Will Government 2.0 achieve the promise of E-Government?
E-government was the future. E-Gov was going to transform government. Improve citizen services. Integrate with “life events”. There have been many successful e-government initiatives. Yet government has not yet “transformed”.
The E-Government Theory
Experts believed that e-government would mature through four phases. (Some analysts presented three phases, some five). The theory was: e-government begins with broadcasting information on web site.
Phase 1: Broadcast. Citizens and businesses have access to information in a more efficient and effective manner than traditional mechanisms. Most governments provide information via the web.
Phase 2: Interact. In the second phase of e-government, businesses and citizens are able to interact with the government. They are able to start a transaction or 
request services. This second phase improves efficiency because businesses and citizens are able to start transactions such as filling out government forms on-line. Most governments provide interaction capabilities.
Phase 3: Transact. The third phase of e-government supports complete transactions. Citizens and businesses are able to fill out forms, request and pay for services. These “front-office” transactions integrate with “back-office” systems in governments to improve citizen and business services. Some governments support comprehensive transactions.
Phase 4: Transform. The fourth phase of e-government assumed that government services would be magically transformed. The nature of government would change. The relationship between governments and citizens would achieve a new level. But, this did not happen. There was no miracle. There has been some change in government, but not fulfilling the promise of e-government.
Government 2.0
Government 2.0 is the logical extension of e-government. Government 2.0 can fulfill the promise of e-government. Many e-government initiatives exposed technology problems. Many governments were unable to integrate the front and back offices.
Phase 4: Single Point. Many experts foresaw the problem of the “single point of contact”. Any life event such as the birth of a child or the creation of a business can require interacting with many government entities across multiple levels. The need to support interaction for these life events is a critical stage. We believe that is the “missing link” to enable government transformation. 
Phase 5: Internal Collaboration. It is very difficult to transform government to interact and collaborate with citizens and businesses if the government does not collaborate internally. Governments need to collaborate across organizational boundaries. Traditional collaboration tools have not been as successful as Web 2.0 collaboration. We believe that governments need to leverage social networking tools for internal collaboration. This is a relatively low risk. Improving internal collaboration enables governments to move to the next phase.
Phase 6: Transform. Government organizations leveraging social networking for internal collaboration are able to extend externally. Government leaders will understand the power of collaboration and the benefits of exposing data based on the experience of internal collaboration.
Is this Government 2.0 or e-government 2.0? It’s both. Successful internal adoption of social networking by governments combined with significant changes in businesses thanks to Enterprise 2.0 points to exciting transformation. Transformation that will improve government services and performance.
Tags: e-gov 2.0, e-government 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, government 2.0, transformational government, web 2.0
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:56 pm
I’ll take issue with:
“Phase 5: Internal Collaboration. It is very difficult to transform government to interact and collaborate with citizens and businesses if the government does not collaborate internally. Governments need to collaborate across organizational boundaries. Traditional collaboration tools have not been as successful as Web 2.0 collaboration. We believe that governments need to leverage social networking tools for internal collaboration. This is a relatively low risk. Improving internal collaboration enables governments to move to the next phase.”
You’ve set up some very general premises, starting with the first sentence. Governments do collaborate internally (if by that you mean that different agencies talk to each other), but where they are limited in their collaboration is when there are very good reasons to safeguard the information held by individual agencies. We should always be wary about incurring real costs (loss of community trust etc) in the pursuit of trendy issues like collaboration.
In the sort of changes in e-Government that you’re talking about (eg life events) it’s not yet clear what e-tools would be useful. In fact, the issue of general improvement of services is where Government 2.0 has not yet begun to demonstrate any value.
If you could specify some use cases, that would be a good start.
November 4th, 2009 at 7:52 am
This is an excellent and detailed comment. The roadmap to government transformation through electronic government, open government or government 2.0 remains unclear.
Governments, like large corporations, are organized functionally. Accross government tiers from national to municipal. Information systems have generally been implemented to meet the needs of these functional groups.
Most of the literature on e-government focused on the front-office with very little emphasis on the back-office. Many governments found that back-office systems were unable to consume web interactions in situations like government granting and e-procurement. For example, grants.gov overwhelmed some grant making organizations in the US federal government. Infrastructure Canada has been challenged to provide accessible details for stimulus money.
Many of us have used pre-Web 2 collaboration and content management software. (I’ve worked for companies that developed these applications in the Web 1 world.) It seems to me that the overriding concern in these applications was maintaining control, sometimes at the expense of functionality and transparency. You might not agree with that statement. It is generally true that consumer social networking has proven to be more flexible, more user-centric, more goal-oriented and easier to use than the traditional enterprise tools.
I will be on a panel later today discussing Government 2.0. We’ll try to answer these questions and upload the content to YouTube. And, we’ll embed the videos on the blog. We also plan to provide some more concrete use cases for Government 2.0 in blog posts during the next month.
The Treasury Board Secretariat in Canada has done a lot of work about “life events” and providing a single face to citizens and businesses. I think that you’re right – the way in which Government 2.0 will enable this is not entirely clear to everyone. I think that it is because the bulk of talk on Gov 2 has been about the social network and very little is about the back office. We’ve talked about this in a previous blog entry http://www.freebalance.com/blog/?p=499
I have to disagree with the notion that collaboration is somehow trendy. There is no question that social networking presents risks for any organization. That’s why tools should be used internally first – such as Intellipedia used by the United States Government to collaborate on intelligence. In fact, many examples of effective use of Government 2.0 come from the most risk-adverse high-security functions.
I also hope that the seminar today will advance the risk vs. benefit debate as well.
Look forward to your comments on upcoming posts, especially the use cases that we will be describing!
November 4th, 2009 at 8:07 am
Great comments and resources – thank you!
I work in the Government of Canada online communications world and would very interested in more information about what TBS has done around “life events.” I’m hoping it’s more than the CLF initiative and goes beyond providing a ‘single face’ to citizens that is simply a web portal that still send citizens on journeys to dated, poorly written content.
For ‘outward’ communicators, effective internal collaboration tools that are open between departments, not just within, are vital if we truly want to translate our shared work and initiatives into valuable online information and experiences for citizens. This will require CIOs to themselves collaborate with others so they are serving the Governments needs and not solely those of their Department. In some cases, I am seeing the Government silo-culture slowly strangling the inherently collaborative and open culture of Web 2.0.
Do we need to use them internally, absolutely. Do we need to use them internally first? Absolutely not. The tools we choose, the time it will take and the lessons we learn will not necessarily influence the approach we use with our citizens.
The promise is still there, the expectation is simply higher.
@mjmclean
November 4th, 2009 at 8:24 am
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November 4th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
I hope to have the video from the ICGFM Forum uploaded in the next day. Manuel Pietra, our President and CEO, asked Dr. Mark Drapeau whether Government 2.0 had improving citizen services. Mark agreed that there remain few case studies showing improved citizen services. He described how Government 2.0 is being used in government transportation – bus, rail and metro schedules to improve services.
November 6th, 2009 at 8:29 am
Clip 6 from the latest entry http://www.freebalance.com/blog/?p=538 for Government Services and Government 2.0
December 16th, 2009 at 11:43 am
first 5 use cases added at: http://www.freebalance.com/blog/?p=706