Photo of Bruce McConnell Bruce McConnell President Government Futures, LLC In the 08/02/2007 edition of ExecutiveBiz we had a chance to catch up with Bruce McConnell, President of Government Futures, LLC. Bruce McConnell is President of Government Futures, LLC, a Washington-based consultancy. Since 2000, McConnell has been the President of McConnell International, which provides advice to corporate senior management responsible for developing and executing market and sector strategy, when government is a factor. We catch up with Bruce why he is involved with Web 2.0, social networking, and what agencies have staked out space in Second Life.

ExecutiveBiz: Why did you get involved in Web 2.0? Bruce McConnell: In early 2006 I became fascinated by the possibility that collaboration could become easy because of new technologies and new ways of combining them. We face an unprecedented need to find new ways of working together across organizational boundaries. The tools to do that are showing up at just the right moment in history. ExecutiveBiz: How do you define Web 2.0, anyway? Is it real, or just a buzzword? Bruce McConnell: Behind every buzzword is a kernel of reality. Like all “next big things” there is hype, but there is also something fundamentally exciting going on. To me, Web 2.0 combines three trends: social networking, collective intelligence, and what I call service-oriented software. Social networking is most visible in Facebook, MySpace, and Linked-in, but it’s also about instant messaging, easy videoconferencing, and blogs – tools that are less scary to the government/commercial environment. The benefit of these tools is to share information quickly. The challenge is to harvest input from many people in a useable manner. Collective intelligence is the idea that a community of reasonably well-informed individuals can produce better insights into complex problems than the traditional handful of experts. This is the foundation of the open source software movement, which government is seriously tapping into. At Government Futures we use collective intelligence tools in our research, including prediction markets, which allow people to bet on the likelihood on future events. And it’s pretty widely known that both the diplomatic and intelligence communities are using wikis to share knowledge internally. Service-oriented software includes the formal discipline of service-oriented architecture, but I mean it as a broader term that encompasses easy plug-and-play via interface standards, modular code, and mash-ups (i.e., applications that combine content from more than one source into an integrated experience). ExecutiveBiz: You mention wikis and open source in government. Is there other evidence that government is getting on the Web 2.0 bandwagon? Bruce McConnell: Government is definitely a follower in this arena, but there are pioneers. One is Susan Turnbull at GSA, the host of Intergovernmental Communities of Practice, which enable sharing of multiple perspectives and best practices across federal, state, and local governments. Several agencies are quietly experimenting with prediction markets. NASA and NOAA, among others, have staked out real estate in Second Life. Blogging has not taken off yet in most federal agencies, but is alive and well among politicians at all levels of government. A recent study lists 17 blogs by members of Congress and 57 by State legislators as of April 2007. Mayors, police and fire chiefs are also using blogs to communicate with their constituents. ExecutiveBiz: That sounds promising, but rather limited. Bruce McConnell: There are many barriers to innovation in government. There is generally little upside and plenty of downside risk. Much of the operation occurs in a fishbowl. Even honest mistakes can become fodder for a Washington Post “exposé.” So, experimenting with new techniques requires leadership and courage. That being said, I think there is great potential here, and a certain inevitability. We found major progress in the public health arena, for example. Government will be relying much more heavily on community-generated, transparent, public information to do its business three-to-five years from now. ExecutiveBiz: What’s the most surprising thing you are seeing about Web 2.0? Bruce McConnell: There’s an unusually large awareness gap between the West and East Coasts in this area. Web 2.0 is already old hat in the Valley. It’s instant death if you use the term in your start-up’s business plan. Yet here in Washington people are still unfamiliar with the term and its implications. The culture gap between the coasts had been narrowing in recent years, but this phenomenon has reversed that trend, which surprised me. I thought the coasts had become more tightly linked. ExecutiveBiz: So, what’s the bottom line? Bruce McConnell: Web 2.0 is here to stay. Government needs to adopt it in a smart way if it is going to keep up with citizen expectations in the years ahead. To do that, some things have to change in the way government operates. Happily, the tools will actually support those changes. What’s needed, as usual, is courage and leadership. For more information about Government Futures, LLC, visit www.governmentfutures.com. Interview with Bruce McConnell conducted by JD Kathuria. Enjoy this interview? Digg It! Check out more Executive Spotlights ...