I’m struck by their choice of a title, especially considering the lessons I have learned over the last couple of weeks about the amount of confusion there is out there around the various pieces of work that are going on.

Reading the title and knowing the business that Gartner are in, I’m left feeling a little confused about what they’re trying to achieve.

• Open Government != gov20
• gov20 != Open Government
• Open Data != gov20
• Open Data != Open Government
• gov20 != open data
• Open Government != Open Data
• eGovernment != Open Data
• gov20 != eGovernment
• blah blah blah…
• etc.

At the same time there is no debate that they all feed off each other.

For me the OpenGovt2010 event in Wellington on Monday was fascinating in this respect, many of the folks leading each of these independent (but dependant) conversations in New Zealand in one room finding their common ground and discovering places where work and opportunities overlapped.

Deliver a well understood national digital identity program. Web20 offers some opportunities here, solutions like OpenID will work well for a large number of government services but may never quite go far enough when it comes to transactions that require more security or involve the transfer of funds between government and non-government entities.

Over the years many governments have experimented with national identity programs, and many have failed for one reason or another. A gov20 mindset offers the opportunity to try a new approach, federating a secure government identity program with other identity providers that citizens use every day from organizations like Microsoft, Google, Facebook or Twitter, along with the widely recognized and already federated approach of OpenID.

Not all government transactions need parties on either side to identify themselves, and very few need the security that is built into most government developed eID programs. In most cases the user just needs government to remember their preferences, and deliver the experience that they signed up for.

Deliver a SINGLE government experience. In many countries the gov20 experience is being rolled out on a department by department basis.

More traditional eGovernment programs have been very focused on delivering single and joined up government experiences for well over a decade now, and we need to ensure that we don’t lose sight of that focus as a more interactive gov20 experience takes hold.

As national governments reorganize and restructure the onus should not be on the citizen to know which department needs to manage the transaction that they need to complete. The nirvana of a citizen or a business being able to open a conversation with government as a single entity still feels like it is a long way off in a lot of jurisdictions.

Make transactions available externally, not just data. We’re all agreed that open government data is a powerful concept, we have already seen the possibilities as developers have built a wide array of new types of application that were hard to conceive without the data that government holds.

There is another optional step though.

Government don’t just hold data, government also has control over a vast number of transactions that could become integral parts of other applications, truly delivering citizen services in places where citizens expect to find them.

Imagine booking your next vacation. With your permission your favourite travel site should be able to check the validity of your passport, ensure you have a visa for your destination country and verify that you have the right vaccinations for the trip. As you travel home your credit card company should be able to interact with a government service to ensure that all that unnecessary sales tax that you spent is quickly refunded to you.

Internal government systems manage all of these transactions today (and about 10,000 more in any given country), it makes sense to allow others to build on them to provide new types of services that just can’t be offered today.

Semantic enablement of published datasets. My last post talked a little about the role of RDF in ensuring that we get value out of data that is published for external use.

As an international community we need to ensure that the semantic descriptors that are applied to datasets have some degree of harmony, allowing citizens to pull data from different jurisdictions to answer questions that they have.

A single understanding of published data would help consumers of these datasets at both ends of the scale. From a child using the data to complete a project for school, through to complex development of cross border policy.

Close the Digital Divide. This is an issue that never quite seems to go away, although many would argue that progress is being made. What we still rarely see however is clear articulation of how recently published gov20 plans will help close the digital divide, in fact in some cases the increasing numbers of services being offered online are only serving to make the problem worse.

New form factors for computing devices are certainly helping, and delivery of government services through technology that citizens already have access to (i.e. the TV, or the cell phone) is certainly a step in the right direction.

Gov20 plans need to carefully consider this issue in detail and find the right answer for their own national situation.

The 2008 eGovernment Readiness Survey has been published by UN/DESA and in turn we have see ZDNet report that some countries around the region have dropped in their overall rankings.

