What Skills are Needed in an E-World

The transition to e-government applications for public service delivery and management involves significant changes to the traditional systems of public management. E-government applications modify the internal interaction between government units and private sector providers of public services and the external relations between government, citizens, and other members of the public. The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), in combination with significant policy changes and systems of operation, has the potential to provide greater transparency and democracy. By reducing information transaction, storage, and dissemination costs, ICTs allow for greater access to information and records. The evolution of interactive communication technologies has opened additional channels for the public to access public sector information, comment on public decisions, and interact with their elected officials.

Realigning Governance

In this chapter, the author acknowledges that over the last few decades, information and communications technologies (ICTs) have progressed at a remarkable pace. By the mid-1990s, the new technology had been used to engineer a major transformation of the private sector, reshaping markets and the basic building block of the modern economy: the corporation. Likewise, enthusiasts predicted that the public sector was about to go through a similar transformation. A new era in government was said to be dawning. For some, electronic- or e-government promised to transform government operations leading to major “efficiency gains” in service delivery. But e-government is proving more difficult and costly than first thought and the expected benefits have been slow to materialize. With some notable exceptions, the efficiency gains have been mixed. The boom in e-commerce was short-circuited by the dot-com bust. Is the bloom coming off the e-government rose? This chapter tries to shed more light on the pertinent issues and reflect a broader vision that e-government is about the transformation of government. A firm commitment from decision makers to think through the issues and steer the right course is critical or e-government could easily lose momentum or veer off course.

E-Government

This chapter approaches the topic from a consumer perspective, looking at some of the principal challenges for governments in developing not just e-government, but responsive e-government.

Transformed Government

E-government is, in many respects, a campaign to transform governments. For both officials inside government and the citizens and clients that these governments serve, it is vital that governments achieve “early wins” in the e-government campaign in order to lay the foundation for bolder changes that may be required to advance to the next steps. While no government has achieved full transformation, several examples have emerged that demonstrate the transformative power of e-government on the business and structures of public administrations.

Confidence in E-Government

Since the 1990s, governments have been exploring, and in many cases implementing, e-government in an effort to expand their budgeted services and efficiency. However, the desire to address these needs has often been offset with a basic lack of experience in the field of e-government, forcing governments to act relatively slowly and cautiously to migrate some of the services traditionally offered by paper-based government to e-government. In this new phase of government creation, new rules are being applied, major investments are being made, and the government agencies involved are reorganizing — not without difficulty. This chapter examines the cases of France, Belgium, Canada, the United States and Ireland and how each of these countries is extremely attentive to an important aspect of the successful acceptance of e-government — the protection of personal data — through new regulations, policies and creative, legal innovations.

E-Government and Private-Public Partnerships

E-government creates both new pressures and new opportunities for partnering — within governments, between governments and across sectors and the citizenry. In particular, new relational mechanisms are required to shape effective ties between governments and the vendors of IT systems and solutions that are more pervasive, fluid and demanding in terms of the level of collaboration and trust required between private sector vendors and public sector clients. The complexity and sophistication of such solutions produce many strategic choices for governments about how to deploy IT and the degree to which in-house capacities should be balanced and complemented with externalized skills and solutions. Thus, partnerships are now central to public management: In a digital world, effectively dealing with more relational organizational architectures becomes the core competency of a continually renewed and enabled public service. This chapter first explores the main challenges facing governments in such an environment, followed by a sketching of the main strategic directions required to address them.

Paradigm and Practice

The contribution starts from assessing the reciprocal influence between organizational change and the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in Public Administrations. ICTs cannot work without a proper organizational change, but at the same time, ICTs are usually one of the main drivers of such change in public administrations, as they provide the political momentum and act as catalyzer or enabler. After reviewing the role that New Public Management experts granted to the ICT in fueling, or rather in following public sector reforms, the work identifies a possible evolution of the model from New Public Management to Innovative Public Management. This model is based on the adoption of technological and organizational innovation at three levels, namely the operational choice, the collective choice and the institutional choice levels. Thereby, the chapter presents some of the current and future impacts of ICTs on institutional configuration, on policy and decision making, and on the organizational/managerial structure. Finally, the ecosystem for an innovative public administration is re-interpreted in the light of recent ICT changes.

Measuring E-Government in Italy

This chapter describes our experience in establishing an Observatory for the measurement of the impact of e-government policies onto the efficiency and the effectiveness of the Italian public sector. Such an Observatory is based on evaluation procedures different from those used in other measurement exercises, such as e-Europe or those belonging to the Big Five consultant groups. Moreover, the adopted definition of “e-government” is slightly different than the usual one, as it takes into account not only the mere providing of e-services, but also the whole impact of ICT in terms of transformation of Public Administration — both at a “front-” and at a “back-office” level. What has made us think about a new evaluation method is the desire for a standard, transparent (i.e., one that everyone understands) system, which, while it takes into account the overall level of e-government, the type and number of online services, and their ease of access and quality, also considers policy actions which flavor the spread of electronic government applications, both inside and outside the public sector.

E-Government and Organizational Change

At varying paces, governments are aggressively pursuing e-government strategies with the expressed objective of capturing the efficiency that ICTs can provide. However, more often than not these strategies are being implemented within the existing organizational structures and practices of governments, which can, by their nature, thwart rather than advance the objectives. This chapter examines some key aspects of organizational change required by governments to make their e-government strategies successful. The change imperative entails a hard look at many of the structures, processes, cultural issues and management practices prevailing within the public sector. This chapter identifies government success factors for several organizational entities involved in e-government and assesses the implications for organizational change on government structures, work practices and culture.

E-Government and E-Governance

This chapter suggests that e-government and e-governance initiatives can potentially have major organizational impacts through three mechanisms: improved decision-making, more intensive and productive use of databases, and better communications. These mechanisms impact on both the internal organization of public agencies and their configuration of networks and partnerships. E-enablement therefore makes obsolete many existing organizational structures and processes and offers the prospect of transformation in both service delivery and public governance arrangements. However, the organizational changes which can be effected through the e-revolution are only just beginning to become evident. While it seems likely that existing organizational configurations in the public sector will not be sustainable, the most appropriate ways forward will only be uncovered through much experimentation within e-government and e-governance programmes. In the nature of experimentation, many of these initiatives will turn out to be unproductive or cost-ineffective, but that is perhaps the necessary price to pay for the level of public sector transformation which now appears to be in prospect.