Ask an expert to name a government that is good at IT, and chances are the reply will be Canada. For the fifth year running, the country has topped a global league table of progress in putting public services on the web. It scores highly in UN surveys of e-readiness. And a major new academic study suggests Canada is the country that comes closest to getting IT contracts right. Such accolades are of interest to other governments trying to leap into the digital age — especially in Britain, where Canada has replaced Australia and Singapore as the example to emulate. Canada's secret, according to management consultancy Accenture, is a willingness to ask citizens what they want. The firm last week published its annual survey of e-government in 22 countries in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia. As in the past four years, Canada topped the league. (Britain came 10th.)
Coming top in e-government is not just a matter of putting official procedures on the web. Over the past few years, most advanced countries have created online channels for public services such as paying taxes and applying for permits. The reason the Accenture survey places Canada so far ahead of Britain — in fact, in a league of its own — is that it has used the web to re-think how public services are run.
Accenture gives highest marks to governments using IT to join up services for the benefit of the "customer". Examples include New York City's "311" number, which consolidates 40 organisations and 14 pages of telephone numbers into a single contact centre. "Citizens can use the service for information on virtually everything — noise complaints, landlord complaints, subway or bus information, traffic signal outages, potholes and towed vehicles."
France, not traditionally renowned for customer-centric bureaucracy, last year launched a similar offering. Allô, Service Public (dial 3939) promises to answer any request for administrative information in less than three minutes.
Marcus Robinson, an Accenture e-government expert, says the Canadians have long taken the idea of "citizen focus" seriously. A bilingual federal web portal is designed from the point of view of citizens and businesses, rather than government agencies. A new service, eContact, now being piloted, directs citizens to information regardless of jurisdiction or location. The web system has a natural language processor and a search engine to interpret the citizen's query and find answers from a database of questions and contact data provided by jurisdictions across Canada.
Individual agencies show an equal willingness to innovate. Robinson contrasts Canada's e-service for job-seekers with its British counterpart. "JobCentrePlus is perfectly good, but the Canadian equivalent is hugely more functionally rich. An agent helps the applicant construct a CV. If you log what you're interested in, they'll send you alerts when jobs come up. It's a nice example of taking a fairly simple concept and making it much more attractive to users." That in turn means more people are likely to use it.
Canada starts with some cultural advantages in e-government. About 70% of Canadians use the internet regularly and about 50% expect most of their dealings with government to be online. Geography also plays a part: as in Australia, when a physical government office is hundreds of miles away, there is a strong incentive to make contact online. Community websites thrive in remote areas: a typical example is www.citysoup.ca a one-stop interactive website based in the small communities of Port Moody and Coquitlam, British Columbia, through which residents pay parking fines, sign up for volunteer activities, book swimming lessons or find a child minder.
As a government, Canada has a more interventionist style than its neighbour to the south: it beat the US in Accenture's rankings largely because of its performance in "proactive communications and education". One example was the federal government's anti-smoking campaign, which involves a programme of daily emailed messages of support and information.
Accenture has an interest in talking up interest in re-inventing government machinery, because the process typically involves hiring expensive consultancies. However, other surveys tend to support its findings. The UN's latest survey of 191 member states ranked Canada seventh in "e-government readiness".
Another soon-to-be-published academic study ranks Canada, along with the Netherlands, as the most successful countries at managing IT contractors.
Author Helen Margetts, professor of e-government at the University of Oxford, says the secret is to place small contracts and keep expertise inside government.
Ironically, Canada gets little credit at home for its achievement. Accenture found that only 41% of Canadians felt government departments worked together effectively. It comments that even the world e-government champion is "not moving at the speed its citizens expect".
Autor: Michael Cross
Quelle: The Guardian, 14.05.2005