From Vivian Yeo’s article;

Several countries in Asia have slipped in e-government readiness rankings, according to a new study released by the United Nations (U.N.). [..]

[..] With an index score of 0.447, the Asian region fared slightly below the world average of 0.4514 in the e-government readiness index. Europe proved the best-performing region, boasting a score of 0.649, while the Americas scored 0.4936.

Given that the survey work that UN/DESA undertake reflects eGovernment projects from around the globe it is important to recognize that the rankings are comparative, so this does not mean that a move in the rankings suggests that a given program is succeeding or failing, just moving in ranking against other countries in the world.

At the same time there are some exciting highlights from around the region in the report, with countries such as Korea and Vietnam scoring well for the work that they are doing in the exciting and emerging area of eParticipation.

So, if your national programs are beginning to slumber a little what can you think about to restart and refresh them? I have three ideas that you might want to start with.

Leadership. When most national level plans kick off they usually do so with support from senior leadership within the respective government, sometimes a senior civil servant or ministerial level politician. This leadership is important both in terms of strong senior support which helps to get past some of the bigger hurdles that stand in the way of delvery and ensuring that the technology aligns well with the business of government.

At this point in time a lot of eGovernment programs are several years into their original plan, the original leadership has moved on to think about other big issues. Now is a great time to reach out to those same people with new and exciting ideas of what can be done in the next phase of your program, work with them to establish support for your next big adventure.

Clarity of Vision. Another symptom of aging programs is that the original plans tend to fragment across various departments and become a little hazy. In this environment it gets increasingly harder for departments to understand how they work together, for industry to establish a plan to get involved with your program and for citizens to understand what services are on offer or how to use them.

It is worth thinking about all of your work around eGovernment, looking at how the programs fits together at a national level and considering many of the new technologies, increased broadband speeds, mobile communications and other advances can be used to bring new benefits to your programs. A clear vision around how all these pieces fit together is invaluable for the many groups who want to get the most out of your program.

Simplify the Technology. Finally, over the last five years we have seen significant advances in the way that technology integrates, with much of the functionality that would have been hard to deliver now being available out of the box. Microsoft has been building reusable plans and components like the Connected Government Framework, or for local government the Citizen Service Platform which help you get started and deliver services more rapidly and efficiently.

Of course, these three ideas won’t solve everything, but they will give you some insight into where to focus as you refresh your current plans and prepare for the years ahead.

eGovernment is as exciting an area today as it was ten years ago, with plenty of additional technologies maturing to a point where they are useful components of government programs, and a plethora of new ideas around how to streamline services that improve service to citizens and businesses.

Now is a great time to take a look at the survey data coming out of the United Nations, reflect on your own national program and put a plan in place for an exciting decade ahead!

During the final months of 1995 I found myself involved for the first time in an eGovernment project. The goal of the project was a simple one, we were tasked with providing a single “Smart Form” that would allow an individual to register as being self employed. Delivering this involved working with business processes in three government agencies, two involved in taxation and one involved in employment registration.

We looked at the challenge ahead as technologies and developers and decided that this would not be a complex system to design or build. After all, it was just a single form, digitising a single well defined process…

About two weeks into the systems analysis phase of the project the enormity of the challenge ahead started to become clearer. Simple data like a name or an address was not stored in the same way across the three agencies. The processes that we were concatenating into our single form were all being run with different service level agreements and delivering on each agreement was quite rightly something that was taken very seriously by the owners of each service. Finally it was also clear that the small amounts of addition overhead of work that would be need to run our single service just didn’t belong in any of the three agencies, and in turn didn’t have any manpower or budget in place to run it.

As a technology company the project soon began to look more like a nightmare than an opportunity, of course for the government we were working with these were exactly the types of lessons that they wanted to learn as they planned for a broader set of projects across the wider civil service.

