He’s a fellow Mini fan - so we talked about cars for a bit - but it wasn’t long before the conversation came round to e-government, and what he had to say was interesting. He’d been part of a discussion earlier in the day where someone had told him about the latest innovation in passport delivery in Singapore.
Singaporeans are able to collect their passports from special vending machines, registering their biometrics at the point of collection - imprinting them upon the chip in the passport seconds before it gets delivered to the vending machine’s tray. But how long does it take for the passport to get to the vending machine, following the initial submission of the passport application details? 7-10 days was the answer.
A government official from Bahrain said that it only took a few days for their citizens to wait to receive their passports - and an official from another country explained that with their new system, citizens only had to wait for two hours!
As a Brit, who has to wait 4-6 weeks, I couldn’t help but feel a little hard done by. And it got me thinking.
One hundred years ago the British civil service was the most sophisticated, technologically savvy public administration in the world. It was at the forefront of harnessing new communications tools, and also in the transformation of process and hierarchy to promote more effective decision making across the machinery of government.
There’s a wonderful document dating from 1918 - the Report of the Machinery of Government Committee - which sought to propose improvements to the structure of public administration. It first flagged the tension between structuring government around users, or structuring government around the services to be delivered.
The UK civil service still does a very impressive job, all the more so considering the stringent cost-cutting they’re undertaking - but it carries a tremendous legacy of thinking, and process and precedent. This necessarily makes it difficult to reimagine service delivery. A century’s worth of entrenched interest, political axioms, and sunk investment all encourage an incremental approach to change.
The question is - are we now going to see the same happen to countries like Singapore, which has for the last decade been a byword for cutting edge service delivery and value-for-money outcomes.
I believe Singapore finds itself increasingly saddled with the ‘Achiever’s Curse’ - where the reasons for previous success become part of a well understood institutional narrative that then fosters a linear approach to change, rather than a transformational one.
It is certainly interesting to see e-government upstarts snapping at the heels of established e-government leaders, and there is nothing pre-ordained about Singaporean administrative effectiveness. What’s been achieved to date has been the result of considerable effort, and considerable effort will be required to sustain and build on those achievements.
Yet the very language of ‘building on those achievements’ carries with it an implied drag on performance - “Singapore is an e-government leader,” said Mohamed before tucking in to a nice piece of tandoori pomfret, “which means that it now has a lot of legacy systems.”
Nobody would argue that Singapore is wobbling at the summit of public service excellence - but much as we’ve seen this season in the English Premier League football, there’s a general flattening of performance between governments. Everyone is Manchester United these days. So this means that there is a lot to play for in the various bi-annual rankings of e-government effectiveness, and in public sector benchmarks like the FutureGov Awards.
It should be remembered that a decade ago Canada was the undisputed leader in government service delivery, not Singapore. It will be interesting to see which countries top the pile in the coming years - and even more interesting, to see why.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): James Smith
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 06.03.2014
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