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Government Leader home > March 2005 issue
March 2005; Vol. 1 No. 1
GOVERNMENT FOR THE INFORMATION AGE
By Kevin McCaney
Program managers who want to make a case for their e-government projects could find some ammunition in Government 2. by William D. Eggers, which spells out
the case for digital, transformational government.
"I wanted to write a book
on how technology is transforming
government that
would be accessible and
inspiring to even the most
technology-challenged
public-sector officials," says
Eggers, a senior fellow at
the Manhattan Institute
for Policy Research and the public-sector global
director for Deloitte Research in Washington.
"I wanted to move the debate beyond Web
sites and portals to explore how ... technologyenabled
changes can profoundly transform
certain areas of public policy, from warfare to
transportation, from regulation to education."
Part of Eggers' premise is that many aspects
of government still carry over from the Industrial
Age, when another technological revolution
inspired mass production and onesize-
fits-all solutions. Government, in some
respects, took its cue from Henry Ford. Today,
an equally significant technological revolution
has taken business to a more specialized,
online approach. Government has followed
suit to a point, he says, but shouldn't stop now.
Eggers illustrates his points with real-life
examples. He tells how, in the mid-1990s,
Anthony Principi, a decorated
Vietnam veteran and a
former acting secretary of
the Veterans Affairs Department,
later to become
secretary, couldn't get some
stitches removed because
one VA hospital couldn't
easily share records with
another. In another example,
he describes a cybercharter
school system in
Pennsylvania that delivers
an online education--including
curriculum, books
and teachers--to parents
and students at home.
"These changes have
the potential to alter not only the service
delivery and operating models of government
but to render many of today's left
versus right policy debates irrelevant,"
Eggers says.
His goal was to put "the central issues
and debates concerning digital government
in one place" and to write it in plain
language, he says. "It's thus a book that can
both help educate nontechnology government
executives about the promise of digital
government while providing a transformation
road map for government technology
professionals."
Government 2.0, published in January by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. of Lanham, Md., is available through the publisher's web site at www.rowmanlittlefield.com and other online retailers.
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