The Blackberry revolution is a great example of how efficiency is increased, but productivity is sacrificed, due to device integration. Consider a weekly staff meeting or technical conference. Think about how many people have their heads buried in their Blackberry devices rather than listening to the conversation for which they were all gathered. Yes, you can check your e-mails two seconds after they are received, but unless you can provide a one-word answer to that e-mail, you will end up re-reading that e-mail at your desk before providing a response because its content has been replaced by other information that has been absorbed by your brain.

Integrating devices that increase productivity can yield significant results, but devices that only increase efficiency are often-times nothing more than productivity inhibitors.

The integration of workforces and boundary-less organizations is a desirable goal when the scope is sufficiently limited. Integration with the intent of eliminating "excess spending and contract duality" is a wonderful idea. Integration that focuses on removing agency-level boundaries for multi-focused agencies such as NASA may do more harm than good. The many directorates and varied research efforts within NASA are too broad to open completely. Having worked with the agency, I found that I had quite open access to a broad range of people outside of my immediate field of focus. However, the difficulty was in accessing people within my own directorate and program. The immediate area of concern, in my opinion, is removing the boundaries within specific programs before removing boundaries at the agency level.

Change the way of doing business in a bottom-up, not top-down, manner.

wrt to Question 1) Are you referring to govt privacy vs personal privacy?

wrt to Question 2) Information technologies may speed up the rate of information transfer and integration but they are not an end in themselves. The role and top priority for the public sector is performing their function – not just adding technology for its own sake. You need to show that the addition of technology will solve the problem. It may not. It may be the people whose hands are on the levers.

wrt to Question 3) You did not identify any guidelines which would govern the public sector workers to disseminate information. One role management plays is to filter the content wrt to constraints. Taken to the extreme should you be able to post encryption keys for commanding satellites, or post troops movements or post scientific data before it has been analyzed by principal investigators

This post was mentioned on Twitter by govfresh: Government in the Digital Age via @NASA: http://bit.ly/6HyR7z #gov20…