e-Envoy at the LSE
Went to see the e-Envoy speak on ‘The Future of the UK e-government’ at the London School of Economics last night. Curiously enough he had relatively little to say about the future of e-government - and I didn’t get the chance to ask what would be happening when the Office of the e-Envoy is disbanded this year or what this change will mean in terms of e-government’s position in the policy agenda.
Despite this it was still an interesting enough talk (rough notes taken on my IPAQ). Pinder was very open in expressing his disappointment with progress in delivering information age government. In particular, he criticized the ‘tick box approach’ resulting from the 100% target - departments and agencies delivering ‘brochureware’ to satisfy the target rather than thinking about how services might be repackaged or reorganized.
Interestingly, he said much more thought still needed to go into devising services that would be relevant to the needs of a more fragmented, individualised citizenery and into tue marketing of these services. He described government as being stuck in the Fordist era of one size fits all and suggested e-government is still the way forward here… if change can be delivered.
Here, however, we get to the crux of the matter: he implied that resistance from within has been a key problem - ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’ being his phrase - because of worries that e-government might threaten existing jobs and practices. This in turn hinted at another problem: rather than breaking down departmental silos, e-channels were creating additional silos, internet, call centre and physical services often being run in isolation from each other. It was here, Pinder suggested, that the key problem lay, for even when web services are being joined-up they aren’t being joined-up with other channels. There has been too little effort put into managing and mixing the channels and, ultimately, too little thought about how e-enabled services might open up a broader re-engineering of processes.
In short: we are still a long way from the vision of citizen-centric government touted in the early days of the OoEE’s existence.
