In recent years the focus of government technology initiatives has been on providing easier access to citizen services, however other priorities are now crowding on to the government agenda. We have seen a shift from technology deployment for the sake of citizens, to technology deployment to improve internal processes. In a sense you can see the government IT debate being reframed: 'Who cares about the customer, the customer is a citizen, and he will remain a citizen. Lets use this money allocated to IT investment to make ourselves more efficient.'
The pendulum has swung from constituent services to operational efficiency. At the end of the day governments are politically-driven operations, and they have recognised that there are limits to what can be achieved with 'joined-up-government'.
The reason government is based in silos is to make sure that government is accountable for policies. If you think about yourself as a user of a government service, and in the past you dealt with five agencies, then joined up government is clearly an improvement, because it is nice to be given one point of contact. But what happens if something goes wrong? Then it suddenly isn’t so nice, because who do you go to rectify the problem? These issues of accountability need to be fully worked out.
In every country government departments have their own identities, and their owen budgets. If you want to deemphasise this departmental structure then you have to take money out of departments, and put it elsewhere. It's still the case in Asia and elsewhere that government departments have too much leeway to set their own IT spending priorities.
The problem with e-government as 'e-enablement' is that there has too much focus on service delivery, and too little focus on using IT to improve the way departments talk to one another.
Ultimately there are three things you have to measure when making a case for a government IT project:
- Does it increase efficiency - eg. decrease cost, decrease processing time?
- Does it create value outside of government – do citizens spend less time complying with government, do they get greater choice?
- Is there a political return - is this helping other policies beyond what my department is responsible for? Does it make me look good, does it help me to get reelected?
Autor: Andrea Di Maio
Quelle: Public Sector Technology & Management, 24.11.2004
