Introduction
Information technology (IT) is central to Gov 2.0, both as a platform for government operations and to provide channels for government internal and public communications. The Internet — the Web in particular, both the static first-generation Web and its reconceptualization as Web 2.0 — is likewise central to nearly every element of modern IT. Internet computing has become more than just a business (and personal) tool; it has reshaped the way individuals and organizations work and interact. Government agencies — public administrations — are of course among the organizations profoundly affected by this on-going revolution.
Gov 2.0 is in many ways a conceptual descendent of Web 2.0. After all, it was Web 2.0 that kicked off the whole ‘2.0’ craze, the idea that a generational leap defined by Net-centric IT should be emulated in every computing application domain. Yet while Tim O’Reilly (2004) defined Web 2.0 as “the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform,” Gov 2.0 is something more. It’s not just a computing platform but a new way of conducting the business of government. Gov 2.0 aims for Web 2.0’s Internet-mediated interactivity and collaboration, but its aspirations are greater: to bring those 2.0 capabilities to government operations whether internally focused or outward facing. The IT platform is central, but the success of Gov 2.0 depends on critical elements beyond IT, on people, policies, and procedures, and on ways that Web 2.0-style approaches:
- improve service delivery and satisfaction
- inform policy
- transform procedures and optimize performance
- enable new services.
Take these points as Gov 2.0 goals. The path to these goals is a focus on measurement, data, analysis, and informed action. But what measurements, data, and analyses, and how do these inform action? The key to these questions is a systematic analysis of Gov 2.0.
This technical note, the second in a series, sketches out such an analysis. It describes the many dimensions of Gov 2.0 and more, and outlines a basic Gov 2.0 implementation roadmap for governmental organizations.
Many Dimensions
Gov 2.0 can help public administrations improve and optimize long-standing practices. It creates the possibility of new government initiatives, products, and services. But what specifically are those new possibilities and how are they to be realized?
Of course needs and conditions will vary according to each agency’s mission, stakeholders, and capabilities. One route to understanding Gov 2.0’s potential — how Gov 2.0 can advance an improved way of business for government — is to perform a dissection of Gov 2.0 along the government’s principal dimensions, an analysis that can and should be carried out at every operating level, from state and local to national.
These principal dimensions are defined by a number of basic questions:
- What are the needs, responsibilities, and expectations of stakeholders, civil servants, other agencies, political leaders, and the public?
- How does Gov 2.0 relate to, and implement, laws, policies, and regulations?
- What are the goals of Gov 2.0? How does Gov 2.0 support government agencies’ missions, and how does Gov 2.0 enable the agencies to expand their missions?
- What can government learn from Web 2.0 and other recent computing innovations such as cloud computing, open source, and the Semantic Web?
- How can and should government transform its operating procedures and its operating environment? What should be preserved and what needs to be reworked? How can we tell which is which?
Data and information constitute the glue that joins the dimensions. They facilitate communications, collaboration, and cooperation among government agencies and between public administrations and the public. But data and information are not of great value without strong collection, analysis, sharing, and dissemination abilities, in particular without collaborative business intelligence (BI) systems, creating what some refer to as public intelligence.
Data, Information, and Analysis
Information, again, is government’s lifeblood. A U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, '21st Century
Challenges: Reexamining the Base of the Federal Government,’ says:
To be a leading democracy in the information age may very well mean producing unique public sources of objective, independent, scientifically grounded, and widely shared quality information... The stakes are high, including considerations regarding allocating scarce public resources, strengthening the economy, creating jobs, stimulating future industries, enhancing security, promoting safety, strengthening our competitive edge, and sustaining the environment.
The GAO report proposes reexamination of twelve areas that are key to governments’ ability to meet 21st century challenges. The first two of these areas concern data, information, and analysis — government as a data collector, data generator, and data provider. The GAO asks:
- "Is the federal government effectively informed by a key national indicator system about the position and progress of the nation as a whole — both on an absolute and relative bases compared to other nations — as a guide to helping set agency and program goals and priorities?"
