New Zealand has ambitious plans to establish a rich e-government ecosystem that syndicates content and services through the national government portal, individual agency sites as well as the private sector. The good news seems to be coming through thick and fast for New Zealand’s e-government planners. In November no less an authority than the United Nations praised New Zealand’s e-government as an example of ‘global best practice’.
According to the UN’s Global E-govt Readiness Report: “New Zealand has taken extra efforts to actively encourage and promote [e-government’s] use to citizens, and does so … across all ministries and sub-sites. This kind of integrated implementation and promotion puts [New Zealand] in an altogether different league, one shared by only a few other e-government innovators and leaders.”
Laurence Millar, Director of the E-Government Unit of New Zealand’s State Services Commission is the man responsible for overseeing the execution of the country’s e-government programme, and he’s certainly got good cause for having a spring in his step.
Another report, < a href="http://www.e-government.govt.nz/docs/ready-access-2004/index.html" target="_blank">Achieving e-government 2004, published in October by Millar’s own department, reviewed government agency web sites, assessed the quality of their metadata records, and assessed public participation. Again the findings were an endorsement of the country’s progress to date.
“When it comes to the implementation of our e-government initiatives we have progressed further than anticipated,” Millar admits. “Our target for June 2004 was that the internet would be the dominant means of enabling ready access to government. We’ve certainly achieved that and, as our own report makes clear, some government agencies are already well advanced to the next set of milestones.”
E-government achieved?
The State Services Commission E-Government Unit is responsible for providing leadership and coordination of the country’s e-government strategy, working with people and technology across government to establish standards, architectures, governance and management to make New Zealand a world leader in e-government.
“So far, so good,” says Millar, of the country’s e-government programme. “I think we have seen dramatic gains in convenience and user satisfaction.”
He cites the example of New Zealand’s student loan application process, which now offers complete fulfillment online (“Knowing the sleeping habits of some students – such as my children - it is just as well it is now online; we would face a challenge getting them to come down to an office!”)
“There’s also been clear progress in melding together content from multiple agencies,” continues Millar.
The government’s umbrella portal – govt.nz – used to have data hand-coded to the web site. Now data is automatically syndicated from about 307 different contributing agencies. Each agency maintains their own data, which is uploaded to the umbrella portal once a week, soon to move to a daily upload.
Government agencies contribute content to the portal via their metadata. The metadata is captured in an online interface called Metalogue, maintained by the E-Government Unit. This enables agencies to add, edit and approve metadata records for their information and services and to post them to the govt.nz portal.
One key area that Millar accepts is still ‘work in progress’ is the issue of participation: “This is where there is currently the most opportunity to move forward,” he says euphemistically. “It’s certainly quite a long bow to draw. Governments get their legitimacy from trust from the people. If there is more participation, that feeds into increased trust in the government process.”
So far New Zealand’s government web sites have a markedly lower share of the available online audience than commercial sites. People who are perfectly happy to buy a book online, are still opting to contact government through conventional channels.
“We need to convert established web users to do government online as well as buying books,” says Millar. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see us start advertising e-government in online forums next year. You may not go online to do government, but if you are already online to do other things, you are probably more receptive to transacting with government online.”
“I also think that our moves on secure citizen authentication will help drive greater participation. Not only does it increase citizen trust in e-government, but it opens up new avenues for multiple agencies to deliver more targeted benefits to citizens,” he believes. “Once an individual identifies themselves, you can trust them and they can trust you. This will make transactions easier, but also increase the value of the transactions.”
New Zealand is “absolutely resolute” that there will not be a single ID scheme in New Zealand: “Legislation and the Privacy Code are explicitly geared to not having a single ID for citizens,” says Millar. “This means that we have designed an ID scheme where the citizen owns the logon process. They set their own unique identification, and they control which agency accesses their personal information online. This is an approach that is very deeply ingrained into the New Zealand way of doing government.”
The New Zealand administration has invited vendors to submit proposals for a single shared logon facility for citizens to access all-of-government services. Because the service will be built once and used by multiple agencies, government departments will be able to avoid the need to manage upgrading the solution and managing security patches – this will all be handled centrally.
The road ahead
Having achieved its first goal (‘the internet will be the dominant means of enabling ready access to government’), by 2007 New Zealand wants ‘networks and internet technologies to be integral to the delivery of government information, services and processes’, with a view to ‘transforming the operation of government’ through the use of the internet by June 2010.
