While it may be that the Geeks shall inherit the Earth, you will have to forgive me for thinking that government would never be conquered. Arcane IT systems, technophobes as far as the eye can see and one data breach after another, it appeared that there was little hope the government geek looking to rewire the red tape and truly transform government through tech.

But no! The once small and closed community of government techies appears to be growing and opening up with geeks popping up in high places, Invasion of the Body Snatchers style. Driven in no small part by the appointment of “IT enthusiast and blogging pioneer among MPs” Tom Watson to the role of Cabinet Office Minster for Transformational Government in January 2008, the profile and priority of all thing geeky has rocketed in what has been a pretty tech unsavvy government thus far.

Dozing off yet? If not, you deserve a pat on the back for managing to stay with it past the phrase ‘civil service principles for participation online’ (sorry, now I really have sent you to sleep!).

So why am I trying to sedate you? Well the Friday before last I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend a session hosted by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Cabinet Office billed as “the Power of Information Taskforce Seminar for Civil Service Bloggers”.

In the blur that was last week, one tweet stood out and woke me from my ambient daze. Possibly after a night of broken sleep brought about by nightmarish images of Dale Winton loading up trolley loads of computers for government supermarket sweep style (or not), Tom Watson (our man in Parliament as Minister for Transformational Government and keen blogger and member of the Twitterati) appeared to start Thursday with a cheery determination to tackle the area of IT procurement in government.

As tipping points go, last week seemed like a pretty significant one in the world of UK government and social media. It was the week when Prime Minister Gordon Brown went on the attack looking to rebuff claims by opposition leader David Cameron once and for all that he was nothing more than an “analogue politician in a digital age”.

In what I think is the first move of its kind in UK local government (although please correct me if I’m wrong!), from today I will be taking on the role of Social Media Manager at the London Borough of Barnet. Initially on a two day a week six month basis, I am joining the Communications and Consultation Team to scope out and implement the council’s Social Media Strategy.

Things have been a little hectic since the Social Innovation Camp, so much so I haven’t had the chance to write about the success of Enabled by Design, which actually went on to win the Camp and can now rightly call itself a “social start up”!

Since then, FutureGov has been supporting founder Denise Stephens on an amazing circuit of events, from MiniBar to the RSA’s Networks Exchange and most recently the Innovation Unit’s innovationexchange - with more to come (including the launch of the Catalyst Awards later this week)! We have been overwhelmed with the interest in the project and blown away by the generosity and support of a wide array of people and organisations willing to give up their free time and expertise to help us move things forward.

The applications have been assessed, the marks have been counted and now the results are in. With the unenviable task of whittling down over 70 applications, the advisory board to the camp has decided on its final 6.

Hosted by the socially active Young Foundation, supported by public sector heavy weights NESTA and the Cabinet Office’s Office of the Third Sector and hard wired by the Yahoo! Developer Network, things are well set for48 hours of mass collaboration, creativity - and fun!

It’s not often events run at 6pm on a Monday appeal enough to get you to give up your evening, but this week I attended (and enjoyed!) an evening run by London’s Regional Improvement Partnership (Capital Ambition) entitled “The Challenge of the Governance of London”.

Set up in early 2006, Capital Ambition is one of nine Regional Improvement Partnerships around the country with the remit of coordinating improvement work across London’s public sector, including the 33 London boroughs, London Councils, the Greater London Authority and the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority.

No mean feat you might say. However, Capital Ambition and the bodies it supports have seen a number of successes in the last 2 years, with the majority of London’s councils now either said to be improving well or improving strongly according to their regulator the Audit Commission, while similarly London now has only one 1-star rated council (assessed on a 0-4 scale where 0 is poor and 4 is excellent).

So last Tuesday saw the annual e-Government National Awards in London, celebrating those projects that have made government “more accessible and effective” over the past year.

Now call me a cynic, but looking down the list on the Cabinet Office’s website there really doesn’t seem to be too much of anything truly exciting or innovative that you might expect from a technology awards. I’m not questioning whether most if not all of these projects are worthwhile endeavours beacuse they undoubtedly are, but what it does make me wonder is when the power of technology will be used for truly transformational ends in government.

Whether its a new customer ‘portal’ (!) here or an ERP system implementation there, these are all projects that are slowly but surely turning the government tanker round and creating a government that, one day, will be able to say it is run like a business. No more, no less. A solid, efficient use of technology to propel government into the 80s or 90s at a push.

Or at least that would be true were it not for the fact that of the £14bn spent on technology in UK government every year (over 50% of all IT spend in the whole of Britain), around 70% of all projects end in failure (as pointed out at the ‘Gov 2.0: or Truly Transformational Governnment’ event on Tuesday). So a mere £10bn wasted there then, give or take a few hundred million.

And why is this? Well if you are to believe the IT old skool, it is down to a lack of ‘IT engineering’ on the part of government, with IT projects unwilling to invest in the technology architects required to apply perfect scientific principles to the development of a system capable of managing the complexities of government. So scientific and perfect I might add that this very same speaker recommended vast investment in culture change programmes to rewire the brains of all employees to cope with the tortuous nature of some of these ‘perfect’ systems.

Or is this systemic failure in government to get IT right in fact a direct result of IT departments insistence on large-scale projects and systems that can never meet the needs of the business of government, whether the internal business funcitons or the interface with their customers. Systems that no sooner have been scoped and blue printed over a period of a year or more become redundant due to the ever rapidly changing nature of government and demands placed on it.

As covered elsewhere by Stephen Dale, surely it is in fact the more lightweight disruptive technologies that live in a perpetual state of beta able to react to change that represent the ‘big answer’ to this culture of perpetual crisis in government IT (not merely “a sticking plaster over a cancerous sore” as one speaker described these solutions).

There can be no better example of this than the work of Tom Steinberg and colleagues at MySociety. MySociety embraces the concept of social media and applies it to government in a variety of new and exciting ways, whether making the actions of elected members more transparent through theyworkforyou.com, enabling easy online petition direct to the Prime Minister through Number 10s petitioning tool or helping everyone to become more active citizens and report local area problems through fixmystreet.com.

These tools are quick and easy to design and implement, meet real social need untouched by government’s big projects and truly open up government for all to access, making government more effective in its duties in the process. Now if that isn’t ‘truly transformational government’ I don’t know what it. Its just a pity true change is rarely from within government itself.

As Tom Steinberg said at the event “sod culture change and big projects and systems, just get on and do it”.

Clearly very aware of the recent successes of their open source competitors and the huge sums of money that continue to be spent on IT in the government sector (£14bn/year at the last count in the UK alone), Microsoft are plotting a high profile return to the egovernment arena according to CNET.

Responding to developments in the ’software as a service’ (SaaS) and social media fields, Microsoft returns to the egov agenda with a wider range of products and approaches largely based around their .Net architecture. At the forefront of this push is Microsoft’s on demand Office Live and Windows Live solutions, delivering plug and play solutions to all tiers of government big or small on a subscription basis.

What remains to be seen is the extent to which Microsoft can embrace and exploit the full range of collaboration technolgies from the workd of ‘web 2.0′. Huge potential exists for Microsoft to not only drive efficiencies in the way government does business but more importantly to enable governments to better connect with their citizens and provide higher quality customer service, above all given the strong market position MS hold in the government sector.

So here’s hoping for big things to come from Microsoft.