 |
|
|
|
Government Leader home > news stories
12/14/05
Future e-gov must integrate past lessons
By Edmund X. DeJesus
Special to Government Leader
For electronic government, the future is less about IT and more about standardizing business practices. Enter the Office of Management and Budget’s Lines of Business consolidation initiative—in effect, the next generation of e-government.
The evolution of e-government from OMB’s initial 25 programs to the Lines of Business (LOB) effort is a logical one. E-government “starts with simple informational sites and transactions with citizens,” said John Kamensky, a senior fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government and former deputy director of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. “But it continues with greater transparency of government and greater citizen interaction with government.”
OMB launched its LOB effort in February 2004, focusing on case management, federal health architecture, financial management, human resources management and grants management. The administration added IT Security last February and likely will put together task forces to look at procurement, geospatial and records management as potential LOB next year.
OMB has certified agency Centers of Excellence to provide human resources or financial services to agencies based on a set of qualifications. While IT systems must be up to par, agencies’ ability to accept and process data in a standard way is the key to the success of future e-gov programs.
And it’s getting people in those other functional areas to adopt the changes and understand the value of the e-government projects that has been a major challenge for OMB.
To be sure, many of the challenges ahead on the road to transformative e-government mirror lessons learned already, observers say.
Citizen-oriented, not agency-oriented
The tendency of agencies to focus on their own mission, rather than on cross-agency projects, isn’t going away. Yet the next levels of accomplishment will require further orientation to the needs of the citizen. “With the right online services and information, citizens can solve their own problems and make their own decisions,” Kamensky said.
Strong leadership also will be crucial. “Each [e-gov] success so far has been because one person has taken responsibility and made a commitment,” said Fred Thompson, vice president for management and technology at the Council for Excellence in Government and former assistant director for consulting and marketing in the Treasury Department’s CIO Office.
That requires leadership from the top—which is sometimes difficult, especially when new administrators arrive and see cross-agency programs that don't directly serve the mission of their agency.
It also requires leadership at the program level. “Everybody wants to control their own destiny, and many people are unwilling to partner outside their organization,” said Mark Forman, executive vice president of KPMG International and former OMB director of IT and e-government. “It takes a very good program manager to lead these kinds of initiatives to success.”
Government also must figure out how to divide characteristics of joint projects, such as accountability, branding and ownership, as well as who pays for what, according to sources.
Thompson suggested that agencies employ a portfolio-management perspective with their e-government programs, combining low and high risk with low and high return.
Direct interaction with citizens
The next step beyond providing information to citizens is to make the exchange two-way. Some Web sites already do this, allowing visitors to submit applications or pay fees online. More of this kind of interaction is coming. However, some state and local government sites go even further.
For example, the Baltimore City services site lets citizens choose issues from a menu—barking dog, uncollected trash and so forth—to report problems. It can even be more unstructured than that. "Software exists that can sift through, say, citizen blogs, and detect patterns to their comments," Kamensky said. Citizens may find themselves doing more to run their government—remotely—than ever before.
Making government transparent
Are agencies brave enough to let the public know how well they're performing their missions? Again, some state and local governments are showing what is possible. For instance, the Virginia Transportation Department’s Web dashboard gives a simple graphical representation of how the state is doing as far as budget, safety and construction.
One challenge is that some tasks of the federal government are more abstract than simply building a road. But the ability to show results and what an agency is producing will grow more important for the government's customers.
While e-gov may be less about IT in the coming years, there will still be technology issues. For instance, current initiatives are oriented toward a specific platform: desktop computers. Yet with many people using increasingly powerful handheld PCs and mobile phones, government must get mobile also, observers agreed.
Thompson said that being able to access government information or services from mobile devices can help solve problems on the spot and bring services out of the offices and into the field.
|
|
|
![Government Leader[purity]](/images/govleader_smlogo.gif "Government Leader [purity]"){kind=small}
