This week I am back to covering emerging technologies and their practical uses. I have been seeing some innovative social business efforts from government for some time so this post, Governments Are Out Front in IT Innovation, was not a surprise. It mentions President Obama’s campaign to see innovation in IT, ranging from its use of big data to open source technologies. On his first day in office, the President also pledged to make the federal government a model for open data. It will take time but there is progress. The use of big data by his re-election campaign to target get out the vote efforts remains a model for this space.
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IBM introduced a new set of social collaboration offerings on the IBM Federal Community Cloud. The services include the industry’s broadest capabilities for social software such as wikis, micro-blogs, staff profiles, instant messaging, web conferencing, messaging and collaboration, and email.  It also includes support for popular mobile devices including Android phones and tablets, Apple iPhone 4 and iPad, BlackBerry, and Nokia Symbian platform.

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Here is more on how the City of San Francisco in its quest to save money, increase revenues and spur innovation turned to its 26,000 employees for solutions. In a matter of weeks, nearly 600 ideas were submitted and more than 4,000 votes cast via its ImproveSF.org program. This program was created with a SF-based company Brightidea Inc. that I have covered before here (see Brightidea Innovation Management).   From two of the winning ideas the city will save more than $90,000. These and two other revenue-producing ideas will be implemented.

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