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18 August 2003
Releasing the Potential of eGovernment
By Detlef Eckert, Senior Director, Trustworthy Computing, Microsoft EMEA
In this, my final column, I would like to concentrate on eGovernment as a catalyst in the transformation of public-sector services, the importance of partnership with industry and why Microsoft believes that Web Services, XML and open standards are vital to the future of joined-up government.
eGovernment holds great potential. It aims to build and deliver a new generation of services to citizens and businesses, lowering costs and saving that most valuable of commodities, time. In an earlier eGov monitor feature, I discussed how e-delivery is changing the face of government and with it, encouraging a new willingness to re-think administration processes from scratch. Until quite recently, new electronic services in many countries were simply 'added-on' to existing offline administration processes, however, to release the potential of eGovernment you need a radical agenda and that involves re-thinking and re-engineering internal processes.
What most Governments would really like is eGovernment in a box. If you happen to be a Prime Minister or a President, then you could make a quick visit to a computer retail store in search of a single, integrated solution, that gives you everything a country might need, with a Web services option.
Out of the box, everyone should rightly expect a user-friendly and intuitive public service not a complex, screen-based equivalent of yesterday's forms. If we simply replace the paper burden and its costs by requiring people to deal with technical problems, then the partnership that Government has with industry in the design of these solutions will fail. At the end of the day, we want Web services to facilitate processes and not frustrate people. It is important not to lose sight of this objective when we see so many examples of a so-called digital process starting and finishing at the front page of a Web site.
Today, most public sector solutions around the world present a mix of legacy systems loosely connected to more modern, front offices and Web sites. Governments everywhere are looking to reduce costs by consolidation, by using 'thin' clients instead of PCs and by replacing ageing systems with more user-friendly Internet capable systems that take them one step closer to delivering more integrated services.
Unfortunately, as the UK and other European countries have discovered, there are no easy answers. What we recognise as eGovernment consists of public services offered online and the back-office 'eAdministration', which supports them. Until recently, both these functions have not been particularly joined up in any true sense. While many Governments now have an Internet presence, offering mostly information and increasingly transactional services through a Web site and sometimes as part of a portal, truly interactive services, such as filing requests, obtaining documents online and tax services remain limited although they are improving.
| where one country talks of transforming public procurement, another understands this to mean, 'We accept email' |
If we take a broader global view of progress, then it becomes clear that eGovernment principles and projects vary widely between countries and cultures. Where some think in terms of end-to-end solutions, others think more simply of informational Web sites and where one country talks of transforming public procurement, another understands this to mean, "We accept email". The Eurobarometer survey of the European Commission from this time last year reveals interesting statistics on the take-up eGovernment use across Europe. According to the research, Sweden and Denmark are where contacts with Government agencies through the Internet seem the most widespread. In comparing the results with a previous survey in November 2001, the countries with the greatest increases in the number of persons contacting a public administrative body were Sweden, Portugal, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Two further studies, which analysed and compared 7,000 public sector web sites, showed that revenue-generating services such as Tax and VAT are normally the first to appear on the Web and citizen-focused services are the last to appear. These studies illustrate how progress is being made in offering web sites and making them increasingly interactive. However the situation varies among the European countries and there is still real work to do until we start to see full interactivity and connected e-government web services.
The internal administration processes of Government, like the mass of the proverbial iceberg, are mostly hidden below the surface, moving and changing very slowly. There are however, efforts to improve and streamline internal administration processes, as is happening in the UK's National Health Service. In Germany "Bund Online 2005" is an ambitious programme of the German Federal Government to bring government processes online. It is a programme that also looks at connecting internal processes with citizens and companies. This represents one of the missing pieces of the puzzle, the connection of Internet and Intranet, in other words, the missing Public Services Extranets that will allow citizens and companies to interact seamlessly with local and central government. This is just the beginning and the point of greatest potential, so when you look today at a public sector Web site you should think of the words of the old pop song "You ain't seen nothing yet".
| the future for everyone involves the restructuring of public sector administration |
In reality, the future for everyone involves the restructuring of public sector administration, a revolution in everything but name and one described in terms of process re-engineering and replacing paper with Web Services based on XML. Interoperability is important, people use different systems, and the best way to achieve interoperability is to support open standards. We at Microsoft believe that one important key to the evolution of successful eGovernment lies in XML based Web services. Everyone who adheres to the open standard of XML can read XML documents. In other words, everyone can choose which car to drive but everyone can use the same road and the traffic signals too, which can be processed and integrated into the platform of choice.
On an open road, the Internet Superhighway, we all need to think more clearly about security and privacy. What these two words mean in a world where people believe there are little of either and which makes citizens more hesitant about trusting their personal information to online services; where authentication, authorisation, administration, and confidentiality exist more as objections than as solutions.
Microsoft is working with industry on open Web standards (see http://www.microsoft.com/twc) and on the further development of security standards and we believe that it is the shared responsibility of government and industry to assure people that in using the Internet, they are not compromising their privacy despite the need for proper authentication.
| interoperability holds the solution to eGovernment services and open standards represent the key |
Sometimes integration is confused with a lack of interoperability. Many companies integrate their solutions, simply because they recognise that integration improves efficiencies while reducing costs and complexity. Systems need to work together and this is the true definition of interoperability. All too often descriptions are mixed in order to imply that commercial software is not open. However, it is interoperability, which holds the solution to eGovernment services, and open standards, in turn, represent the key to interoperability. Microsoft like many other commercial software companies supports a wide spectrum of standards and protocols but such diversity holds its own challenges if you happen to work towards the goal of a more streamlined software environment.
There are however no real interoperability forums, or certification programs to speak of and these interoperable 'standards' just have to work, which is really 'no way to run a railroad' but it's all that industry and government have to work with in the circumstances. One good example of interoperability working in practise is the EU project 'PKI challenge' carried out by EEMA (The European Electronic Messaging Association). In this challenge, Microsoft demonstrated the full interoperability of its PKI system embedded in Windows Server 2003, with the systems of more than 10 other vendors. More such projects of this kind are needed to demonstrate confidence in the industry's interoperability message, proving that the splendid isolation of software standards of the late 20th century is steadily being replaced by the interoperable Web-standards world of the 21st century.
Industry can deliver best practices for governments. We can create awareness building projects but to be truly successful we need demonstrate real value to the users and the administrators. Without this, real progress in electronic government will continue to be slow. The emerging infrastructure of high Internet penetration, mobile Internet and broadband access, will increase acceptance and usefulness and ultimately as statistics from the UK suggest, people will start using government services, but only if the online experience gives them something worthwhile or useful in return. In the future, government and its partners in industry have to focus on the twin factors of experience and interoperability. Citizens will expect most if not all the services and forms they queue for in a Post Office to be available over the Internet and those same services will need to be joined-up, end-to-end and with a transparency that simply doesn't exist today.
Rome was not built in a day; we should remember that eGovernment is barely out of its experimental infancy in most countries. If it is to succeed in redefining the relationship between citizen and the bureaucracy of government then it can only be in partnership with industry. This is a future that we are committed to at Microsoft, where the work we are involved with in standards and Web Services, will help transform everyone's expectations of what government is capable of delivering and managing over the Internet.
Previous articles by Detlef Eckart in this series
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