We are seeing a burgeoning of innovation in the application of information technologies in the public sector.  One trend is the increasing willingness of governments to make their data available to citizens and other organizations outside of government through which they can create their innovative services. Historically, the US Security and Exchange Commission's initiative to make its data on public companies available through the Edgar project unleashed a tremendous amount of innovation in ways for this financial data to be analyzed by investors.  More recently, the US national government has begun to catalog publicly available data on its Data.gov Web site, and this effort has been mirrored at the local level by initiatives such as the datasf.org Web site launched by the municipal government in San Francisco.

But just making the data available is not enough; it must be made usable by visualizing it in ways that create insight, or embedded into other tools. Several organizations advocating for greater government transparency are creating very innovative applications that visualize public data.  Hyperlocal aggregators of public and private data have created applications that provide information relevant to an individual address.

Governments can also make their data more usable: One example is a new interactive IT Dashboard that captures spending and performance data for IT projects across the US Federal government.  Click here.

We have documented the actions that a government agency must take in order to reach the next level of impact using the Web in an article entitled "E-government 2.0."  While there are some promising public sector examples driving impact using the Web, the efforts of many government agencies seem to have plateaued in recent years. Based on our experience studying and serving the public sector, we argue that there are three key areas in which government agencies will have to take action: 1. Improving the governance of their IT management practices so that the Web is considered an integral service delivery channel, with line-of-business leaders made responsible, establishing product management teams, and becoming more data-driven,  2. Investing in Web capabilities, especially in user needs assessment and segmentation (i.e., marketing), usability, and product management, and 3. Embracing open innovation in application development and user participation in content creation: Click here.