Open Government

Foreword

Don Tapscott

Author of Wikinomics and Grown Up Digital

It goes without saying that as we step into the future, governments face incredibly complex challenges. Sustaining societies and economies in the face of climate change, energy shortages, poverty, demographic shifts, and security will test the ingenuity of those who wish to see, do, and participate in the public good.

Even though it’s the twenty-first century, most governments still reflect industrial-age organizational thinking, based on the same command-and-control model as industrial-age enterprises. Today’s bureaucracy and the industrial economy rose hand-in-hand. The economy needed roads, sewers, electrification, railways, and a sophisticated military. As government got bigger, and the revenue of government increased, it became necessary to build more elaborate procedures, structures, and controls, all run by new layers of professional managers. Nonpartisan hiring practices, pay scales, procedures for making appointments, financial systems, and audit processes were put in place. At the time, all of this was judged to be state of the art.

These bureaucracies operated like individual “stovepipes”—with information only flowing vertically and rarely between departments. During the last 40 years, governments, like corporations, applied computers to their work as each agency acquired and built data processing systems to meet their automation needs. The result is that old procedures, processes, and organizational forms were ...