Toward digital government whats new?

Since the early 1990s, there have been multiple initiatives by several UK governments to use IT to modernise public services. For example, in 1996 the UK government was focused on the new possibilities offered by information technology, and it will learn from the way that these are starting to be harnessed by other governments and the private sector. It will change fundamentally and for the better the way that government provides services to citizens and businesses. Services will be more accessible, more convenient, easier to use, quicker in response and less costly to the taxpayer. And they will be delivered electronically.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, various administrations viewed e-government as an important way of improving public services, increasing the speed of carrying out transactions, and improving convenience, accessibility, flexibility, and hours of service.

These efforts to reform the use of technology in government, and to apply the lessons of the value of open standards as a means of breaking open the proprietary silos of technology - via initiatives such as the e-Government Interoperability Framework, or e-GIF - achieved very limited success. Some promising early progress such as, for example, putting the income tax self-assessment process online, and the process around payment of the vehicle excise duty remained as front-end, cosmetic one-off initiatives that failed to progress into any meaningful modernisation of the overall processes involved: they were on the web, but not of the web.

In retrospect, it is evident that the UK has historically suffered a recurrent mismatch between political aspiration and any meaningful and sustained technical delivery approach on the ground, despite being a pioneer in many policy areas notably the adoption of open standards and the promotion of open source. There are two important contexts from which to consider the UKs digital public services delivery ambitions - political and socio-technical.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the design and delivery of public services remained in the hands of a small number of dominant external suppliers who used technology mainly to automate previously manual ways of operating public services, rather than using it as a means to re-engineer and improve them around the needs of citizens. In part, this reflects the legacy of an exceedingly complex software real estate derived from a history of inefficient government procurement practices.

However, it also indicates an approach that used technology as a sticking plaster to make public services appear joined-up when in reality they remained fragmented across multiple administrative hierarchies, operational departments, and agencies. In short, there was a focus on technology at the front end, rather than the reform of the often poorly performing organisational structures and processes underlying this shop window.

Equally problematic was the progressive de-skilling of the public sector and its outsourcing of in-house technological expertise to a handful of large external suppliers. These long-term, exclusive contracts meant that even where departments or local authorities had the desire and ability to drive a re-engineering of their services, they were often unable to do so due to a lack of in-house capabilities as well as restrictive contracts that impeded attempts at innovation and reform. Instead of becoming the means to deliver reform and improvement, technology became the biggest blocker; even where the same external supplier provided the solutions, every system was separately built and maintained, often using proprietary and closely-coupled technologies. This siloed architecture cut across the desire to redesign and optimise services around the needs of service users.

In 2011 a cross-party House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee published the results of their investigation into the state of the use of IT in government and was highly critical of the approach, referring to it as a recipe for rip-offs. In response, the current UK government has renewed its focus on digitally-enabled public services but has been pursuing a very different architectural and commercial route for its achievement. The result is that although technology-based initiatives have been around for some time in public services, the current use of the term digital carries a more specific meaning than earlier online and e-government programmes.

Understanding and interpretation of the term digital public service delivery has evolved significantly in the past decade. Effectively, digital is now considered an umbrella for organisational values and practices. While technology is typically the enabler for these opportunities, digital is not principally seen as limited to technology. Successful digital organisations have customer-centric operating models clustered around speed and adaptability, exemplified by maxims such as show dont tell and good enough is better than perfect.

Digital organisations also seek to address the use of mobile devices as the new norm for staying connected across every aspect of our lives. Through the likes of smartphones and tablets, a growing number of people interact with friends, review various news feeds, check availability of local business services, collaborate with colleagues, communicate with vendors and suppliers, and much more. Successful organisations embrace this mobile-first world, and the expectations of an increasingly digitally literate population.

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Toward digital government whats new?