From E-Government to Good Governance and from Good Governance to Development... The Arab world in the global E-Government readiness report 2005 Arab E-government

Simon Moores offers advice to those looking to spread e-government to the Middle East and beyond. For starters, they must remember what works in the UK doesn't always apply elsewhere.

I'm just back from a visit to the Middle East where I've been sharing my unorthodox 'Kalashnikov theory' of e-government at the invitation of the British Council.

To start with, as we try to come to grips with the new challenge of 'transactional government' here in the UK, we might remember there's a wider world out there, struggling with the internet as a new medium for public sector reform.

What people often tell me in the Arab world is that if you are a small and oil-rich state, then e-government looks good on your CV and impresses the Americans.

"Bureaucracy is the ultimate purpose of the state," Karl Marx said in one of his wittier moments. Yet e-government works best in societies with a relatively thin and efficient public sector. We know this, intuitively at least, from our own experience in the UK and can observe that where government is at its fattest and most Byzantine, e-delivery projects are most likely to fail because being large and being 'joined-up' are mutually incompatible concepts in an environment which demands agility, initiative and shared services.

I'm now in danger of oversimplifying a complex argument but let me return to the example of the Middle East, where many people, seeking reform, might like to see the arrival of some degree of e-government. Even Syria is interested, or so their Ambassador tells me, but not everyone is entirely sure what it really offers in practice.

What people often tell me in the Arab world is that if you are a small and oil-rich state, then e-government looks good on your CV and impresses the Americans. There's no real legacy infrastructure to worry about and a handful of very large technology incumbents are more than happy to sell you something resembling 'e-government in a box', often still not quite as advanced using a Sky satellite remote but improving slowly over time.

At this point, if you're a small nation you will appear on the e-government 'readiness' index and for some, that's where progress slows. This happens for a number of reasons, frequently related to competitive suspicion and a deep-seated cultural reluctance to share information and authority between politicians and their personal fiefdoms in the shape of government ministries.

This problem becomes more acute in countries with much larger populations, relatively low internet penetration and little hard currency to spend. Led by a handful of innovative and reform-minded thinkers, they want to achieve a result they can point at as a sign of progress and a source of national pride.

Once again the big software and hardware companies are only too happy to sell boxes with 'works best with e-government' written boldly in English on the side. But the arrival of a national technology strategy invariably opens a political can of worms, which reveals among other things that in societies where the oral tradition is prevalent and personal authority counts, nobody has taken the time to write down the business processes that underpin the people- and paper-intensive operations of government departments since the Ottoman empire collapsed in 1918.

So while we are trying to help Iraq towards true democracy, I would argue we are missing the opportunity to help some of its neighbours use technology in a way that reaches the lives of the many and not the few.

This is where my Kalashnikov theory comes in - and it's very simple. What I've been telling government leaders in my Middle Eastern travels is that not every country can look towards Dubai or even Singapore in planning a national technology strategy. Instead, most countries with larger populations should remember the rugged examples of the Kalashnikov rifle and the T34 tank. That is, they should build their own nascent services in the same way - resistant to sand and a great deal of harsh treatment, and still capable of delivering what they say on the box in what are often the most hostile bureaucratic and technology-limiting conditions imaginable.

My personal Christmas message to the companies and countries that wish to encourage good governance, progress and public-sector reform is that simply selling fibre, boxes and licences to a developing country is little different to doing the same to my small, technology-challenged and struggling local council.

If we in Europe are going to promote e-government as a tool for progressive change across the Middle East, it has to be in a sound local context and with the financial and technical support that will take modest projects to the point of being able to deliver simple, useful services for the many. Or, to quote Winston Churchill: "It is no use saying, 'We are doing our best.' You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary."