Will e-government be different?

October 14, 2009

Although I wanted this blog to be an opportunity to reveal discoveries in the academic literature to a wider practitioner world, I admit that I haven’t put forward many gems recently. This is despite clocking up almost 500 references in my dissertation’s bibliography to-date! This is probably because the industry literature produces enough stuff to comment upon!

A couple of the prominent IT paper authors over the years have been Kenneth Kramer of the University of California, Irvine and John King of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In a paper from 2006, from the International Journal of E-Government Research, that is easily available on the web, entitled “Information Technology and Administrative Reform: Will E-government be Different?”, they ask some searching questions based on the history of IT’s employment in government. Despite the title it is still highly relevant!

What are the points they raise? -

  • “IT application does not cause reform and cannot encourage it where the political will to pursue the reform does not exist.”
  •  “IT application has brought relatively little change to organization structures, and seems to reinforce existing structures.”
  •  “The benefits of information technology have not been evenly distributed within government organizational functions: the primary beneficiaries have been functions favoured by the dominant political-administrative coalitions of public administrations, and not those of technical elites, middle managers, clerical staff, or ordinary citizens.”

 Yhey finally conclude on page 12 that :

“claims that E-Government will fundamentally alter government structure, performance, citizen engagement and so on are likely to be dashed, given that IT in and of itself has consistently proven to have little bearing on those kinds of government reforms. IT is a general-purpose engine that can enable reform efforts, but unless the other factors required for reform are in place, the role of IT is immaterial.”

So what’s the answer? The answer is that we need to employ benefits realization at the outset and measures (with initial ones) to determine whether we are doing what the citizens want. A good one to start with is satisfaction with the end-to-end service!

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Posted by greatemancipator

E-governancing

October 11, 2009

The latest report from Accenture is entitled “From e-Government to e-Governance: Using new technologies to strengthen relationships with citizens”, 99 pages in total with 28 pages of so of pictures and text, the rest being case studies from across the world under headings of outcomes, balance, engagement and accountability.

Interestingly there is only one from the UK under the heading of outcomes and that is one about Public Service Agreements, which makes me think  that finding something was a struggle.

The three strategies related to outcomes outcomes are listed as:

  • Focusing performance management on actual improvements in people’s social and economic conditions, using outcome-focused performance management to drive enterprise-wide cultural change and break down service silos.
  • Continually improving the customer experience by soliciting service user and customer feedback, and interpreting and evaluating that feedback to drive high performance.
  • Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of public service provision, using new technologies to reduce the cost of back-office functions and improve service quality and enable cross-government collaboration.

In fact, none-too-different from the proposals from the other bloggers collected in Blogging about other bloggers’ blogs! Perhaps the message is getting through?

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Posted by greatemancipator

Vote for the Great E-mancipator

October 8, 2009

Vote for the Great E-mancipator in the Computer Weekly 2009 Blog Awards

more about “Vote for the Great E-mancipator“, posted with vodpod

 

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Blogging about other bloggers’ blogs!

October 7, 2009
Having not mentioned Andrea di Maio too recently (4th October), I’d like to pick up on a recent post of his where he compares the chances of Government 2.0 succeeding in the light of the unchanged issues that pervaded Government 1.0. Amongst these issues he lists “Cultural barriers, turf battles, risk avoidance, a procedural rather than a policy-based approach to accountability.”
 
In considering the employment of the maturity models and rankings so favoured internationally by consultancies, he states that “In the past those rankings hardly cared about how many people were actually using those online services, let alone what value were getting from them”!
 
This topic naturally lead onto a posting by Public Strategist entitled “e-Government ten years on”, that in its turn reported on a post or two by Jerry Fishenden. This is all good stuff in the fact that at least some people out there are willing to learn from history. Public Strategist admits their predictions were badly wrong, but my view is not a criticism of the predictions but of the actual failure to measure the progress, success or failure, that wasted millions, if not billions, of the money, we are now so desperately short of!
 
There are many good points in what Jerry Fishenden raises but a couple of the bullet points from both pieces (8 September and 1 October) are worth repeating:
 
  • “Most day-to-day interactions with citizens happen at the local level. So look at models of online interaction that recognise this reality and that local government and third-parties may provide the entry point for the re-definition of the delivery of public services
  • Taking existing inefficient services and putting them online won’t deliver the benefits being sought. Public services need to be re-engineered around what ICT now makes possible
  • Re-designing services needs to put the citizen/business at the centre, not the producer (or the producer’s idea of what the citizen/business wants). Government needs to get away from inappropriate approaches such as department-based CRM, which project internal government silo’s and stovepipes and impose them on the citizen
  • The main blocker to modernising the UK and the effective use of innovation is the hierarchy and arrogance that exists within much of the public service, particularly Whitehall, which lives in a world that has long since passed and refuses to listen and learn
  • We should be using the scale of modern technology to get massive and continuing feedback from those the public sector is there to serve, providing a programme of continuous improvement under the tutelage of those who use the services the most”
    •  
    Jerry also links to the presentations on LSE’s web site - the one by Peter Gilroy is worth a look!
     
    The history lesson from Public Strategist was not new to me, having been haunted by it since the beginning, and having had to revisit the sequence of events that led up to the crime as part of the literature review for my PhD. It did, however, confirm the route that was taken and confirmed my suspicions of the foul deed.
     
    From the above three bloggers we seem to have a consensus, which I heartily support. Let us hear again the lessons learned in recent history and hopefully not make the same mistakes!

    Leave a Comment » | citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, Metrics, Systems thinking, transformational change | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
    Posted by greatemancipator

    Engaged in the USA

    October 4, 2009

    The latest (Fall 2009)  edition of the Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter is entitled “Engaging Citizens in Government” and contains 24 short pieces on the topic from a range of sources in including the UK with Andrew Stott, Director of Digital Engagement being one of the authors.

    I’d prefer to pick out two American pieces, one being a short analysis of the latest Pew Internet survey which signifies that the well-off and well-educated are more likely to engage in political dialogue, i.e. no change, although there are some hints that social media may change this.

    The second is a two-page piece on page 32 by Kathryn Brasier of Pennsylvania State University, entitled “Planning for Citizen Engagement”, which should be read by every politician.

    A slightly bizarre newsletter of a document but full of interesting titbits to read at ones leisure.

    Leave a Comment » | citizen, e-government, engagement, Metrics, Systems thinking, transformational change | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
    Posted by greatemancipator

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