It is interesting to look back on projects like that today and consider what has changed in the world of technology and how we might approach the project differently in today’s world. The simple answer is that these are exactly the types of challenges that information technology and large systems design principals now take in their stride.

The industry today talks a great deal about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) which is a technical term for breaking systems into their constituent parts, and then publishing them so they can be used elsewhere while having minimal impact on the organization that provides the service.

In a Government context the advantages are clear. In a SOA world it is no longer critical that data needs to be managed in exactly the same way in every department, or that business processes need to be redesigned with the workings of the rest of the government in mind.

Today every government department can look at the services that it offers, be it licence issuance, tax collection or any other process, and then use simple web service technology to enable those services to be used by other departments or external commercial providers seamlessly.

The benefits are easy to see. Services are less complex and less costly to design and provide. With the right planning around national level architecture and data management, cross government services can be built without the need for costly and complex systems integration projects.

In some cases an agency who makes their particular line of business application available as a web service will find it being used in useful new ways by other government departments or by commercial organizations to provide services to citizens and businesses in ways that had not previously been thought about or funded.

My former team in Redmond put a lot of time and effort into looking at the right high level framework for this sort of environment would look like, the resulting work was called the “Connected Government Framework” or CGF for short. Today you will find the basic framework that the team delivered integrated tightly into many of the solutions and service offerings from Microsoft and our partners.

The lessons from this complex fifteen year journey help us deal with some of tougher issues that just about every government is facing today as they put their own plans in place for the delivery of online and electronic services. Not least of which are the still those same issues of shared service level agreements and data harmonization. Service Oriented Architectures and the technologies involved assist us in delivering complex business systems without the need to closely couple organizations or data in ways that may otherwise be less natural.

23/1/08 additional: Government Computer News this morning carries information on the release of Microsoft’s Citizen Service Platform, an announcement that was made at the Government Leader’s Forum in Berlin yesterday. Follow this link to read more;

Microsoft’s Citizen Service Platform incorporates the company’s work with local and regional governments over the past several years, and consists of templates designed to run in Microsoft operating environments for the most commonly deployed e-government services.

Microsoft will offer the initial set of online services to governments for customization and integration into their current environment later this year.

Anyway, the first part of the week was spent with colleagues from the United Nations University in Macau attending their ICEGov event, the second part in Sydney where I got the opportunity to participate in the symposium that the University of New South Wales were hosting, looking at the technical and legal aspects of Open XML as they pertain to the needs of Australian users, developers and business.

And to round things off I’m now sat in a hotel room in Sydney, trying to catch up on the events of the week and clear my inbox down to a point where it becomes manageable again, as I am sure you have read before we exchange a LOT of email inside Microsoft.

The ICEGov conference was pretty unique in its makeup, we have been working with a couple of members of the faculty for a little while now on some research questions around eGovernment and Interoperability but this was the first opportunity I have had to visit the school and gain a wider view of the work that is going on there.

Unfortunately I could only stay for the first two days of the event, the sessions I attended looked at elements such as applying formal engineering techniques to eGovernment development, Interoperability through decisions around architecture and technology, eGovernment policy management, and a session on eParticipation which is an area of eGovernment where I personally believe we will see an increasing focus in years to come.

Usually at this type of conference sessions consist of various government or industry leaders presenting best practice based upon recent projects that they have been involved in. These types of events are interesting, it is always good to learn what is going on elsewhere in the world, but every government differs in terms of technology use, social structure, culture and related government policy so it is sometimes hard to see how these best practices can be picked up and put to good use in another jurisdiction.

The format of ICEGov was far more academic in its approach, with each of the sessions being closer to half a day and the format of the content being constructed more as a topic tutorial, drawing on occasional cases where needed. I found every session I participated in helpful, and in every case walked out of the session with a handful of new ideas that I hadn’t walked in with.

Great stuff, and a big congratulations to the organizing team who I know put a lot of effort into pulling this together.

