There has been a significant ICT investment by the UK Government both nationally and locally to reform the provision, promotion, and usage of public services. eGovernment has been the articulation of many of these projects, helping to exploit the power of information and communications “in order to transform the accessibility, quality and cost-effectiveness of public services.” [1] The Government’s previous policy of putting as much public information online as possible has been successful but belies an unwillingness to face organisational reform. The majority of investments have been directed towards projects that are more piecemeal in nature, adding new features to public sector delivery whilst attempting to work within the existing framework. This ‘silo mentality’ is becoming increasingly outdated, as organisations which fail to build responsive structures that facilitate CRM systems and collaborate between public sector organisations and societal stakeholders are starting to look increasingly outdated when compared to more ICT focused and inclusive organisations.
The bulk of this £6 billion eGovernment strategy[2] has been directed towards raising the quantity and standard of government information online, ensuring public access to the Internet and creating inroads towards more collaborative projects between organisations and communities. In many ways government policy has been successful. For instance, government information is freely accessible online and organised by websites which provide seamless access across departments and regions without the user needing to be conscious of the differences. Also, government initiatives are slowly starting to foster greater cooperation, which helps to improve levels and quality of information and decision-making.
M. Jae Moon,[3] the UK National Audit Office,[4] the UN/ASPA,[5] Rita Santos and Richard Heeks,[6] and Darrel West[7] identify four or five stages of e-government, which distinguish where different government organizations are on the road to transformation:
- The Billboard Stage: Where information is put online but it is only one way
- The Partial Delivery Stage: Where information is communicated in two directions
- The Portal Stage: Where online services reach a technical level to reduce administrative burdens
- The Seamless Stage: Where government services are seamlessly intertwined
- The Interactive Democracy Stage: Where web-based political participation tools enable citizens to comment and make political improvements
However, the majority of investments have been directed towards the earlier stages, providing considerable amounts of information but lacking sufficient interactivity and input from users, resulting in many public sector websites being tarred as being too passive. To fully benefit from eGovernment the adaptation of new technological advancements “requires a careful investigation into the philosophy, structure and productive processes of the public organisations participating in eGovernment.”[8]Such a holistic view requires consistently considering public administration “as a socio-technical system and, as such, as a unit of: individual citizens, employees of authorities and governments, groups and society, technical and information systems, norms and laws, social and cultural practices, moral and ethics and natural environmental issues.” [9]
Much of the early reforms required for early stage Internet platforms were painless, merely requiring information to systematically be added online and sufficient marketing to encourage uptake by citizens and businesses. This was partly because the public sector is good at refining and improving existing services, such as through longer opening hours and drop in services. In terms of eGovernment adding a website which contained reports, key information and contact details required little organisational change but was able to provide visible results. This level of modernisation also helped to fulfil the Government’s goals of all information being put online creating too much emphasis on piecemeal upgrades rather than upgrading internal structures based around new ICT possibilities.
These lower level reforms were also easier to sell to the public than more problematic, technical and organisational reforms that provided less tangible results. Joint projects between government departments are very difficult, as any work requires the close cooperation of a large number of actors. There has not been enough development towards creating a framework that encourages this cooperation, with the Government having previously failed to put enough pressure and financial incentives for greater joint projects. However, the Government is finally starting to push through various initiatives that help introduce incentives to create new approaches to improving efficiency and improve the quality of government. These usually take the form of either ‘back office’ reforms or ‘One Stop Shops’.
The author believes that organisational cultures are the greatest obstacles preventing a more modern ICT influenced public sector. The
The proposed research aims to answer the following, with a view of examining why and how different agencies or stakeholders plan and implement public websites:
- What are the organisational factors that influence how eGovernment projects develop?
- Is there an optimum type of eGovernment culture? And if so, what does it look like?
- What are the key influences that push projects forward and what inhibits them? How do they impact on project success/failure?
Methodology
- Grid-Group Analysis + Cost-Effectiveness Analysis
- Multiple Perspective Analysis + Action Research
The problem of assessing eGovernment projects is that there will be different competing goals between different stakeholders in the planning and implantation process. Policy alternatives and their outcomes may also be unknown, such that estimates of risk and uncertainty are not possible. As a result the author considers that the problems will be ill-structured and that the methodology will require an analysis that actively defines the problem, taking care not to impose any bias. As a consequence policy analysis will be devoted towards problem structuring as well as problem solving.
