Recently, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra demonstrated a Windows Azure service built on Department of Labour teaching data. Ars Technica says:

Further to these, Microsoft announced a new Azure service now included in the CTP. Codenamed “Dallas,” the new service gives developers the ability to discover, purchase, and manage data subscriptions within Azure. The technology was showcased at PDC by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra. Kundra demonstrated a career-finding application based on Department of Labor teaching data stored and catalogued by Dallas that allowed, for example, teachers to find which areas of the country needed more teachers. The application was able to drill down within the dataset, for example, to find out exactly what kind of special education teachers were required in a particular area. Behind the scenes, Dallas itself is built atop Windows Azure and SQL Azure.

I like this. There is a critical difference between Government as a DATA platform vs. Government as a TECHNOLOGY platform. Governments should be in the business of liberating data (data platform) and letting the industry decide how that data will be used. As the above example shows, useful services are technology agnostic once data is liberated. Secondly, developers are already familiar with specific technologies and it would be a shame if governments mandated that they learn specific technologies.

Far better to liberate data and let developers apply their own creativity.