13 December 2004

What Next for eGovernment?
Microsoft eGovernment Roundtable - 8 December 2004

By eGov monitor

Launched at the height of the 1999 dot-com boom, the Office of the e-Envoy took on a wide-ranging remit to promote the 'e-agenda' in all its forms, becoming the ambassador for a bold new vision to drive Britain into the digital age. Five years on and the OeE is no more, but its biggest challenge facing its successor is the business transformation of government itself. Mirroring the internet industry in the aftermath of the dot com bubble, the UK's eGovernment strategy is 'maturing' - taking a reality-check. These are now, as we are often reminded, belt-tightening times for the public sector. So 'where next' for eGovernment?

Alistair Baker, Managing Director of Microsoft Ltd and the software giant's EMEA Vice President, opened the roundtable by presenting some thoughts about the wider context shaping the UK's approach to eGovernment. Back in 1999, ministers embarked on an aggressive e-agenda with the aim to be at the leading edge of eGovernment, faced with the risk that the UK would be left behind. Alistair cited the words of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates who, in 2000, predicted that there would be more changes in technology in the coming decade than in the whole of the last 50 years. The renewed search for greater efficiency and better public services today is taking place against this backdrop of dramatic change. The infrastructure for transforming public services is in place, he said, and Government needs to reclaim that aggressive, 'biting the bullet', e-agenda.

eGovernment has transformed from being a cultural phenomenon to a fiscal priority, observed Will Davies, Senior Research Fellow of the IPPR. The lack of focus of the Government's early e-ambitions had left people without a clear sense of the rationale behind them, making it easy to criticise. On the 2005 e-service delivery target, Will said that he had rarely come across anyone who was prepared to defend it heavily (nobody present volunteered to do so). The target was not the best focus for eGovernment, representing he added, "a classic example of duplication of existing processes" - and therefore posing a conflict with the aims of the Gershon agenda. The real benefits, said Will, come from where a service does not exist and is built from the ground-up for the customer. The types of service development he had in mind were Lastminute.com, easyJet and the Government's national travel information portal, the Transport Direct project, leading us on to the next participant at the roundtable, Nick Illsley, Chief Executive of Transport Direct.

Nick told the roundtable that he joined the Transport Direct project as one of its strongest critics, having expressed concerns about the way it was planned to be delivered. "I was told 'If you think you can do it better, then come and do it' - and I did", he said. While admitting that he was not an 'IT' person, he said he brought to the project considerable experience of delivering public services, having been the Chief Executive of the National Rail Enquiry Service for the previous three years. He predicted that in the future, Transport Direct would be "rarely seen", forming part of the underlying infrastructure of other services, such as GP appointment booking. He divulged that a major lesson learned was the need to create a culture of understanding between the parties involved. "Government", he argued, "does not understand the IT industry". Given that Transport Direct - a Labour Party manifesto pledge - has had its timetable repeatedly pushed back, it was interesting that Nick did not talk up progress on the project or imminent launch dates. Instead, he stressed that time was being set out to make sure the system works properly. According to Nick, the biggest issue from his experience was not the technology, but managing stakeholders - "The service had to be good enough for them to buy into it".

David Tate of the project's system integrator Atos Origin singled out developing integrity - ensuring the service works - and collaboration with third-party providers of data providers as the two greatest challenges encountered so far with Transport Direct. The Government was entering into a space in which industry would not invest. "The hardest part of the project will be make people use it" he said. David explained that a lot of work had gone into making the service as user-centred as possible. Nick added that the inclusion of BBC Technology in Atos Origin's consortium bid for the project had probably been a large factor in their winning the contract (BBC Technology have designed the user front-end). Usability was an important but often overlooked aspect of IT, David added "The BBC are luvvies, not techies", he said. "We need more luvvies in the IT industry." Nick added: "Instead of the focus on e-enabling services, we need to present the outcomes and look at how technology can help us achieve that."

Dr Chris Yapp, Head of Public Sector Innovation at Microsoft, pointed to the as yet unpublished findings of a study commissioned by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, which is looking at the contribution of the local eGovernment programme to the efficiency and effectiveness agenda. The emerging findings, he said, indicate a strong correlation between service performance and CPA and IEG3 performance, with larger authorities seen to doing better than districts. "The challenge of the Gershon agenda is how we get shared service and supply chain thinking into the public sector", he said, enabling smaller authorities to benefit from economies of scale. (See this week's issue for more on the ODPM's benefit studies)

What is the biggest question in the whole efficiency agenda? According to Will, it is the status of the 'change agents' tasked with driving delivery (one of which is the eGovernment Unit). While it has yet to be established how the change agents will work, it can be virtually guaranteed that they will encounter huge amounts of resistance.

The most promising aspect for the future, he said, is the next wave of devolution, which will raise issues over role of technology in a new level of governance. Less heartening progress is being made with the eDemocracy agenda, which has apparently fallen off the eGovernment Unit's plate. The most interesting development, perhaps, would be a change in the conventional way that interactions with government are seen; rather than 'transacting' with government, we could all be participating.

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