A post appeared on New Zealand’s publicaddress.net blog earlier this week which I thought was fantastically insightful.
The site invites guest bloggers from around New Zealand to post on whatever topic is dear to their heart, this one in particular is purported to be written by an anonymous member of New Zealand’s civil service.
Here’s an excerpt from the anonymous civil service blogger;
What we tend to do (certainly for our first few years in the public sector) is think of great ideas to make our systems more efficient. Often we’ll find a sympathetic manager and say “why don’t we do X? That would make things easier / cheaper / faster for people”.
Then we hit the problem. You see, we’re drowning. Our collective heads are almost disappearing under the waves because of lots of well-meaning law and process that has actually resulted in a bad outcome. These things were done with the best of intentions, based on good theory. But when coupled with media serving people with the attention span of a goldfish, have ended up making it impossible to actually get anything done.
When we all embarked on our big eGovernment programs over a decade ago there was lots of talk of the need to redesign internal processes and how we should be careful not to just deliver electronic variations of existing processes. There are a few rare cases where that has happened, but many governments around the world have ended up computerizing the process that they already had, cutting costs but delivering only small additional incremental value to their constituents.
It is easy to forget how hard it can be to get things done when you are embroiled in the complex machinery of government. If you want an example, consider working with online services with the UK government in the late 1990s and bumping into policies laid down by Cromwell’s Instrument of Government over four hundred years earlier that made it difficult to share date between agencies.
Many eGovernment programs in the 1990s were thrown into the heart of departmental and national modernization programs. The technology brought great advantages, allowing service providers to cut complexity out of their processes, but it was rare that the technology itself was able to drive the level of wholesale change that was expected and needed.
Like the interoperability challenge, technology is an enabling tool. There is still an opportunity to think through how the organization and process of government needs to change to deliver against those policy goals.
The goals of eGovernment programs remain the same, the civil service are working hard on ways to use technology to cut cost and find new ways to serve their constituents. At the same time many of our political leaders have lost interest in eGovernment or online services and have moved onto more interesting and more pressing challenges.
2009 is a year when we once again need to think hard about how we can simplify government, how we cut back on costs and complexity, and how we make it easier for the civil service to do more with less. This time the pressure is financial, a challenge that the machinery of government is skilled at understanding. Technology will play a pivotal role in helping governments meet these challenges, but we also have to be ready to address the harder issues of organization, process and the supporting legal infrastructure that both are based upon.
We have made some great progress with eGovernment programs over the last decade, but the job is not done. It is only when issues of organization, process, technology and legislation are dealt with as a single program that we will see the real benefits of eGovernment.
Maybe this year, more than most, there is motivation to finish what was started.
If you do nothing else, you should read through the entire post from New Zealand’s anonymous civil service blogger.