The second event was equally as interesting. The symposium at the University of New South Wales’ CyberLaw Centre has been arranged for some time, about 30 people took part in both halves of the day. The first half was a technical discussion, the second half was looking at the legal coverage for the specification.

As is always the case with these events it was a spirited but constructive discussion with Rick Jelliffe and Matthew Cruickshank facilitating conversations around the technical aspects of Open XML and then Colin Jackson presenting the views of the New Zealand Government on the topic of Open XML and open documents in general.

The conversations during the afternoon session were led by Ronald Yu and Microsoft’s Steve Mutkoski. Good points were made all sides of the debate, and several of us agreed that a post-February beer or two might be a good idea.

I would really like to see more of these types of event in the region. The debate on the Internet sometimes consists of one side throwing a grenade over the wall at the other, then the other side throwing one back. Events like the one at UNSW give everybody a chance to spend time getting into the technical, legal and standardization questions. I know that I learned a few things on the day and I would like to think that some of the other participants did as well. It was good fun, there is always a lot to be gained from open conversation.

At the Government Technology Summit in Phuket earlier today we were discussing what to look for in a project to help decide what sort of outcome there will be once it reaches maturity. I have tried to commit a few of those thoughts to this post, some are obvious statements in here (and for that I apologize!) and some that are maybe not so obvious.

As the reader I would ask you to note that at best this these comments are a guide, every project is different and every government is different – the outcome of any project can be affected by the passion of the individuals involved, the desire of citizens or businesses to support the new service or any number of other factors.

So, some things that might be worth while looking out for when you’re assessing chances of success;

• It is never about the technology. I have seen many eGovernment projects have started out as an effort to embrace technology in one form or another without any clear goal to redesign the process that the technology is supporting or a clear policy mandate that supports the end result. Very often these types of project fail. The technology in itself rarely does anything useful if it does not have a really clear business objective to follow. Look for the policy and business agenda.
• It is always about the leadership. Like any process reengineering project, a great eGovernment project has to have a we defined and empowered leader, and that leader generally has to be somebody who is accountable for the business change that the project will bring. Looking back on the many eGovernment projects that I have been involved with success is often driven in association with a committed minister or mayor. The policy mandate has to support the change and the technology that will be necessary for any project to succeed. Look for the leader and listen to what they have to say.
• Policy and Technology in perfect harmony. Technologists and policymakers rarely “connect”. They usually talk two different languages and therefore often their objectives do not align in the way that the project needs. In any project there has to be a component that will ensure that technologists and policy makers talk – before policy is made. Look for the communication plans that bring policy and technology people together in a fruitful manner.
• Knowing the target audience. Knowing exactly who your target users are can be hard for government entities, they generally have to deliver services that reach everybody regardless of disposition. Unfortunately this does not make this point any less important that it would be for any other project. You have to be able to ensure that your end result reaches the constituents that it is designed to assist, and that they can access it on devices that they choose to use. Very often eGovernment projects target the web as a primary delivery channel, in many project it may be better to consider a kiosk, the mobile phones that are in most peoples pockets, digital television services or one of the many other devices that exist in society today. Look for clearly defined and articulate demographics for the target user base along with an analysis of how they want to consume the service.
• Where is the user? All too often technology seems to be the starting point rather than the user (think through some of the current debates that we’re currently having in Asia). Good technology design needs to place the user at the center or it will most likely fail. As with most large projects, focus groups and other ways of gathering feedback from your target user base will be a guiding light as project plans are executed. Look for a clear articulation of the benefit that the user will get from the project once it is complete. Think about how useful your target group of users will find your final project deliverable.
• It isn’t about the Web. eGovernment is rarely about building Web sites or using technology purely for administrative and operational purposes. It’s more often about fundamentally rethinking the way public service delivery happens. For example, would a policymaker commence a new hospital building program if they understood that pervasive healthcare technologies mean that in the near future patients will be able to self-medicate and control many conditions in the comfort of their own home? Look for the pervasive impact that the Internet enabled project is making on policy development and service delivery.
• Measuring success. As with any endeavor, knowing what success looks like makes it much easier to define goals, targets and plans that will get you there. I have seen many eGovernment projects start off as entertaining technology experiments with no specific end goal in mind. Again, these projects rarely seem to get very far! Look for a clear definition of success, make sure it is clear how you will recognize when you get there.
• Embrace the legacy, be ready for tomorrow. Government data centers can at best be described as complex. Over the years business processes are designed and built on whatever the best of breed (or sometimes just the lowest cost) technology of the day is. Any new project needs to be able to be make use of existing components of the data center while providing support for devices and delivery channels that don’t exist yet. In past years when government technology was often designed in a bespoke manner for a single purpose this would have been a near impossible objective, today we can select technologies that are designed to deliver applications over the Internet to huge numbers of people. For government this provides both a clear view into which technologies and standards will be useful today, along with confidence that following the market will provide an evolution path into the future. Look for the plans that adopt technology that is in the market today, then clearly analyses market trends to provide a roadmap around what comes next.
• You’re going to need your people, bring them with you. Very often eGovernment projects involve consolidating service lines to provide seamless services to business and citizens. Naturally this is threatening to some who are measured on delivery of their own service or efficient running of their department. Think about how staff are measured and rewarded, make sure that there is a clear safety net for their careers in a new framework that provides more efficiency, collaboration between departments, and simpler services for citizens and businesses. Look for a framework that supports the people involved and ensures their involvement and commitment to the project.

