The digital Europe, is it reachable. Working almost every day with eGovernment collaboration mainly in Norway but also in an European reach, I am worried. My worrie is related to the lack of understanding the innovation driven by technology that the brilliant idea of a single market need to become real. I am sensing and talking to too many bureaucrates, brilliant people who believe that the technology roadmap is to leave to the people with this passion. I am sorry to tell, but I do think this is enough.
For our politicans and our bureaucrates to get their dreams come true, they not only need to tell us their dreams, they have to involve themselves in the technology dream. Easy for you to say who are passionated about it, and yes I do agree. But as a women in an overdominated industry by men, I also had to do my deep-dive to get into it. And still alot of the guys do not think I know anything.
However here are my tips to get passionate about technology:
1. Find a gadget you fall in love it and spin out from here. For me it was my Dad's first personal computers running CPM and Dbase, I was amazed how we could write our master thesis on floppy disks, bring them to the schools computer and home. And the beauty of printing a draft, then editing and just hit the cap P and the ctr button trilled me.
2. Put the gadget as the core in your technology web and start spinning and see how it connects. So the next step was look at the personal computer and think how could we develop an ERP-system for our factory on a small and cheap computer and not have it in our binders. Same idea prodution data on floppy, move from computer to computer in the factory
3. And just continue but start talking with people to learn more, and always listen in on their story. Through my passion I have had the great fortune to work with great leaders in technology, politics and organizations. Always amazed by their capability of taking it to the next level to see a new opportunity.
So what is next for me? Well I do have passion about eGovernment collaboration. I do want to share my thoughts on why we need to have collaboration platforms in the cloud, preferable as public as possible, to enhance and stimulate the open innovation needed to meet a single market and reduce our financial challenges. I do also want to use technology to solve the challenges in the developing countries, and with a spesific focus on enabling women and their spirit of entrpreneurship and intrapreneurship. For women like me, this is one of the great opportunities I do hope we have as leaders in our part of the world. I also hope this opportunity will inspired a larger group of women to stretch out for leadership.
On a closing note, reports like this would be much more accurat if the report people had passion for technology. Then they would have the capability to look behind the nice polished windows and start understanding the cost of lacking collaboration platforms. Actually Norway is as far as I know the only country in this list who have a full sized working collaboration platform and our ranking is lower this year despite the fact that the growth in services using this platform is more than 200% this year.
Europa - Information Society - Digital Agenda - Action 89: Member States to make eGovernment services fully interoperable
