Government investment in ICT is growing. At Forrester we expect the overall government ICT budget to reach $346 billion in 2011, growing to $382 billion in 2012 or by about 10%.  That makes government one of the largest vertical industries – almost double the size of the retail industry, well above the telecom industry and actually behind only professional services and financial services.  As government soul searching intensifies in the wake of the financial crisis, and in light of global competition and economic recovery, we expect the dawn of a new government – not “big government” but a government that operates more effectively and certainly more efficiently.  What does that look like, and what does that entail?  We see three primary trends:

• A move to greater performance management processes with an emphasis on KPIs for specific programs rather than just budget targets.
• An increased dependence on technology but with an eye to rationalization and consolidation, and an increased role of a centralized CIO to coordinate technology adoption;
• And, a growing adoption of enterprise management tools with visibility not only into department level programs but including executive dashboards to enable a holistic view of the government. 

Giving workers flexibility in when, where, and how they work is a hot topic right now. The US federal government has passed legislation to make telecommuting easier and multinational firms, like State Street, are instituting programs to let employees choose when and where they work. Why are organizations emphasizing this so much? Mobile and remote employees have more control over their work/life balance and won't have to stop working if circumstance prevents them from coming to the office. Furthermore, they can easily be collocated with clients and allow the company to reduce its real estate and carbon footprint. However, as this chart from my new report, Demystifying The Mobile Workforce, shows, information workers may be moving more quickly to this flexible way of working than their companies currently acknowledge: 66% of the North American and European workforce work outside the office at some point during a month.

If business leaders and their counterparts in IT are to get in front of this trend, they have to understand their mobile and remote workforce. For example, who is shifting work between the office and home? What technology are they using to do so? Do they believe that the company is doing a good job of providing them the policies and technology to work in this way? If business and IT leaders can't answer these questions, they will be hard pressed to accurately:

At today’s Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple unveiled iCloud, the company’s long-expected solution for the multi-device, multi-connection world. With iCloud, Apple has liberated its customers’ iPhones, iPads, and [more recent] iPod touches from their tether to a Mac or PC, recognizing that these products play an increasingly primary role in their owners’ lives. For product strategists (vendor strategists can read my colleague Frank Gillett's take here), the most important attributes of iCloud are:

• Its pricing. How much does iCloud cost Apple’s customers? Zero. Zip. Zilch. Well, at least in the basic form that Apple contends will suffice for a vast majority of its customers, iCloud is free for anyone who owns an iOS or MacOS device provided she doesn’t require more than 5 GB of storage for all the stuff Apple will hold on her behalf. Apple’s message to its customers is: you’ve always got your stuff, on whichever device you prefer at this moment. This stands in stark contrast to other cloud-based services like Dropbox and Sugarsync that force consumers to think carefully about butting up against their storage limits, just as the soon-to-be-the-default capped data plans force them to think about how many bits are traveling up and down which network.

[Co-authored with Charles Green]

In my last blog I asked the question, “What’s it take to be a smart city?” One of the critical elements lies in smart governance. Smart governance takes leadership, coordination, and collaboration. (Take a look at my recent report, "Smart City Leaders Need Better Governance Tools.") Part of this leadership is finding innovative and cost-effective solutions to intractable problems – and that often lies in engaging constituents for input on the problems and feedback on the solutions.  As Charles and I were working on another project, we came across a great example of a US state looking outside the box to solve a real and frustrating problem faced by its citizens.