"Web-scale IT" is an idea from Cameron Haight of Gartner that describes how companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon use datacenters filled with massive numbers of cheap servers.
Three things come together to power these leading organizations:
Web-scale is spreading as it becomes better, faster, and cheaper.
Already, Web-scale IT is being rented out. Anybody can go to Amazon Web Service and rent servers in their datacenter. Security-conscious enterprises can buy the capacity as a "hybrid cloud" protected by a virtual private network.
It's also being open-sourced. Initiatives like Cloud Foundry aim to deliver a complete set of open source software for a cloud datacenter. Docker has emerged as an exciting lightweight container for Web services. Facebook is sharing their datacenter designs and hardware designs as open source.
As a greater percentage of all business activity goes through online services, businesses that are organized around a matrix of services will dominate an increasingly diverse number of industries.
Powerful new hubs will emerge to support entire industries by providing a matrix of online services. These hub businesses may end up controlling big chunks of IT-intensive industries like finance and health care. Smaller companies will be very successful providing single, invisible Web services that get embedded into the larger matrix.
We can see how this works in 2013 by looking at Facebook. Facebook runs a huge Web-Scale IT operation with continuous delivery updating vast server arrays. They share services for login, comments, billing, payment, advertising, and plug-in applications - external Web services that use the Facebook API and user list. A whole industry with billions of dollars in revenue has grown up using these API's.
Government services are at the opposite end of the entrepreneurial spectrum. But, government efficiency will eventually be transformed by Web-scale IT. Government services are increasingly delivered through big software projects. These projects often suffer failures at the final integration stage, after huge amounts of money have been spent on development. As I write this, I am reading that the State of Massachusetts canceled a contract to build a new tax return system, after spending $46M. Last week, the US Government turned on their health insurance exchange system after spending $400M - and it didn't work.
Continuous Agile and its related disciplines are designed to solve this specific problem by ensuring that no project reaches a late phase without being integrated and working well. While there are many obstacles to fitting Continuous Agile into a government procurement process, it will eventually happen, and the benefits will be huge. Governments that adopt Continuous Agile and a matrix of services IT organization will find that many of their online and offline services can be delivered more quickly and efficiently.
The road to an agile government may be long, but in the end benefits will come quickly and globally. Improvements will spread rapidly across the globe, because they can be so easily shared. A service that works in Massachusetts will work in most other states, and in some other countries.