By John Zipperer

With a growing number of government agencies looking to IT as a way to make their operations and performance more transparent, Beth Simone Noveck couldn't be happier. Noveck, a law professor at New York Law School, is the author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings Institution Press, 2009). Her book is a clarion call to revamp government's relationship with people. But Noveck is no longer only making suggestions as a government outsider. Today she also serves in the Obama administration as Deputy CTO for Open Government. This puts Noveck, the person California's CIO calls "the largest proponent of the concept of freeing the data," in position to transform her vision of transparent government into reality.

Washington isn't alone. Governments around the world are being pressured to increase access to their information. Transparency is seen by governments as a way to better serve citizens, contracting partners and other branches of government. A worldwide trend toward granting more access to information for appropriate audiences has emerged and is gaining traction.

The effort got a high-level boost this year when, on his first day of office, U.S. President Obama issued a memorandum committing his administration to "an unprecedented level of openness in government." (See sidebar, "A Bipartisan Push for Transparency," p. 25.) Whether this pledge can be honored will likely depend, in part, on the government's long-term commitment to the process. It will also depend on the continued development and availability of IT applications and services that let governments easily combine data from multiple connected systems, then feed that data to citizens and others over Web portals and dashboards.

To do so, however, governments will need databases and system management tools behind those dashboards and portals, to help IT services find information and handle it properly. "Data must be put in context, be made searchable, be rendered secure and presented on demand to oversight teams in varying formats," says Joe Page, Regional VP at CA.