21 October, 2008

FutureGov Summit: a tale of government, toy ducks and bad suits


Pictured: John Suffolk, GCIO of the United Kingdom, meets the Duck of Luck.


Although we had less transvestites and elephants than in 2007, last week’s FutureGov Summit ticked pretty much every other box. 120 very senior government officials; 17 sponsors; distinct strategy and technology tracks; afternoon break out sessions; and more gamelan music and Balinese dancing than you can shake a stick at.

In addition to the support of the world’s two largest IT companies – Microsoft and IBM – we even had a track sponsored by the Singapore authorities to profile the work of the city state’s ICT vendors to build a world class e-services infrastructure. So this year, even more so than last year, we saw the FutureGov Summit ‘arrive’ as a valued and valuable experience for top officials in the region, as well as the world class solutions providers looking to reach out to them.

I think back to how it all started and I’m amazed – not just at how far we’ve come, but also at how many of the people who were involved in that first event are still involved, lending their very considerable support to the work of the Alphabet team.

I’ve spoken before about Laurence Millar, New Zealand’s GCIO, and his sincere support since our initial event in The Fullerton Hotel. Back in 2005 that event was essentially the ‘first birthday’ celebration of Public Sector Technology & Management magazine (since renamed to FutureGov magazine). Besides Laurence, we were able to welcome back longstanding friends such as Tim Diaz de Rivera from the Philippines; RS Sharma from Jharkhand; J Satyanarayana from India’s NISG; Dr Salim Al-Ruzaiqi from Oman's ITA; Reshan Dewapura from ICTA in Sri Lanka; Juthika Ramanathan from Singapore’s ACRA ... and many others. Additionally, it was great to receive the ongoing support from the teams at Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Juniper, Kodak and NCS – all of whom are previous sponsors who liked what they saw and came back for more.

Because we really are a community of practice, our events bring people together for a genuine idea exchange – and this is something that’s part of the DNA of both the company, and the structure of our event. Instead of classroom seating, our top officials (including local and state government ministers from China and India) all sit around a hollow square, enabling them to face one another and debate issues openly.

This sense of community was on display at the gala dinner of the Government Technology Awards at the end of the event. Here we celebrated the very best government technology deployments across Asia Pacific and the Gulf States. 450 government nominations were distilled down to a shortlist of 55, which after much pontification by our judges, resulted in 11 very deserving winners. Check out Alphabet Media’s corporate site for the official PR release about this.

By the time the end of the evening came, there were a lot of hugs and back slaps and photo snaps as all the participants – by now friends – prepared to return to their respective offices with new relationships, new ideas, and a definite spring in their step about meeting the challenge of public sector modernisation in the region.

As I mentioned in my remarks at the gala dinner, the team at Alphabet Media is small – and an event of the scale and ambition of the FutureGov Summit is not an easy thing to pull together. However the reason we’re able to do what we do is simply that we really are very committed to supporting the essential work of public sector officials to improve their productivity, service delivery and transparency. There’s no more important work in the region, such is the vital role of government. I’m proud of Alphabet’s role in bringing people together – and even more proud of my team for all their hard work in the making of this event over the last 12 months.

Of course nothing runs entirely without hitch, so in the interests of full disclosure, I can admit to the embarrassment of leaving both of my freshly-tailored suits behind in Singapore. The cheap and nasty thing I managed to pick up in the back streets of Kuta was really the only cheap and nasty thing about FutureGov Summit. Happily it has already been handed over to the Salvation Army, though they didn’t seem ecstatic to receive it.

Ps. Thanks to Microsoft’s Chris Levanes, we even managed to serve ‘Duck Tartare’ for the lunch on the last day (see photo). NB. No Ducks of Luck were harmed in the production of this event.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

FutureGov has come a long way since the first event in Singapore in 2005, and James deserves recognition for what he and his team have achieved. Each government in the region is on a remarkably similar journey – transformation, joined up citizen-centric services, engagement and participation, and multi-channel delivery, especially to mobile devices.

None of us has the resources or wisdom to travel this journey on our own – FutureGov gave us the opportunity to share with other governments, and is invaluable to accelerate progress, learn from mistakes and deliver benefits more quickly.

The award winners were representative of the innovation and great service delivery that is taking place across the Asia-Pacific region – I am already looking forward to the next event.

Wednesday, 22 October, 2008  

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