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A new way of governing in the Digital Age
The internet delivery of government informationand services, e-government, has been a fact ofonline life since 1996. In the fast-moving pace of digital technology, several evolutionary cycles in e-governmenthave developed in that time.
Now e-government is on the brink of a new era when it could work to transform government’s service delivery and interaction with citizens, according to a number of surveys and experts. In so doing, e-government could also change the traditional structures of government and citizens’ perceptions of them.
In the US, the federal government, as the largest single government entity, is at the forefront of this transition. The federal portal FirstGov.gov offers an entry point to the full range of government services, programs, and agencies, and it does so in a user-friendly manner that has been widely praised by independent evaluating organizations and information technology specialists. State, city, and county governments have also moved rapidly over the past several years to establish an internet presence. All 50 US states have established an online presence.
The quality and quantity of the information and services provided online by all these different government entities range across a wide spectrum, the result of thousands of individual decisions made in city halls, council chambers, and state houses across the country. Recognition of that divergent quality and usability brings on the next stage in e-gov’s evolution—the challenge to identify the best practices of online service delivery and the best methods to use advanced information technologies to deliver the greatest payoff for governments and the citizens they serve.
The Council for Excellence in Government is an independent Washington-based organization closely monitoring the pace and progress of government online. Council Vice President for E-government David McClure said in an interview with Global Issues that online service delivery has already begun to highlight what’s been wrong with the old methods.
The evolutionary stages
McClure’s study of the movement of governments online since the late 1990s has allowed him to identify several stages in the process. Governments large and small, local and national, go through much the same developmental process, he said, in the US and in other nations. The first stage is bringing a website online and establishing a presence, which usually offers little more than basic information. Next a government will develop an interaction with citizens and create a channel for an online exchange of information. Then the agency will advance to the transaction phase — allowing users to reserve a campsite at a public park, renew a driver’s licence, pay a business licence fee, etc.
The phase now beginning in many governments, McClure said, is transformation, “figuring out how can you make the best use of this dynamic interaction you now have with people — citizens and businesses — so that you can redesign everything in your process behind it to make it much more efficient.”
One of the progressive trends in governments’ online services is to provide information in a thematic fashion, rather than in a bureaucratic fashion dictated by the structure of the government agencies that are the custodians of that information.
On the federal level, for instance, a wide array of agencies maintain public lands that offer recreational activities. Now, online users can explore all those opportunities at Recreation.gov without having to know which government agency has jurisdiction over what.
Citizens themselves are getting more opportunities to contribute to the design of their online services. McClure says municipalities in increasing numbers are surveying citizens about the types of services they want to see online.
When cities take that step, McClure said their online products get higher approval ratings from citizens. “[The cities] rate higher, they’re delivering focused services. They’re not trying to do everything. It makes a huge difference,” McClure said.
There’s another bonus that emerges from this approach, according to the Council for Excellence in Government survey. People who reported successful online interactions with government like government more. “Their trust in government, their acceptance of government goes up tremendously,” McClure said.
Ensuring privacy and security in transactions between government and online citizens is a high priority for both the people who use the services and for the people who provide them. A survey of government information technology specialists found that 80 per cent of respondents identified the protection of confidential and sensitive information as a critical priority for their agency. The study, conducted by Lightspeed Systems — an information technologies (IT) company — also found that a majority of these technology specialists reported they do not have solutions to these problems.
Despite the positive reviews of e-government services that emerged from the Council for Excellence in Government survey, 46 per cent of participants expressed strong concerns that their online interaction with government could compromise their privacy, or the security of personal information.
McClure said the findings reflect the high standards that the public holds for government’s obligation to protect the privacy of citizens. “All it takes is one incident, and trust in government would slide 20 (percentage) points and everything would be pulled offline.”
The expectation of privacy varies from one nation to the next, however, and some nations — notably Canada, the UK, and Singapore — have moved ahead of the US in the types of online transactions they offer involving the collection of private information.
The Council for Excellence in Government survey finds that citizens in other countries have fewer concerns about privacy than Americans do and are more accepting of government compilation of personal information that could occur through online transactions. Ensuring that all citizens receive an equal level of service from government is a concern about e-government identified in a report prepared by a task force organized by the ICMA. Even while governments move online, they are still providing services in person, on the telephone, and through traditional mail. The ICMA report finds that governments will be challenged to provide an equal level of service through all those channels.
“Simply because someone e-mails rather than mails a complex request does not mean, in practice, the issue should be rectified any faster,” said the taskforce report. Access and equity of service delivery are noted as problems in a study conducted by the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University and released in September 2003. A review of government Web sites maintained by the 70 largest U.S. cities concluded that only 20 percent of themcomply with an international web standard for disability access, and only 13 per cent comply with astandard outlined in US law.
“Government websites need to do much more to make themselves accessible to all Americans,” said Taubman Director Darrell M. West in a press release announcing the September findings. “Web sites maintained by city agencies are flunking basic disability access standards for the visually and hearing-impaired.”
There’s also a language barrier online, Taubman found. Only 13 percent of the city government sites surveyed offered any form of foreign language translation. A second Taubman study surveying state and federal government sites found a higher level of online multi-linguality.
The future
Governments large and small increase their online presence day-by-day, even as they struggle to determine what services citizens want, how they might be provided, and how they might be funded. Even amidst this swirl of immediate activity, a picture of what the future might look like is taking shape in the vision of some analysts.
The ICMA task force found “(E-)government services help to ‘democratize’ local government in a positive way. Web site resources boost transparency, increase access to policymaking, and increase accountability from government leaders.”
That positive outlook must be balanced against another possible outcome, according to the ICMA report. “(T)he rate at which information is received can also pose a hazard if it abbreviates the democratic thought process.”
The prospect of increased transparency in government is one foreseen by many of the i futurists who watch the trends in e-government. A study released jointly in May 2003 by the Federation of Government Information Processing Councils and the GSA finds, “The use of e-gov can be an important tool of democratic governance, facilitating the transparent, two-way open communication that makes government-of-the-people possible.”
Government jurisdictions throughout the United States and around the world are at many different points along the evolutionary e-government timeline. But authorities watching the trends seem to agree that advanced information technologies and their users have the momentum to compel more openness and transparency from governments large and small. — The Evolving Internet, US state department’s electronic journal
The writer is managing editor of The Evolving Internet
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