A Look Back at the Decade: Government Tech Edition

With the closing of the decade, we thought it would be interesting to look back at the top technology headlines of 2009 and compare them to where the market is today.

Data on the Rise

Big news was the launch of data.gov in late May of 2009. The site was championed by the country's first Federal CTO, Vivek Kundra, as a way to enable citizens to access federal data. In addition to making the government more transparent, the hope was that private sector could use the massive amount of federal data in research and to create innovative programs and solutions. The site launched with 47 data sets and as of the last reporting (June 2017) it now holds approximately 200,000 datasets, representing about 10 million data resources. Beyond these numbers, data.gov's impact has been significant.

Thousands of programs can point to the site as the basis for their development. More importantly, it launched a new way of thinking in government. Agencies stopped being as territorial about their data and slowly but surely became more open to sharing it with one another and with the public as they saw what innovation can happen with simple access. In 2019, the vision of data.gov expanded with the Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary Government Data Act, requiring that nonsensitive government data be made available in machine-readable, open formats by default.

Cloud First to Cloud Smart

In 2009 the Obama administration established the Cloud-First mandate that changed the way agencies looked at acquiring and modernizing their systems. Each agency had to look first to a cloud solution to see if it fit their needs better than a traditional on-premise or hardware-based solution. Email and communication applications were some of the earliest systems moved to the cloud.

While there were many concerns about the security of cloud, acquisition processes proved to also be a huge stumbling block. Because of the consumption model of cloud, traditional procurement language and processes did not "fit" this new technology. The FAA was an early cloud adopter finding a way to acquire and manage cloud solutions for security, capacity, and application performance.

With minds open to cloud and administrative barriers removed, the government has moved from Cloud-First to Cloud-Smart, an evolution we've covered here on the blog.

Cybersecurity in Focus

President Obama issued a national cyber policy review in May 2009 that included 24 recommendations, including the need for a national cyber coordinator. Hiring for this position proved problematic and delayed the implementation of many of the recommendations by a year or more. Once the building blocks were in place, the government has spent the last 10 years getting organized around cyber defense and strengthening the nation's cybersecurity posture.

We've written here about the progress of the Continuous Diagnostic Mitigation (CDM) Program moving the government from identifying who and what was on their networks (and subsequently cleaning and tightening them up) to better reporting and proactivity related to cyber threats and incidents.

These are only three areas that have changed drastically in the last 10 years. There's also of course the rise of mobile and apps, the continued focus on improving government "customer" service, and the application of technology in the healthcare field. We'd love to hear your picks for the biggest tech or policy evolution over the last decade. Share your thoughts in the comments.