Andrea DiMaio

There is something that has always surprised me as a government analyst. When we do surveys, online or otherwise, respondents always rate “mobile technology” amongst the very top when it comes to what matters to government agencies. However, our government team receives relatively few inquiries on this topic  while, looking at inquiry data, our colleagues who deal with mobile and wireless technology across any industry are asked questions about few, quite straightforward topics, such as mobile email, device to mobilize employees and investments in wireless infrastructure.

This seems to indicate a fair amount of interest but a remarkable lack of strategy. Up to a year ago we would get some inquiries about “mobile government” (or m-government), i.e. service delivery over the mobile phone. On the other hand, besides some of the notification or payment services based on SMS and the ability to access some government portals through a phone browser, there is little left. The only area of constituent-centric service where mobile technology seems to play a critical role is public safety: mass notification and location-based emergency calling clearly yield a great value to people.

But the whole idea that individuals wish to access their government service anywhere at any time is a bit of a fallacy. Indeed there are cases where accessing information while on the move makes a lot of sense: accessing your health record while queueing for the physician, looking at your most recent tax record when you are discussing financial investments in a bank, reading reliable traffic information or when the next bus will come at a particular location, and more. On the other hand, so-called “transactional” services are less important. I suspect that many have gone through the exercise of trying a business case for mobile government service - something they should have done for some of the more traditional e-government services that are now severely underutilized: the outcome is probably behind the apparent lack of interest in mobile devices as service delivery channels. On the other hand, we expect a surge of interest in the use of mobile technology to mobilize the workforce, and make it more effective and efficient.

So, can we say that the bottom line is that the importance of mobile government in citizen-facing services is not even close to what many expected it to be? Is this going to remain a sellers’ market, with technology in search of a problem to solve?

Many talk about the wisdom of crowds. Check this story: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/12/25/christmas.giving.blog/index.html?eref=edition_technology

and think about how the compassion of crowds can re-invent human services.

Ley me wish you a wonderful 2009

I am preparing a presentation for the Gartner Spring Symposium in Las Vegas about Real Examples of Innovation in Government and I would like to gather input from readers of this blog.

To do so, I have arranged a very simple online survey for those who are willing to submit a case: those selected will both feature in my presentation in Las Vegas and become part of a research report that I will prepare afterwards.

All you need to do is to fill the survey and, if selected, answer to a few extra questions by email.

The survey is available here and the closing date for submission is January 31 2009.
Thank you very much in advance for your help

One theme that seems to be very fashionable around the evolution of e-government is e-participation. Its definition in Wikipedia is “ICT-supported participation in processes involved in government and governance”. Processes may concern administration, service delivery, decision making and policy making.”

While this definition mentions both service delivery and decision/policy making, many people use the term in the latter sense: engaging citizens in city planning or in commenting about a draft policy, creating blogs to discuss future policies or wikis for interactive policy making, and so forth.

As I have written before, this kind of participation, when it happens on-line, is unlikely to take place - or at least to thrive - on a government-controlled channel. To some extent, it would be more appropriate to see such a dialogue develop on a Parliament or a Congressman web site, rather than on a government one.  What would be much useful though is to allow people to comment about the services they receive or the administrative obligations they have to discharge, asking them to rate them and to provide suggestions for their improvement. It is most likely that also part of this conversations will take place outside the government context, on social networking sites, fora, blogs. However for services that  are partially or totally delivered online, the government web site or portal can be an important touch point to capture opinions, thoughts, suggestions.

At a meeting last week where I met international experts on e-government from several countries, there seemed to be a wide agreement about this and the fact that e-participation should be more tightly related to service delivery. On the other hand, when we discussed the role of web 2.0, a few colleagues mentioned its importance for personalizing the government portal. As if people cared composing a page with feeds and widgets from government.

Reality is that interaction with government is rare for most citizens and those who interact most are also likely to be the least inclined to use electronic channels. Service levels will increase by greater efficiency, shorter waiting times, less rather more interactions. Becoming less visible by leveraging existing data and previous interactions as well as by enabling citizens to choose their preferred intermediaries: these are steps that - especially in the current challenging times - government IT organizations should take to contain costs and increase service levels at the same time.

Although many e-government research programs, consultants and vendors seem to be beating the old drum of “more interaction is better”, there is still hope. I just saw that I have the following inquiry in the coming days, from a state authority:

“Citizens are contacting their government 1.3 times a year as an average. Even if the e-Government is a huge topic, the question remains if it does make sense to establish a digital solution for that due to the very low usage.”

I love this question and I’d wish more government officials to ask it.

