From e-Goverment to i-Government?

Vienna.
The third speaker in this opening session at EDEM 2009 is Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, whose theme is the demise of electronic government (hmm, that didn't take long...). He suggests that e-government as a concept has come to the end of its lifespan; the promises of higher public sector efficiency, and of resulting economic growth and greater trust in government, and of deeper citizen participation in public matters have not been fulfilled. The reality of electronic government is far less promising; the economic gains remain unclear, and have yet to be measured accurately - there are no robust frameworks for such measurement at this point. We measure not what we should, but what we can measure: avoidance. That's not helpful.

EU statistics show a gradual rise towards a 75% level of provision of e-government services, but such measurements are highly subjective (emails, Websites, etc. already count for those 75%) - it's the final 25% yet missing which are the hard part: active, meaningful, two-way engagement with citizens. And even if such services are provided, citizens' use of them is very limited (only some 25% of services are actually used, the same dubious EU statistics show). Viktor compares this with the bane of the aircraft industry, the white tail - a plane which has been produced but hasn't found a buyer, remaining an unbranded 'white tail'. In the Salzburg province of Austria, for example, less than one transaction in three weeks took place using e-services during 2001-2005. Citizens only use e-government systems when it provides them with value which is not available more easily and effectively using other channels.

Technology platforms also fail to ignite cross-agency synergies, and Viktor points to the US system FirstGov as an example here: no agency in the US government was willing to collaborate with another, and so this shared portal was created in order to provide agencies with the realisation that collaboration was going to produce beneficial effects. However, through FirstGov the silos deepened rather than flattened. Another example was the public/private-operated Moving platform combining access to various services required in moving from house to house; this was a huge success at first, but as agencies understood how important such services were, the agencies disaggregated themselves from the process and created their own platforms for moving (there are now some 5-10 such sites operated by various agencies).

There is also a failure in the failed rebirth of strong democracy; electronic agoras exist, but remain largely empty. One example is the US-based eRulemaking site, which provides a space for government agencies to receive feedback on proposed new rules and regulations. Only a tiny fraction of citizens participated actively in this process, even for the most popular draft rules; the average level of participation lies well below even this. And of the comments provided, only a miniscule number are actually constructive; the vast majority are boilerplate texts copied and pasted from lobbyist material by citizens encouraged to do so. Broad substantive participation remains elusive and illusionary.

E-government as a concept provides us with few indications as to why it fails; it has been conceptualised as a novel, techno-determinist process which emphasises engineered approaches and technological solutions. The focus must instead be on information and information flows within government and between government and citizens, and recognise that people change and control information flows, and will do so with or without technology.

A new idea here is i-government - a shift away from technology and the semantics of XML, and towards theories of organisational behaviour, in order to understand and assist in selecting and implementing projects that aim at changing information flows. We need to reassess value propositions, and focus on outcome quality rather than process volume improvements through better information variety. And we need to reconceptualise the role of the citizen, not as customer but as citoyen; we need to reimagine the role of information intermediaries, from the electronic town hall towards a Habermasian information plurality (but possibly with intermediaries other than the ones envisaged by Habermas).

Technorati : EDEM 2009, democracy, e-government, i-government, participation, politics
Del.icio.us : EDEM 2009, democracy, e-government, i-government, participation, politics