MOSCOW: The new American administration of Barack Obama is planning to appoint a chief technology officer, following the lead of most large corporations nowadays. Should other countries have one, too?
Rather than slavishly copy the United States, I think most countries should have a chief information officer – someone who thinks about information as an agent of change, not just as an agent of efficiency. The free flow of information constrains official power and gives individuals the power to act for themselves. It is the essence of a free market, and it should also be the essence of a free democracy. People should know what their officials are doing, what their government’s policies cost, who pays for them, and who benefits.
Of course, such a government CIO couldn’t make all that happen alone. But he or she could encourage it – everywhere information is used and everywhere it’s hidden.
The CIO wouldn’t have policymaking authority per se, but he or she should sit high in the government – ideally with little bureaucratic encumbrance. The CIO would not have a fiefdom and would not compete for power or turf with other senior officials, but would simply remind the president or other people of the role of information every time it was appropriate.
To the extent that more than persuasion is required, that would be up to the president [head of government]. Indeed, the CIO would illustrate the power of information’s power by using it, rather than legal power, to persuade people to do the right thing.
No governmental “information agency is needed. The CIO would operate more like a “virus, spreading everywhere, rather than being an additional appendage grafted onto the government.
This virus would continuously nudge government agencies to become more effective and accessible, rather than merely more efficient. Ideally, it would affect employees and citizens by changing their expectations. It wasn’t laws that created online banking; it was changed expectations and consumer demand. (Yes, there were a few laws about liability, but they played only an enabling role.)
In short, the CIO would not press the government on “tech policy, such as the rollout of broadband, but would set strategy about how to collect, manage, and disseminate information for public use and analysis. The CIO would consult agencies on their public relations – but public relations would be redefined, as in the non-government world, to mean listening as well as talking, and to mean admitting faults as a way to correct them.
What the CIO should not do is almost as important. He or she should not attempt to centralize information, but rather to make it flow more smoothly. Call it information liquidity, akin to financial liquidity.
What specific goals should the CIO pursue?
Openness and transparency do not mean simply making everything available online, but making information easy to get to, compare, and analyze. This includes everything from actual data to how those data are represented, facilitating comparisons of data across organizations and across time. The data also need to be easy to manipulate so that third parties – whether commercial data services or journalists – can create compelling and revealing visualizations.
A government CIO also needs to remind us that as wonderful as the Internet is, it is most useful to people who can read and write. The digital divide isn’t much of a divide anymore; it’s the literacy divide that is holding many people back.
The CIO should not be the minister of education, but he or she can provide advice on the use of information technology for everything from curriculum content to the institutional changes that can be wrought by better teacher-parent-student communications concerning homework assignments, grades, and even school-bus schedules and lunch menus. Just as consumers can rate products, parents and students should be able to rate and provide feedback on the performance of individual teachers.
The CIO also needs to take a serious look at information security – in conjunction with the CIOs of other countries (since cybercrime knows no borders). A big factor that contributes to the existence of viruses, spam, and the like is their lucrativeness. Unlike the drug trade, legalization would not make much of the problem go away, but the issue is similar, because economics plays a much bigger role than is generally acknowledged.
Two big changes are necessary. First, sending an e-mail will need to cost more than it does currently. Second, Internet service providers, which are in the best position to manage the security of individual users’ machines, need to get more involved – again with a system that understands the costs of poor security and charges those costs back to the people responsible. (Just as we require drivers to have insurance, maybe we should require users either to buy security services from their ISP or to post some kind of bond/insurance.)
There are many such examples; all we need is better information to find them and take action, whether inside the government or in the private sector.
A government can do three major things: make (and enforce) laws, spend (or take) money, and inspire people. Every country needs a CIO who can inspire its people with the power of information.
Esther Dyson,chairman of EDventure Holdings, is an active investor in a variety of start-ups around the world. Her interests include information technology, health care and private aviation and space travel. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).
