Web 2.0 in Public Services

Date: 2010-02-22 18:39
By Greg Parston & Giles Randle, Accenture
Web 2.0 in Public Services

Story tools

Print this articlePrint this article
Email to a friendEmail to a friend
Give us your feedback.Your feedback

The authors look at ways the public sector could harness the strengths of Web 2.0 and deliver better public services.

Public service organizations around the world are jumping on the web 2.0 bandwagon— engaging citizens through social media, blogging, social networking; developing ever more sophisticated  government web 2.0 sites; investing in “Enterprise 2.0” platforms and even encouraging the public to create mashups and apps using government data.  The challenge for public servants is to look past the hype to understand the real benefits of web 2.0 and the actions required to maximize these benefits for their organizations and for citizens.

What is web 2.0?

Since the term was first popularized in 2004, there has been little agreement about what “web 2.0” actually is: an “open” approach to web development, data and content; a fundamental shift to “web as platform” or a set of tools that enable users to access and generate online content in new ways. In fact, web 2.0 is all of these things.

Web 2.0 has three key components:

•    Web services—applications that expose their functionality to other applications over the web enabling users to generate mashups, apps and widgets.

•    Rich Internet Applications—web-based applications accessed through a browser that have similar functionality to desktop applications.

•    Social Media—sites that enable users to generate, edit and share content and connect with each other (social networking). Popular social media sites include YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter and bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

The benefits of web 2.0 to government

Given the excitement and pace associated with government’s increasing use of web 2.0, it can be difficult for public servants to identify the full range of benefits of these technologies. Too often public service organizations fail to develop compelling business cases and coherent “gov 2.0 strategies” before investing in web 2.0 technologies.

Web 2.0 can benefit public service organizations in a variety of ways:

•    Improved efficiency: Through enterprise 2.0—internal blogs, wikis, Collaborative Planning Applications, social networking platforms and mashups—organizations can increase productivity by sharing best practices across the enterprise and dramatically reduce the cost of collaboration. The Government of Canada’s GCPedia, for example, uses Enterprise wikis to connect employees and enable them to share learning. Moreover, by replacing traditional desktop strategies with software-as-a-service models and cloud-based desktop strategies, public service organizations can also reduce the cost of IT and the risks associated with implementing enterprise applications.

•    More effective public services: Web 2.0 enables government to solicit real-time customer feedback and develop enhanced customer insight, helping government deliver more responsive and personalized public services. For example, in Singapore, REACH, a citizen engagement agency, uses a range of social media to solicit citizen feedback on a range of services and issues. Furthermore, enterprise 2.0 enables organizations to drive collaboration around cross-cutting outcomes in service planning and delivery, which can help government deliver public services that are focussed on improving outcomes and not simply on service transactions.

•    More accessible public services: Web 2.0 enables organizations to provide citizens with information about accessing public services as never before; not only through government sites but also through user-generated mashups and apps, social media and personalized feeds like those provided by the District of Columbia’s Digital Public Square Web 2.0 could also enable citizens to report problems to and request service from government more easily through social networking sites, widgets on non-government sites and mobile apps. Fixmystreet.co.uk and communityfix.co.uk are both nongovernmental web 2.0 sites that enable citizens to report problems to government more easily than ever before. One example of how Web 2.0 applications can provide services or serve as a stopgap until experts are available is  NHS Direct, where a Web 2.0 application acts as an interactive online health service. It provides citizens with some assurance about a particular health condition or alerts them to the urgency of finding care.

•    Greater citizen participation: Through popular social networking sites and by developing their own web 2.0 e-participation tools public service organizations can engage citizens in a more productive discourse about what they expect from public services, how public services could be improved and – through educational applications – what they as individuals can do to improve their own or their communities’ quality of life. For example, local authorities across the UK are using online budget simulators to engage and educate the public and develop a better understanding of citizens’ public spending priorities.  Barnet Council, for example, offer a citizen portal with an application, designed to help citizens understand the tradeoffs necessary to budget for and administer public services.  

•    Improved transparency and accountability: Public service organizations can increase transparency and become more accountable to their constituents by developing platforms, like the NHS Choices website, that enable citizens to rate and comment on the quality of services; opening up government data banks to the public; and developing web-based tools, like recovery.gov and the IT Dashboard in the US, to report on spending and results.


Next Steps

Web 2.0 will have a profound impact on public service organizations’ strategy and operations. No longer content to be passive consumers of services, citizens will continue to demand more “open government” and a greater say in how services are designed and delivered. Moreover, public service organizations will strive to achieve the customer-service, efficiency and productivity improvements many private sector businesses are already beginning to realize through web 2.0.

To maximize the benefits of web 2.0, however, public service organizations do need to consider three key actions:

•    Develop a comprehensive and coherent web 2.0 strategy upfront: This strategy should define the business case and value propositions for different web 2.0 technologies; develop key performance indicators and metrics to evaluate the success of web 2.0 initiatives; explore the impact web 2.0 will have on existing IT strategies, architectures and solutions as well as service delivery chains and business processes; develop high-level implementation plans and consider how web 2.0 will affect the data governance strategy.   

•    Plan the organizational and cultural change required: To maximize the benefits of web 2.0 public service organizations will have to adopt more collaborative ways of working; strengthen their capacity to innovate by empowering employees to take risks, share learning and generate ideas and move toward flatter, decentralized organizational structures. Organizations should consider how they will deliver this change upfront.

•    Consider the legal and regulatory implications of web 2.0: Opening up government data banks, allowing government data to be hosted on non-governmental sites, sharing citizen data across organizations and signing service agreements with private third parties—such as social media companies—can have serious legal and regulatory implications. It is important to consider these issues upfront as they may limit or prevent web 2.0 adoption.

Using web 2.0 to meet citizens increased expectations requires more than just investment in new applications. To truly strengthen governments’ relationships with their citizens and improve public services, gov-2.0 initiatives must be supported by organizational transformation that will enable collaboration, integration and citizen-centric delivery.


Published on eGov monitor (http://www.egovmonitor.com)
Source URL: http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/33888