Rialtas.net – Government 2.0

I think that this might be the first government statement on eGovernment in Ireland in several years…..

Some Excerpts..

Developing an Inclusive Knowledge Society

Taking that “end-user” perspective as my starting point I see the main requirement of ‘quality’ as the degree to which technology meets the expectations the demands that people have.

The development of an inclusive Knowledge Society in Ireland is fundamentally important to our societal and economic future and I know that it depends on quality infrastructure quality applications and quality content. These have been central to our ASC Initiative which has been on-going over the last couple of years and which this year will see us spending about 3 million Euro.

Technology in Government

Essentially, e-Government has been about the challenge of providing public services using Internet technologies providing services in different and more convenient ways to meet the needs of citizens who are generally more informed and need to have a more responsive service.

This, of course, means that we in government have to be innovative in making government more responsive we have to be very aware of what our customers see as quality in terms of outputs and expectations and we have to manage our IT resources to ensure that we get maximum return on the considerable investments that are being made right across the public sector. This points to another perspective on quality quality of development and investment in both hardware and software.

Importance of Innovation

I saw an interesting article in the Economist recently which spoke about how governments generally have now embraced Web 1.0 –

“with the online world largely mimicking the offline world. E-mails replace letters; websites make publishing speedier and more effective; data are stored on the user’s computer”

and

“that all this has been overtaken by “web 2.0”, shorthand for the interactivity brought by wikis (pages that anyone can edit) and blogs (on which anyone can comment). Data are accessed through the internet; programs are opened in browser windows . . . . ”.

This is pointing to the need to move beyond where we are now to re-assess the demands of citizens who live in an increasingly individualised world and have access to limitless resources of information. We also hear frequent calls for more “joined-up thinking” and “joined-up services” because there is an expectation that the public service should be taking a more rounded view of the predicaments and the circumstances of citizens and should be more effective in making the impacts that they require of us.

The focus, therefore, has shifted somewhat from simply putting things on-line because we can put things on-line. We now need to examine why we are in business at all the impacts we hope to achieve through intervention or compliance and how the outcomes of those actions can be improved either through the delivery or the design of the services concerned.

Indeed, this also holds for the democratic processes themselves where simply facilitating those who want to be heard is not good enough where we need to ensure that we are not overly swayed by obsessive bloggers where we have to make sure that those who do not have the time or the inclination to voice their views and opinions in public, can still get continued democratic representation.

A signal of that changed approach is set out in the Social Partnership agreement, “Towards 2016” – which speaks of a life-cycle approach to service delivery – and refers to the need for greater levels of flexibility involving greater cross-organisational coordination – through “the removal of unnecessary demarcations, the adoption of more modern approaches to work and the promotion of innovative ways of meeting the demand for services. It is also necessary that managers have the flexibility to adopt procedures to respond to particular pressures, which may vary from sector to sector, and to ensure that work methods are suited to the efficient delivery of services”.

I think that one of the big challenges facing us today is the identification of what sort of innovation is needed where it is possible and how it can be managed. It requires having a focus on the impacts or outcomes of what we do in our respective areas as politicians, policy makers, administrators and deliverers of service and then looking at how we can enhance the outcomes of our labours, delivering better results for the citizen and the business community.

Read the full speech..