Grid Group Analysis + Cost Effectiveness Analysis
The author believes that grid-group cultural theory originating from Mary Douglas [12] and later developed into a public policy tool by Christopher Hood [13] would form a major analysis to aid problem structuring. Its ability to capture the diversity of human preferences and relate differing preferences to different possible styles of organisation, each with its own advantages and disadvantages should help to explain the interactive process of many government websites.
For example, examining the cultural differences between different web portals to the public sector should provide insights into the way organisational behaviour affects structure and results (see ‘One Stop Shops’ analysis below):
- DirectGov.com, a hierarchical style website setup by the government and intended as the first point of access
- DirectionlessGov.com, a individualist rebuke to the site by volunteer computer programmers to highlight the failure of over centralised and over expensive government endorses websites
- YourLondon, an egalitarian portal developed following numerous symposiums of
- Pre ‘One Stop Shop’ key links web pages found within government websites based upon the sites context (fatalism)
Cost-effectiveness analysis is considered a better fit than cost-benefit analysis as the author believes that eGovernment has the possibility to go beyond mere efficiency savings, as increased information would also result in better decision-making. Because of the uniqueness of government these social benefits can be included without the distorting analysis of quantitative measurement.
Multiple Perspective Analysis + Action Research Analysis
Multiple perspective analysis allows for greater insights into problems and potential solutions through applying personal, organizational, and technical perspectives to problem situations. Especially suitable for ill-structured policy problems, the utilisation of technical, organisational, and personal perspectives has been useful at dealing with social technical and challenges such as eGovernment.[14]
Action research would form a useful mode of enquiry, as combining a problem-solving rationale and a research-orientated one simultaneously.[15] The former is preoccupied with the resolution of some organisational problem, via a research based intervention; the latter involves using the intervention as a vehicle for the production of new knowledge of interest to public policy.
Back Office Reforms
‘Back office’ reforms are used to improve the machinery of government processes, such as increasing the amount of high quality, localised data transfer between departments and regions. The introduction of technology and its adoption, such as sharing information through pooling ‘back office’ computing systems between government organisations has the potential to greatly improve the value for money and quality of government services. However, the reforms needed to introduce such strategies are complex and require a significant amount of commitment from all stakeholders involved. Otherwise the myriad number of obstacles to success will result in wasted time, overspending or even project collapse. This is most successful when “technology has entwined with management reform, while addressing the demands of consumers.”[16] As a result, emphasising reforms through the window of e-Government and its possibilities will give as many opportunities for efficiency gains as New Public Management and Deregulation in the 1990s but through increased productivity and not at the expense of services.
One interesting example of multi-agency cooperation was in
The benefits of MADE data were significant, for example enabling one town to identify that the top two wards for crime were also the top two for fire and ambulance incidents, with a similar pattern being replicated across all districts. This resulted in a multi agency ‘vulnerability index’ being created using a variety of indicators previously unavailable and permitted a greater understanding of local regions and better informed policymaking decisions.
One major example of Government creating a positive environment for cooperation is the Digital Challenge, involving a £6 million grant for one region and nine £200 thousand grants to the runners up. This was to purposefully create a unique incentive for a region, city or smaller sized area to introduce joined-up technology reforms to meet the needs of their local community and individual citizens. This major investment goes further then fostering best practice for ‘eGovernment champions’, as the structure of the grants should help to encourage the Digital Challenge finalists and the winner to work together and with central government to pool practices in order to tackle social exclusion and be exemplars in their field.
‘One-Stop-Shop’ government requires that all public authorities are interconnected and that all groups and individuals are able to access public services at a single point even without the need for users to know which department or local authority they need to answer queries. When successful these platforms can be incredibly useful for helping people navigate public services. However, the weaknesses and unpopularity of many schemes have shown limitations of ‘one stop shops’ against search engine sites and rival forms of communication, such as telephones and digital television.