“Our targets are quite stark,” says Millar, “but I think there is the right balance of vision and goals, along with concrete milestones. Everybody buys into these objectives, the debate within government now is ‘what is the most appropriate tactical response for that journey?’”
Achieving joined up service delivery represents the current focus of the E-Government Unit, and Millar is pretty confident that by 2007 all the services that could be sensibly delivered online will be delivered online.
“Most service delivery in New Zealand is currently single agency-driven. What we need to do over the next three years is go ‘inside out’ – in other words get everything designed from the citizen perspective,” says Millar. “Of course the integration of services is the difficult bit!”
In the past there has been a fair amount of interest and notoriety regarding what has been called the ‘New Zealand model for public management’. This model was based on a strongly delineated divide between different agencies, where services would be ‘bought’ and ‘sold’ between departments.
This unique approach to public administration led to a single-minded focus on efficiently delivering the outputs that agencies were contracted to deliver. This proved to be a very effective way of increasing public sector productivity – but it proved to be less good at delivering on inter-agency cooperation.
“Eventually we realised that government is more than a series of transactions, no matter how efficiently they’re delivered,” says Millar. “Now we are looking to increase the efficiency of the government-citizen transaction from the citizen’s perspective.”
The logic of seamless service delivery and joined-up-government obscures a number of ‘back office’ details that need to be thoroughly worked through first, he says: “Integrating services will start to blur the boundaries between agencies. Once you have a process that transcends agencies, who’s responsible for the success of the transaction? I think that accountability on a pan-agency basis is the next stage in administrative theory.”
Millar draws attention to another issue facing government administrators – creating an institutional willingness to rationalise services across organisations. This is something that can be overcome by a greater understanding of the priorities and sensitivities of the citizen-consumer, he suggests.
“All our implementation priorities are based on demand and research. We haven’t got an overdraft of political capital, because we haven’t taken the approach of ‘build it and they will come’,” Millar says. “When you move from access to delivery, that’s when you start spending serious money. So you have to make sure that it is spent on the most important things, the things that matter to the citizen.”
“Previously we didn’t know who we had to target. So the research that we have commissioned has been a tremendously important part of what we do. Our focus moving forward will be on services that deliver highest benefit to New Zealanders.”
E-government ecosystem
“I don’t have all the answers, but as we move towards 2010 a number of issues are percolating up – the rich interconnectedness of modern life, how you preserve and maintain citizen trust, what the appropriate level of government involvement in citizen lives is – and how that relates to the use of technology,” says Millar. “These are all issues that government administrators will have to face, because one of the key things to have come out of governments’ use of technology is the opportunity for public services to respond to people. Previously government determined what people needed, and the technology was merely the delivery mechanism.”
Looking ahead Millar believes that the next stage of e-government development will actively involve the private sector, and NGOs. New Zealand is already experimenting with a ‘syndicated’ approach to government information, and the same model could be used for public services.
“Government isn’t about driving traffic to a web site – government is about giving information to those who need it. In future this will increasingly mean syndicating information out to civic user groups, and other stakeholders interested in different aspects of government information,” Millar explains. “At the moment we’re primarily syndicating news, but we have plans to place consultation documents online and syndicate that, where appropriate.”
New Zealand may still only be at the very early stages of developing this syndicated approach to e-government (“We’re still feeling our way. You wouldn’t want to put a consultation piece on state security on a Women’s Health Group site for example.”), but Millar is already talking about getting select committees (high level government policy review groups) online: “Online consultation, and web-casting the select committee process, is all about building transparency and trust into the political process. Trust is the currency that gives government legitimacy. So for government, the question then becomes ‘how does the online world affect citizen trust in government?’”
It’s an interesting question, and it raises the issue of whether a more direct and participatory approach to governance will end up subverting the existing parliamentary process: “Parliamentary democracy entrusts decision-making to elected representatives. But a more direct approach to citizen participation, one that has been enabled by greater online transparency, needs to be used to inform rather than undercut that parliamentary process,” suggests Millar. “In my view, this is an issue that is outside the domain of civil servants, this is clearly an issue for the politicians!”
Quelle: Public Sector Technology & Management, 25.02.2005
