Essentially, the strategy presents a series of objectives for the way ICT should underpin the delivery of government services between now and 2010, together with a discussion of some of the priorities and key milestones.
There is plenty of focus on what e-government should look like and why, but a lot less on how we are going to achieve it. Which is, of course, the hard part.
On the plus side, the document deserves applause as a unified statement of direction.
It contains some relatively bold statements about single sign-on for citizens, multi-service smartcards and the development of a cross-agency service-oriented architecture (SOA).
This last item is important because larger federal government agencies have all initiated architecture projects, and guiding these individual efforts towards a collective design will greatly assist when it comes to connecting government services between agencies.
SOAs are enterprise guidelines and principles for deploying software as discrete components or "services".
Although they can take many years to put into practice, research conducted by my organisation confirms very significant benefits accrue through more rapid integration and software reuse, among other things.
This latest e-government strategy has also been given more weight by being endorsed by cabinet before its release, something the 2002 strategy never had.
For the most part, however, there is nothing new in the content. All of the messages about being more co-ordinated, giving citizens consistent unified interfaces and connecting systems across government agencies have been around for a long time.
Senior technology decision-makers in the public sector are already well and truly tuned in to those goals.
As one government IT manager said to me, "there's not a lot in it you could disagree with".
One way to improve the document would have been to align the IT strategy more closely with long-term government objectives in portfolios such as healthcare, human services and education.
Another would have been to connect it to a broader shared services agenda, such as is being pursued by some state governments.
Most important, the e-government strategy does not address the very significant challenges around governance. A lot more thought needs to be put into how the government plans to alter its organisational structure, decision processes and the way funds are distributed to best achieve this top-down vision.
At the present time, for example, the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), the department whose crest adorns the cover page of the e-government strategy, looks and sounds like a whole-of-government IT authority, but it is in fact no such thing.
The real cross-government technology decisions in Canberra are actually made by the chief information officers (CIOs) for the government's largest departments, collaborating directly with one another through a relatively informal but very effective council they created themselves.
These CIOs are happy to listen to AGIMO suggestions as long as they don't, in the words of one I spoke to recently, "get in the way of any real work".
I have been hearing that message about AGIMO, and its predecessor the National Office for the Information Economy, for five years.
I cannot imagine this is the ideal platform from which to pursue a top-down, co-ordinated vision for e-government over the next four years.
In order to achieve the 2010 vision it could be useful, for example, to tweak the funding process, perhaps withholding a proportion of government IT expenditure and centralising its allocation to cross-departmental projects.
Another valuable step might be to transfer authority for setting AGIMO's agenda to the CIO council itself, thus recognising and formalising the reverse hierarchy that already exists.
There are plenty of other possibilities too, but the new e-government strategy devotes only two paragraphs to acknowledging governance arrangements that are already in place. That is a missed opportunity.
Autor: Bruce McCabe
Quelle: Australian IT, 11.04.2006