- "Is the federal statistical system adapting effectively to the nation’s needs for information? Is it effective at all levels and sectors of society to meet evolving information requirements? Are the large amounts of data that it collects being effectively disseminated to the widest possible audiences, with due consideration to privacy and confidentiality issues?"
Data, indicators, statistics, and information dissemination: These are components of a comprehensive BI system. When aligned with business needs, they turn data into informed decisions. BI supports strategy development, performance management, and operational decision making. BI systems may be adapted to the needs of diverse users ranging from casual data browsers to researchers, and users with widely varied levels of technical skills and numerical literacy.
Special government BI needs include confidentiality protection, geospatial capabilities, support for record linkage and data fusion, advanced metadata management, and integration with survey design and management tools. End users need interfaces for finding, accessing, and interacting with data of interest across agencies among other capabilities. These special needs are covered in greater depth in the first technical note in this series, ‘Government Business Intelligence Best Practices,’ which is available at spacetimeresearch.com.International Initiatives
Government use of the Internet, and before the Internet, of online information systems, for information exchange and dissemination is of course not a new thing. The OECD's OLIS Online Information System, for example, was a pioneering medium for communication and collaboration between the OECD's Paris secretariat and the organization's far-flung committees and national government members, predating the Web.
The Web has extended the possibility of creating e-government systems to governments internationally and at all levels: local and municipal, state, and national. South Korea's ‘e-People Portal,’ is only one great example of many described by Deloitte Research in a National Issues Dialogue paper, ‘Web 2.0: The future of collaborative government,’ as
" a single place where citizens not only can rate the quality of services, but can also offer their own ideas on how to improve services. From one portal, citizens can submit suggestions to over 300 public organizations — and agencies aren't allowed to ignore them. Within a month of receiving a communication, an agency must reply to the citizen, explaining whether or not it has acted on the suggestion and, if so, how."
This technical note has already cited the U.S. government's Government Accountability Office; the Web sites usa.gov and data.gov are especially visible, American works-in-progress. We will now look at two more of the many notable national efforts underway, those of Australia and the UK.
An Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce is charged with looking at new uses of public sector information and at online engagement. The taskforce is composed of policy and technical experts and entrepreneurs from government, business, academia, and cultural institutions, according to the taskforce Web site (gov2.net.au/about/). Its purpose — presented here as another example of Gov 2.0 efforts — is to advise and assist the government to do the following:
- Make government information more accessible and usable.
- Make government more consultative, participatory, and transparent.
- Build a culture of online innovation within government.
- Promote collaboration across agencies with respect to online and information initiatives.
- Identify and/or trial initiatives that may achieve or demonstrate how to accomplish the above objectives.
The United Kingdom's central Gov 2.0 initiative is described in the document ‘Working Together - Public Services On Your Side.’ (It eschews the term ’Gov 2.0,’ perhaps because that term resonates with technology fans but is less meaningful for the larger public.) The UK's initiative, The Working Together Web site (www.hmg.gov.uk/workingtogether.aspx), details steps the government is taking "to give people, communities and frontline staff the information and real power they need to personalise public services" with the rationale that "reflecting their local and individual needs will create a richer, fairer and safer society."
The UK's goal is to place power in the hands of those who use public services, and "underpinning all this will be an information revolution." Front-and-center for the UK is the government's Directgov Web service (www.direct.gov.uk), which connects citizens to the spectrum of government agencies and service and data providers. As for the government’s adoption of Web 2.0 solutions, the Digital Engagement blog, authored by the Cabinet Office, which coordinates policy and strategy across government departments, is a great place to learn more.
These top-down initiatives provide visions and goals but generally leave implementation to individual agencies, each of which have their own missions, cultures, operations, and people and IT infrastructures. It is up to each implementer to formulate a path to Gov 2.0.
The Path to Gov 2.0
The path to Gov 2.0 neither starts nor ends with information technology, yet IT will guide and support the journey. The path starts with both top-down leadership that may take the form of legislation, regulations, or other mandates and bottom-up leadership from field and office staff with a first-hand, intimate knowledge of operations and requirements.