So, there you have it. This isn’t anywhere near being an exhaustive list, as I said at the start of this post every project is different so the most you can derive from this text is a little helpful guidance. I don’t for a moment believe that I’m an authority on this topic, every project I participate in teaches me something else that eventually needs to get added to this list.

I add that I frequently feel humbled as I watch the complex machinery of government solve process and technology problems on a near unimaginable scale.

If you have additional points that should make it into this list I would love to hear them.

Fifteen years ago I was involved in some very early experiments in the United Kingdom to look at smart forms and identity management, it has been astounding to watch technology and policy evolve to deliver the projects that we see today.

Looking at the submissions in front of me I would describe many of them as Phase 3 projects. I’ll explain…

I have watched many eGovernment projects evolve over the years. When it comes to thinking about what comes next for each of these projects I tend to think about their evolution in three phases.

Overall this is probably about as simple as models get, but it does give some clues around how to build a road-map for the delivery of an  online Government service, along with some introspective guidance that relates to the services that you are delivering today.

Phase 1, Presence. Most governments are past this phase these days, but many began here. Early eGovernment projects had the goal of providing basic information about a department of a service through the medium of a web page. Very often these pages would provide a form you could download and print, maybe an address for your local office, or other guidelines around how to work with the department.

Phase 2, Transactions. Today there are a large number of completed and evolving projects in this category. These phase 2 projects very often take an existing business process that has been working for years and set about digitizing it in one way or another, frequently a web form is put online and citizens or business are invited to come and fill it out in this new environment.

In themselves these projects are useful, they make government more accessible and they decrease the amount of paperwork involved in getting something done.

Phase 3, Seamless Services. Ultimately every customer I talk to today about their eGovernment objectives has some element of Seamless Service delivery in their plans. Technologists might describe this as the Web 2.0 goal for government services. To deliver these types of service government has to be ready to think about the business processes that exist today and be ready to redesign them around a model that will deliver a new level of flexibility and openness.

In society today citizens and businesses have access to a wide range of devices, upon which they manage a wide array of data. In the world of Seamless Services those devices play an integral role in engaging with government as part of their everyday purpose, often they will complete government transactions transparently as part of a commercial transaction or another everyday activity. An example might be applying for an electronic visa in your destination country as you purchase the ticket to travel there from an online travel agent.