eGov is not eGovernment

 Huge variation

A key point in all this discussion is that the public sector is not remotely homogeneous, despite the popular view of ‘the civil service.’ “There is a general government drive towards efficiency and cost saving, here as in most countries,” says Barry O’Brien, IBM Ireland government programmes executive. “But of course the public sector is hugely varied. At the same time there is a huge awareness there, I see, of the need to get more ‘joined up’ in doing what they do today even better. But the leaders are also looking at the new and valuable that things that could be done. There is also something of a push from society in general, because people have become accustomed to smart, personalised services. Their expectations are that engagements with the public services should at least be similar. There is also a general drive towards more transparency and accountability.”

The other strand in discussing eGovernment, he said, is technology itself and today’s convergence of social, mobile, cloud and information or Big Data. “That all adds up to huge opportunity and potential value for eGovernment. We have good examples of what one could call first generation eGovernment services, like Motor Tax Online or Revenue’s ROS and citizens have full confidence in them. Now we are perhaps due to move into another phase, with more value added and building on the established trust of users. It is fair to say that the responsibility is at the public sector management level to ensure that such smart modern services can be delivered to citizens while protecting data appropriately.”

 

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That is by no means simple, O’Brien points out. “It requires major data classification exercises in each state body and careful management of many data governance obligations. The actual services to citizens would probably come via cloud services — inevitably hybrid, it can be assumed — but the same data protection obligations apply regardless of the channels, which is what innovative systems will have to follow in the state sector. But there is a sense in which there is no reward for innovation in the sector, as it were. That is why IBM is one of a group of major ICT companies that has been talking at EU level about introducing an Innovation Principle to balance the risk disincentives and even mind-set that apply in all national public services.”

Legacy and potential

Accenture is a major global consultancy and services firm that has extensive dealings with governments and their agencies. Paul Duff is its head of health and public sector in Ireland. “There are technology trends such as cloud computing that are finding their way into the public sector, although not as rapidly as in the commercial world so far. With cloud that has been largely to do with concerns about data security and adoption has certainly been constrained.

“Ten or 15 years ago when eGovernment was highly topical there was some highly visible progress with examples like Motor Tax, online farm payments and of course RoS. They were important and delivered good value, but then we entered a period of consolidation — perhaps in part because of some ambitious projects that did not deliver full value, such as PPARS and REACH in particular. The fiscal situation then came along to batten down the hatches for a while.”

“To this day, there are a lot of legacy systems out there, they are functioning and for example paying maybe millions of people. The last thing anyone wants to try is migrating those systems onto new platforms. But at the same time there are public-facing portals and other interfaces where there is a fair amount of rhetoric and initiatives in many countries, such as the UK, where there is a government digital services team pushing a ‘Digital by Default’ agenda.  There are certainly interesting and potentially valuable lines of innovation, especially where new and flexible services can be delivered while ensuring the protection of data and core systems.”

There have seen some good pragmatic decisions made in recent years, Duff believes, notably in shared services, with ICT as the key enabler of an organisational reform process. The Revenue Commissioners’ data centre, for example, is the host for multiple state agencies systems and their management. “Any reliance on third party hosted services by government has waned in recent years, with clusters of shared services around larger departments and their existing resources. The Department of Justice centre in Killarney, for example, supports nine different state agencies.”