Forward-thinking in all but title
The history of e-government is littered with utopias (and disutopias), but the language of transformational government is a modernist dream run riot. You can see it from the strategy's title and Tony Blair's first sentence in his foreword: "The world is changing around us at an incredible place due to remarkable technological change" to its core vision, which is "not just about transforming government through technology; it is also about making government transformational through the use of technology."
The aims are highly desirable - the problem is the language, which creates false expectations. If you call something transformational, people tend to expect transformation. Shared services, more efficient human resources and finance systems, working out how much government actually spends on IT, professionalism, and the need to bring IT issues to the highest levels of organisations are all eminently worthy. But they will develop slowly, they come late (decades after the US, for example) and - they don't have the magic of transformation.
When it comes to citizen-centric government, there are several good points. The Service Transformation Board sounds like an excellent idea, putting heads of the big service delivery departments together for perhaps the first time. But again, the modernist thrust wins out over a considered strategy for making e-government something that citizens are likely to use. The plan is to "rationalise" the 2,500 websites in operation and get everyone using direct.gov and the Business Link. But the internet isn't like that. You can't make users work it in a particular way or come in from a particular place.
There are things you can do - work out the link structure of the government domain; employ strategies to make it easier to navigate; use hyperlinks to lead users into the domain and raise its visibility on Google; and employ external links to point outwards to other sources of information and expertise. You can track usage statistics and carry out experiments to find out how citizens use government online and how they might be encouraged to interact with government electronically. But there isn't much about these possibilities here, apart from a highly-welcome admission that "the UK has no systematic view of what citizens, businesses and frontline staff want and need" and what looks like a pointer to a link-up with Google for government searches.
We can expect another strategy for implementing the strategy, apparently. But even for a policy document, this is written very much in the abstract, with few examples of how technology might be used to make a better world - cleaner, for example, though e-pricing of road use; more secure, through e-borders; healthier, through e-health. This lack of examples makes it hard for the document to inspire the reader and I should think it would leave most citizens cold.
It is not easy to imagine alternative technology-enabled futures in an intelligent and inspiring way particularly after the dashed hopes of earlier e-government initiatives. But if we are going to be modernists, we ought to try.
posted by Unknown @ 11:46 AM
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