A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about Australia’s ambitious Gov 2.0 plan, and it’s MashUp Australia competition, which allows and encourages programmers to develop applications that access streams of open Government Data. In light of the above we thought it was also worth blogging about the recent report released by the Japanese government: ‘ICT Hatoyama Plan’, which amongst other things, refers to tapping into the Goverments ICT potential.

The most important part of this plan seems to be the establishment of a nationwide Cloud Computing platform called the ‘Kasumigaseki Cloud’, allowing various Government departments to access data and collaborate efficiently. As this excerpt from CloudBook states:

The Kasumigaseki Cloud will enable various ministries to collaborate to integrate and consolidate hardware and create platforms for shared functions. Efforts will be made to efficiently develop and operate information systems with the aim of greatly reducing electronic government-related development and operating costs while increasing the pace of processing by integrating shared functions, increasing collaboration among systems, and providing secure and advanced governmental services.

Additional features of this cloud infrastructure, is the establishment of a National Digital Archive… and the emphasis on creating Green Cloud Data Centers.

It’s good to see such ambitious plans being put in place at Government level.. and I don’t think it’ll be long before we see or hear more about similar eGov initiatives from other APAC markets (especially, South Korea and Singapore).