Wikinomics: Gov2.0 challenges relate to people and institutions

As someone who worked in the e-Government trenches almost a decade ago, so much of what I see in Government 2.0 highlights how far we’ve come and how fundamental the challenges remain:

Government 2.0 is about much more than blogs, wikis and social networking. It’s about how the government sources expertise and how it orchestrates capability. It’s about marshalling the collective intelligence of society to address big issues like climate change and fiscal reform. It’s also about delivering services like education, health care and social security benefits more effectively by treating citizens as co-innovators rather than passive, inert consumers.

Social media has a role to play. But the hard problems relate to the people and institutions. A complex machinery of government has grown organically over the past century with multiple levels of government, hundreds of agencies, and overlapping lines of accountability. The complexity makes it difficult to implement reforms and change in the public sector is almost always slow and incremental.

Never was about the technology.  Still isn’t.