Very interesting McKinsey interview with Scott Griffith, CEO of Zipcar today.

Zipcar offers rental by the hour from nearby in the neighborhood. That contrasts with traditional rental cars that typically offer by the day or week from the airport.

IT developed over the past twenty years makes this happen efficiently and effectively enough to make it a business. Customers, after all, have got to be easily able to find if a car is available, where it is, how to get in, how to solve any emergencies that may arise, how to pay, etc. Those are all information problems. Wireless networks and web services are essential, as is comfort in the population in handling similar web transactions.

I think you'll find the details interesting, here.

In particular note that Zipcar is increasing the utilization of cars that would otherwise be largely idle. Zipcar says that, in comparison to the normal rental car companies, they roughly double the revenue per car and double the number of cars covered per employee .

Theory suggests that, as the fleet gets larger, availability should increase and the walk to your "local" car should decrease. It also suggests that, as the community sharing the fleet increases, utilization per car should increase and the cost per person decrease. This is a basic economy of scale for shared services. It works to the extent that "customers" share in the savings and consider the process responsive to the individual needs. It apparently is working for Zipcar.

And, as we all have heard, it should work also for cloud computing, if the kinks can be worked out. What, after all, is the utilization rate for your laptop, or even your department's or your jurisdictions central servers?

I've not used a Zipcar myself, but know some friends who have and have liked the experience. Have you tried Zipcar? What did you think of the cost and quality? Zipcar says they are now renting the fleet management information systems to fleet managers such as governments. Is your government exploring this? Would it be a good move in tough times? Comment by following the link back to the blog here.

All the best,

Jerry

Well, for part of his day on October 22nd - for an hour in the morning - he was discussing and working with a group of Canadian public officials and me in Toronto. We were exploring strategies for using technology for "bottom up" reform.

The core idea was that Gov 2.0 (infrastructure and tools for interactive participation and cloud economies of scope and scale) are combining with tough times to push for serious cost-cutting and organizational redesign in government. Unfortunately, the large agencies face the most difficult barriers of legacy staff and systems, with cultures the most resistant to change.

But what about the smaller governments? They need computing, but more like typical consumers need computing, and they don't have a long history of internal systems development and operations.

IF the appropriate standardization could evolve, would smaller governments not more quickly accept cloud offerings where somebody else handles the technology details? Remember that the small governments are individually small but collectively large. They also own most of the direct interactions with the public.

Nova Scotia was represented in our group, talking about their reasonably well-known SAP procurement for the province; this package was procured not only for the province, but as a single procurement for the municipalities, the hospitals, and the universities within the province. One standardized package. Gartner wrote about it some time ago.

Ballmer was interested in all this and very engaged (he's not afraid to communicate his energy and enthusiasms). He talked about his "three screens and a cloud" vision, and of getting his Azure infrastructure services ready for prime time in the next six months or so.

The group told him that all government practitioners were aware that standardization of applications was difficult - even for the fishing license example that Ballmer referred to several times. But they also argued that the smaller governments were particularly desperate, and that infrastructure services like processing and storage and networks shouldn't present large standardization problems.

I've worked with this "cross-boundary" Canadian group for several sessions. Here are reports from the past two sessions if you're interested.

• The report from Meeting 1
• The report from Meeting 2
  

Wayne Wouters, Clerk of the Privy Council  (senior Canadian civil servant) and Corrine Charette, Canadian CIO, were part of the group along with senior CIO and program folks from New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia.

It was a good group, with Ballmer adding some star power. But are they really onto something? Could the smaller governments represent a critically important and relatively overlooked opportunity for technology standards and shared services, even to the internet-wide "cloud" level?

Let us know what you see out there.

All the best,

Jerry