Chancellor George Osborne’s speech to the Google Zeitgeist event yesterday highlighted some key areas of technology-related government policy. Most of the detail in his speech brought to life policies we’ve heard before in one guise or other: open data; open government and the ‘digital by default’ commitment to public service reform. He led with plans to make the UK “the world leader in open data” and promised “to unlock some of the most valuable datasets still locked away in government servers”. The emphasis is firmly on exploiting the business opportunities from government data, which should please companies looking to profit from datasets in areas like healthcare analytics.
The biggest ‘new’ news was the appointment of Beth Noveck, who used to run President Obama’s Open Government Initiative. Noveck will be tasked with taking forward the UK’s ‘open source policy making’ initiative: in other words, things like the Red Tape Challenge, the crowd-sourcing exercise that invited the public to put forward ideas to cut regulation. At first blush Noveck appears just the right person for the job – an influential thought-leader who, to borrow Osborne’s words, “literally wrote the book on Wiki-Government”. But it’s not yet clear exactly what her role will be in the UK, or who she’ll report to; and the post appears to be less high profile than the one she left in the US.
TechMarketView subscribers will find further analysis of the topics Osborne covered including our views on SITS opportunities resulting from open data and digitised public services, in our UKHotViewsExtra article: Osborne unlocks government data. If you’re not yet a subscriber and you’d like more information please contact Deborah Seth.