IfG.CC - The Institute for eGovernment

Web services specialist calls for a culture change to make online government services work.

White Waltham, Maidenhead, 26 October 2005 – e-Government budgets have been ploughed into meeting the 2005 e-Government deadline, rather than encouraging citizens to fully utilise the online services now available, according to David Macken, managing director of Internet technology provider, System Associates.

It is now 2005, the year that local authorities and government departments must demonstrate a more coherent method of working, using information technology to deliver better service levels to the public. Many authorities are on track with their internal processes, but have yet to realise the full potential of e-Government services in terms of government efficiency and service levels. The message from David Macken is that a major culture shift is needed to move away from a process-centric to a citizen-centric approach. He comments: “We are starting to see a few projects involving local councils that are genuinely dedicated to making it easier for the citizen to find the information they are looking for. However, local councils need to work together if a more joined-up online government is to be achieved.”

Research strongly suggests that the public wants to see shared information and public sector organisations working together online. Macken comments: “If someone wants to know where their nearest recycling point is, they want to know regardless of borough boundary. They may live in one borough, but the nearest recycling point could be in the next borough. By bringing together the various authorities, the citizen can find information relevant to them, without being restricted to the borough they live in.”

The emergence of more portals and information gateways shows that this is starting to happen, and content management systems have been, and will continue to be, the catalyst for online partnerships and collaborative working. By pooling IT budgets, neighbouring boroughs should start to see economies of scale and avoid citizen confusion. With a heavy emphasis on the use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and call-centres, web-based enquiries can be handled centrally and filtered through to the relevant boroughs.

Using the latest web technology, web portals are relatively quick to set up, the biggest difficulty lies in getting neighbouring boroughs to work together and that involves a big culture-shift within the public sector. Those that fuse together their political boundaries will undoubtedly reap the first rewards.

Macken believes that 2006 will be the year that sees greater convergence of local authority and departmental websites, spurred by the latest web technology including spiders, GIS software and tailored search engines, which make it easier and quicker than ever to get a web portal up and running.

Cross-boundary local authority teamwork will be crucial to the success of online public services. However, according to Macken, “The two biggest killers of a portal project are lack of funding and the source of data drying up, so that the information becomes out of date. It only takes one authority to back out of joint funding for a whole portal project to fail. Direct government funding should be available to sustain these portals and maintain their credibility.”

Quelle: Managing Information,