer reflects what was there at the time you ordered. How do you prove what you originally contracted to purchase?

The digital age clearly raises profound questions about how we ensure a reliable, authentic record of the times in which we live and the information and knowledge we capture and disseminate. And bear in mind when I refer to digital bits I mean not just information as we tend to think of it, but everything from our financial information (money!) held in bank accounts through to our biometrics and our DNA.

I wrote a piece some years back about the concept of the "digital dark ages", setting out the view that unless we find better ways of handling digital bits, people in the future may well look back on this era as one about which they know remarkably little. Or (worse) that what they do apparently "know" cannot be relied upon because there is no assurance that the digital bits that have been preserved are an accurate record of what actually happened.

I'm not sure much has changed since I wrote that piece. And of course the ability to re-edit and continually refine digital information does have its upside too, as the best of Wikipedia illustrates.

But I hope before we go too much further down this road that we can get some smart minds and smart technologies together to help address the issue around authentic records. The digital age has too much of benefit to offer us for us to let it be undermined by issues like this.

Technorati tags: standards interoperability digital archives technology policy