Online portals such as YourLondon act as a ‘one stop shop’ to unify the websites of
Table 1: If there was a website where you could find public services all in one place from car tax to council tax to local school information and congestion charging would you use it? [18]
Research from Tickbox.net (above) has shown that there is a keen interest among many in using one-stop-shops, with 74.6% saying that they would consider using such a service. [19] DirectGov is the Government’s main channel for communication, with already having replaced up to 500 of the 3,000 or so government websites.[20] This one-stop shop helps to direct people effectively to the council or government service that they require. However, it intitially difficult to market, with a £5 million campaign to persuade users to contact their local council via a central government web portal having little effect, according to an independent study. [21] The Connect to Your Council campaign targeted people via radio and press and advised people to visit www.direct.gov.uk. However, despite claims by the DCLG that more than 250 thousand people visited the website in May and that more than 40 percent of respondents thought the campaign would encourage use[22] the consultants, SocITM Insight highlighted that one area of the campaign received only a 1.25 percent increase. [23] Despite referrals from Directgov rising threefold after the campaign, fewer than 1 percent of visitors found their local authority through the site and most relied on a commercial search engine (53 percent), while 16 percent guessed the address. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in
Public sector ‘one stop shops’ have struggled when competing against highly established search engines such as Google, with users finding it easier to type in some key words to hunt down the required site, rather than using and then navigating through public portals such as DirectGov. This is because the familiarity of Google and its ease of use limits the appeal of users transferring to the other service. In order to justify their existences and attract significant levels of traffic platforms such as DirectGov will not only have to match Google’s utility it will have to exceed it.
The hierarchical nature of sites such as DirectGov has led to critics describing the framework as overbearing in its dictations to other websites and unaccountable to its users. As a consequence grassroots websites such as DirectionlessGov have been launched by collectives such as Democracy.org.uk (also responsible for TheyWorkForYou and UpMyStreet among others), which creates an impartial and voluntarily supported alternative to either the centralised DirectGov approach and the monolithic Google approach.[25]
This was written by Jonathan McHugh in February as part of an unrealised research application
[1] E-Government Review Greater London Authority: Audit 2004-2005 (Audit Commission) 2005 p. 4
[2] P. Foley, X. Alfonso, et al Connecting People: Tackling Exclusion? An Examination of the impact of the Internet by Socially Excluded Groups in London (Greater London Authority) 2006 p. 24
[3] Moon, M. Jae. 2002. “The Evolution of E-Government among Municipalities:
Rhetoric or Reality?” Public Administration Review 62: 4–12.
[4] United Kingdom National Audit Of.ce. 2002. Government on the Web 11. House of
Commons 2001–2002 Session, HC 764. London: Stationery Office.
[5] United Nations/American Society for Public Administration (UN/ASPA). 2002.
Benchmarking E-Government: A Global Perspective. New York: UN/ASPA.
[6] Santos, Rita, and Richard Heeks. 2003. ICTs and Intra-Governmental Structures at
Local, Regional and Central Levels: Updating Conventional Ideas. Manchester, UK:
IDPM, University of Manchester.
[7] West, Darrel. 2004. “E-government and the Transformation of Service Delivery
and Citizen Attitudes.” Public Administration Review 64: 15–27.
[8] M. Wimmer A European perspective towards online one-stop government: the eGOV project (Electronic Commerce Research and Applications ) 2002 p. 93
[9] M. Wimmer A European perspective towards online one-stop government: the eGOV project (Electronic Commerce Research and Applications ) 2002 p. 95
[10] L. Torres, V. Pina, and B. Acerete E-Governance Developments in European Union Cities: Reshaping Government’s Relationship with Citizens (Blackwell Publishing) 2006 p. 292
[11] L. Torres, V. Pina, and B. Acerete E-Governance Developments in European Union Cities: Reshaping Government’s Relationship with Citizens (Blackwell Publishing) 2006 p. 296
[12] M. Douglas Cultural Bias, from In The Active Voice(Routledge) 1982 p. 183-254
[13] C. Hood The Art Of The State: Culture, Rhetoric, and Public Management (Oxford University Press) 1998 p. 7-12
[14] W. Dunn Public Policy: An Introduction 3rd Edition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentis Hill) 2007
[15] McKay, J., & Marshall, P. The dual imperatives of action research. Information Technology and
People, (2001). 14, 46–59.
[16] SmartGov: Renewing Electronic Government for Improved Service Delivery Jul 2003 p59
[17] D. Wastell a, P.r Kawalek et al Information systems and partnership in multi-agency networks: an action research project in crime reduction (Information and Organization) 2004 p. 197
[18] DirectGov Internet Thinking (Tickbox.net) 2006
[19] DirectGov Internet Thinking (Tickbox.net) 2006
[20] Quoted in: http://www.idealgovernment.com 18/02/08
[21] £5m e-government awareness campaign flops The Guardian October 12, 2006
[22] Councils Blast Euro RSCG Take-up Campaign (Campaign) June 16, 2006
[23] £5m e-government awareness campaign flops The Guardian October 12, 2006
[24] £5m e-government awareness campaign flops The Guardian October 12, 2006
[25] http://www.directionlessgov.com/about.html
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