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17 Dec 2004

Better government and e-government - Tom calls for a stiff upper e-lip

Some of the recent posts seem a little discouraged about e-Government, lamenting the proliferation of databases, the quagmire of e-Voting, etc.  Time for some Xmas cheer, I think.

e-Government should be fading from the national agenda at this point in time. Not because it doesn’t work, but because it does. (Think Pat Morita in The Karate Kid--"Properly executed, there is no defense"). People do not brag inordinately about the presence of telephones within their organisation. It’s sort of taken for granted, and so should be the presence and utilisation of information and communications technologies to improve and extend the performance of government functions. We have reached the point in the five-year adoption cycle where many systems should be showing signs of improved productivity and organisational performance--and in fact, we are seeing this. Pity it won’t be counted correctly for a couple of years, but it’s happening.

Proponents of e-Government as a ‘philosophy’ of changing the nature of government have made a couple of mistakes that are extremely typical of movement politics. First, we acted like engineers, in that we looked at what the technology could do before we actually asked people what they wanted. Second, we tried to use our new technologies to address areas of government that were not broken--such as voting, a system that has worked well for a couple of centuries.

However, the passion for improving government survives, and the knowledge that modern technology can be used to do it is not going to fade. Maybe we should focus our thinking on where the problems lie within government first… and seeing how combining different technological processes can solve the real problems.

My nomination of the day is means testing. Why is it tough? Why does the government of the day use it as a bottleneck to minimise and delay the redistribution of income that all have agreed should happen? Why isn’t means testing integrated across all services? Why should citizens submit to the embarrassing--indeed, often humiliating--process more than once? Given that any of the big systems integrators could design and roll out a solution that would answer all of my questions in less than a year, why doesn’t the Ideal Government community collaborate on developing user requirements and getting one or two of the SI’s to draw up a statement of interest that could initiate movement within government, instead of being reactive. Could set a trend…

• Posted by Tom Fuller on 17/12/04 at 10:54am
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