Having a professional title like the one listed above endows one with some pretty hefty responsibilities. What exactly one does in such a role is up for debate, but for Tom Watson, UK Minister for Transformational Government, the focus is on how technology is transforming how government serves and interacts with its citizens. Sounds a lot like our Government 2.0 research program.

On Monday, Watson gave a speech entitled Government 2.0 that highlights his evolving vision for government service provision and citizen engagement. You can read the full speech here.

Some highlights:

On the challenges of government: “Government is Britain’s biggest organisation…Orange has 17 million customers. We’ve got four times that. HSBC operates in 83 countries. The Foreign Office in 144. Tesco has 1,200 stores. The Department for Children, School, and Families oversees 23,000 schools.”

On the role of technology in government: “Technology enables Government to achieve two seemingly contradictory goals – collaborate at scale and deliver services to citizens with pinpoint. This offers a new relationship between government and citizen – genuinely government of the people.”

On leading change: “I began to understand the change going on in the world when I set up a political blog five years ago. At the time it was seen as a radical act. People could not belive that I had opened myself up to such scrutiny and occasional daily abuse….. but the blog broke down the walls between legislators and electors in a way that interested me so I persevered.”

Those first remarks about scale are perhaps the most enlightening. The general concepts of participation and collaboration that frame Government 2.0 are easy to talk about but in an organization with the size, reach and responsbility as outlined by Watson, making change happen takes on a new level of complexity. One of the key questions is thus how to facilitate change throughout government , i.e. how to make transformational government happen. Watson points to “iterate, iterate, iterate” but doing so requires more than just a Minister who says do it. It requires empowered employees who are given the flexibility to innovate, and more important, the ability to fail so long as they learn from those failures. This, however, will require a paradigm shift in the culture of government, and might take a lot more of the Minister’s time!