WRITTEN ON November 22nd, 2005 BY Colin Muid, Maana AND STORED IN Transformational Government

I was one of the little group (5 of us) in the UK who first got involved at the centre of government in inventing what has now become known as e-government. That was back in 1996. I therefore feel a sense of the progenitor of it all, and like any progenitor I look at what has become of what I started with a rather critical eye.

I am concerned that along the way good ideas we had then have become lost or forgotten. We were clear about reorganising public services so that they were organised around the needs of the citizen in receipt of services to suit their life events, instead of having public services organised to suit the administrators (only at certain times of day, in fixed locations, and working in separate silos of activity so that replication and bureaucracy got in the way of effective delivery to the citizen).

What we have in the UK is a few signs of real re-engineering and joined-up administration, but many more signs that all we have done is put a technological front-end on the same old silo-based services. We have automated the mess, not cleaned it up. The targets which government has set, in order to drive change, as I suspected they would, have driven a behaviour of “getting a tick in the box for doing e-government” rather than driving real fundamental thinking about the services and the citizen using them.

Some apparent nonsense examples: We have huge technology investment in the health service but no investment of substance in the people who work in the NHS to persuade them to make use of it. We have a huge number of websites which simply replicate the variety of different organisations we used to have to visit physically. We have every public service organisation inventing its own “shared service centre” – where is the sharing?

Some good examples: The electronic parish priest which you once invented, is becoming a reality in some places, except it is a keyworker who carries their laptop to visit adults or children or families who need integrated social/medical/care/educational services. We can see the integration of the organisations which collect revenues from us through tax (HMRC, incorporation of the Contributions Agency) – alright they are having some difficulty in getting it all to fit neatly, but they are on the right lines. We see reorganisation of services around “citizen journeys/pathways” for health, children services, education, reducing re-offending – all of which indicate some more fundamental systems thinking.

The point is that the good stuff is happening because of proper thought, not because technology is regarded as the key. But it can happen because technology is the enabler for such radical change. Where the bad stuff is happening it is because the starting point is a technology not a fundamental re-think which hearts and minds have bought into. Nothing new in those findings, of course.