Any thoughts?

Last Wednesday I did have an intriguing conversation with officials in a large non-government organization that operates across the world. This organization is in the process of defining its own green IT policy, and - amongst other things - is looking at how to make its IT procurement greener. In the draft version of the policy they shared with me, I could read something like “IT suppliers should have environmental good practice system that meet ISO 14000 series (or equivalent) standards as part of their business practices“. In this first version, rather than defining on the desirable characteristics of a green IT product, they had decided to focus on the characteristics of suppliers, assuming that compliance with standards would imply a propensity to greener products and services.

However, as this organization is bound to buying some products in local countries, they are having an interesting discussion about whether requiring such a standard would have a discriminatory effect or put an excessive burden on smaller suppliers in less advanced countries. This is a very good example of how a one-size-fits-all approach to green IT does not work. It is certainly desirable to require compliance with international standards, and many make the argument that this increases competitiveness of suppliers, who can address a wider market. On the other hand the cost of compliance may be simply too high, especially in difficult economic times.

What multinational organizations operating in developed as well as developing countries should consider is to focus on which attributes of environmental sustainability they really need to stress in their procurement processes: these are likely to be more closely related to products and services than to the overall business practices of their suppliers. If the latter are key, they should select those attributes that are sensible taking into account the diversity of countries, and that do not create discrimination. Similarly, the definition of a “green product” should take into account what is feasible in different regions, and aim at identifying “green enough” products as opposed to requiring compliance with standards or self assessment schemes (such as EPEAT). These schemes can be taken as the basis to extract those (few) criteria that are the absolute minimum to consider a supplier and a product as environmentally viable.

Last Tuesday I did visit two US state capitals and discussed about their e-government developments. While looking at their portal home pages, I noticed that - in the list of most important services  - they had the list of sex offenders. This is something many of us in Europe are not used to, although one can see the reason why people want to know whether and where sex offenders are located in their neighborhood. In one case (but I’m sure there are several others), the location of sex offenders could be shown on a map. In the other case, you can just see a list.

Now, think about making that information available in a mashable form: that would allow people to look at a map of the state combining property value, location of schools and other public facilities, public transportation, crime, and sex offenders’ location. Residents as well as people or even businesses considering to relocate in a particular area could start deciding where to establish themselves according to both the desirable and the non-desirable characteristics of a particular area. Not to mention those who own a property in an area where new sex offenders pop up in the list: what about the value of that property?

This is the power of information. The map that particulat US state uses to show the location of sex offenders already is a mash up: the genie is out of the bottle.

I just spent two days in London at an IT vendor analyst conference. When I landed at Heathrow last Tuesday, there was a taxi arranged to pick me up and take me into downtown London where the conference was taking place. I usually take the express train to Paddington, but I was happy they had arranged a taxi and did not want to seem rude by declining their offer. Once in the taxi, the driver told me that, while he was waiting for me at the terminal, he had been chatting with a colleague of his who had been hired by the same vendor and was waiting for two ladies on my same flight, going to the same meeting: he told me so as he was driving a seven-seater, which would easily accommodate the three of us.

During the conference, one of the sessions was about environmental sustainability. The relevant manager said that, in order for them to be credible when advising clients about “green” solutions, they had to put their house in order and sort out their own environmental sustainability policy. This covers the usual issues, ranging from energy consumption, to recycling, to use of videoconferencing, to car usage.

I could not resist asking the question about how the suboptimal pick-up scheme at the airport was scoring against their environmental sustainability policy. The manager was clearly surprised and embarrassed. Now, while there may be many good reasons why the vendor used two different taxis (such as a simple act of courtesy), I would expect them to at least offer me the option to car-pool (which I would have gladly accepted), as a concrete proof that their policy is in place and is being enforced.

To be fair to the vendor, they had already arranged car-pooling on the way back to Heathrow, so it is very likely the earlier pick-up was just a glitch in an otherwise very well run meeting. On the other hand, this shows how difficult it is for any organization to have a sufficiently comprehensive policy and the ability to enforce it.

We had our own glitches at Gartner. About a year ago clients in Orlando asked me, after a green IT session I did with them,  why we were running colorful and animated screen-savers on all our kiosks after telling them that they should ditch screen savers to reduce energy consumption. In another occasion, again after a green IT presentation, I got nailed by a client who waved a paper copy of my slides (handed over by an account executive) to show that they had been printed on one side only, again in breach of our own advice.

Vendors do need to walk the talk when addressing their clients’ environmental sustainability issues, and there is no shame in making mistakes in this long journey. Actually both good and bad experiences are worth sharing with clients, in order to help them be more successful than we were.