The path ends with better government-delivered and regulated programs and services. In between we have systems and people — managed and supported by e-government initiatives.
Certain basic steps are fundamental in any Gov 2.0 roadmap. Government should:
- Create policy that fosters openness, responsiveness, and engagement: a culture that promotes service and accountability. Benefit from staff and stakeholder experience and the diversity of their views, and understand and adapt industry best practices.
- Look at both IT-mediated operations and people processes. Understand how IT innovations can enhance the ability of personnel to respond to stakeholder needs.
- Evaluate practices and technologies developed by and for the Web 2.0 world — collaboration, continuous improvement, and accountability, and diverse innovations such social media, cloud computing, and geographically-aware mobile devices — for their government applicability. Account for concerns that are of special importance to your agency. These may include compliance, privacy and confidentiality, accuracy and timeliness, and accessibility as well as mandates that affect spending, revenue collection, procurement, and personnel administration. Assess their impact.
- Understand how government’s mission and societal role differs from those of the private and non-governmental public sectors and also how they are similar. Gov 2.0 initiatives, especially efforts enabled by new technologies and practices, should complement and support those sectors.
- Plan, execute, measure, analyze, and report… and repeat. These are data-centric processes, mediated by IT. They are steps facilitated by business process management (BPM) and business intelligence (BI) solutions, linked directly to performance management needs.
Building on Web 2.0 for Next-Generation Government
Crafting Gov 2.0 will not always be easy. "In our experience, three obstacles have… limited the impact of e-government efforts: ineffective governance, lack of Web-related capabilities, and reluctance to allow user participation in the creation of applications and content," according to McKinsey consultants Jason Baumgarten and Michael Chui, writing in a McKinsey Quarterly article, ‘E-government 2.0.’ Overcoming these obstacles is key to successfully applying Web 2.0 and modern computing capabilities to e-government, to Gov 2.0.
Deloitte Research's Web 2.0 paper offers the view that "the shift toward a more collaborative model of government won't happen simply by introducing Web 2.0 technologies" such as social media and interactive tools. Web 2.0 is a key element, and so is data, which fuels e-government.Data plus analysis equals information, Gov 2.0’s currency, providing operational visibility and promoting inclusive, participatory, open governance. Gov 2.0’s several principal elements — policy, people, technology, and mission — supported by Web 2.0 and modern, data-centric computing practices, will help create the next generation of government.
About
STR Technical Note series
This is the second in a series of technical notes sponsored by Space-Time Research.
Space-Time Research
Space-Time Research enables data transparency for government and other data providers. SuperSTAR analytics and visualizations provide a rich data experience for the delivery of public intelligence and government 2.0.
Space-Time Research is the leader in web-based data dissemination combining microdata with confidentialization and field-level security for advanced privacy protection. Customers include many of the most advanced government census and statistics organizations including the US Bureau of Census and the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Seth Grimes, Alta Plana Corporation
Technical Note author Seth Grimes is a business intelligence, data warehousing, and decision systems expert. He founded Washington DC based consultancy Alta Plana Corporation (www.altaplana.com) in 1997. He has over twenty-five years experience designing, developing, and supporting data management and analysis systems for government agencies including the US Navy, Department of Transportation, State Department, Internal Revenue Service, Census Bureau, and NASA, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the International Monetary Fund.
Mr. Grimes is also Contributing Editor at IntelligentEnterprise.com, a Business Intelligence Network channel expert, an instructor for The Data Warehousing Institute, and founding chair of the Text Analytics Summit. He writes and speaks on information-systems strategy, data management and analysis systems, industry trends, and emerging analytical technologies. He is also a team recipient of the U.S. Vice President's Hammer Award for Reinventing Government for his work on the U.S. Census Bureau's American FactFinder system.
Download the Making Sense of Gov2.0 - Technical Note written by Seth Grimes, Alta Plana Corporation.
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© 2009 Space-Time Research Pty Ltd and Alta Plana Corporation