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:
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!
The Great E-mancipator 