About two months ago Transport For London  (TfL) - the government owned company running the public transportation system in London - launched a social networking site called Together For London. The purpose was to gather ideas from customers about how to make London a better place. Registered users can create an avatar (called “Little Londoner”), start and participate in discussions, and even set up a campaign. So far the site has started 113 discussions, 176 campaigns and received about 200,000 pageviews. While Transport For London claims it is too early to judge and numbers are positive, some press articles have called this a failure.

I do agree that it is probably early to draw any conclusion, but as I have said many times in my research (see How Governments Can Use Social Networks, login required), social networks that are initiated by government are unlikely to be as successful as those initiated by the public. I bet that, in the long run, customer groups started in social networks such as Facebook will become more compelling and influential than anything TfL can come up with. The intent is certainly noble, but I’m afraid there is little that governments can do to be seen as creators of places to “socialize”.

Questions to ask in this case are:

• what is the compelling event that should make this attractive to customers, and
• why should they remain compelled to participate (what my collegue Anthony Bradley calls “magnetism” of a community).

In absence of clear answers, this network may have a difficult life.

Over the last couple of days there has been a rather hatred discussion in Italy after the government decided to increase the value-added tax on pay-TV services from 10 to 20 percent.

The largest pay-TV operator (Sky) launched an instant TV and press campaign, highlighting how this would impact their clients and the potential conflict of interest for the Italian prime minister, who owns TV channels that compete against Sky. As part of its campaign, Sky invited its clients to email the prime minister’s office.

When I tried, I got the following autoreply

I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It’s attached below.
For further assistance, please send mail to <postmaster>
If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message.

The Postfix program
<spreside@palazzochigi.it> (expanded from segreteria.presidente@governo.it):
can’t create user output file. Command output: procmail: Quota exceeded while writing “/var/mail/spreside”

suggesting that the mailbox was full. Press reports this morning confirmed this was the case.

Irrespective of who is wrong and who is right in this particular matter, this shows the limitations of what is called electronic democracy or e-participation.

Or maybe not: while people may never know what happens to a traditional petition, a full mailbox sends a clear message about the ability (not to be confused with willingness) of government to listen.

The interoperability of technologies, data and applications across different government agencies, tiers and jurisdictions has been a keystone of e-government and government transformation programs for almost a decade. The nirvana of any such program is to achieve seamless integration between processes and applications, to make the structure of government invisible (or irrelevant) to service delivery, and to set the basis for agile, truly transformational government.

Jurisdictions worldwide have published  government interoperability frameworks in multiple versions (see a few examples from the UK, Germany, Australia, Denmark, New Zealand) and all these have helped move technical interoperability in the right direction. Compatible technical architectures or document standards are necessary conditions for processes and applications to interoperate, but they are not sufficient. As the European Commission’s work on the European Interoperability Framework shows, there are several level of interoperability, and technical is just one: the toughest ones are semantic (do data have the same meaning?), organizational (are processes compatible?), legal (do similar laws apply to the same issues?).

This reminds me of when I was doing research on software reusability, back in the late 80’s. At the time, barriers to software reuse were technical (i.e. different platforms, operating systems, programming languages) as well as organizational (i.e. reuse cost models, design methods and processes). However even with most of those technical challenges overcome (by the adoption of open standards and more and more technically interoperable platforms), reuse is still relatively low, because organizational challenges are far more difficult to solve.

The same applies to interoperability: we can have all countries and regions using the same (open) standards, and yet data models may be incompatible. Technical interoperability provides a common lexicon and part of a common syntax, but can’t help with semantics. The realm of semantic and organizational interoperability dangerously borders whole-of-government enterprise architecture, another venture that has rarely provided much value, besides creating a context for compliance and scrutiny.

An interesting question to pose is: how much more effort will be put on cracking the toughest interoperability problems, taking into account the difficult times ahead?  This question would clearly be amenable to some scenaric planning, but let me just take the most controversial view. If this is going to be a long and deep recession and governments need to deploy exceptional resources to sustain economic development and social cohesion within their respective boundaries, government interoperability may become irrelevant.

Let me start with the counterargument to my own thesis. In order to rapidly achieve challenging political objectives around economic recovery and job protection and creation, different government agencies and tiers need to collaborate more effectively and efficiently. Focus on national and local priorities will cause efforts like “European Interoperability” to slow down or even grind to a halt. But also within countries, states, provinces, what is likely to happen is a recognition that there is no more time to devote to semantic or organizational interoperability, to government-wide enterprise architectures and global transformational programs.

On the one hand governments will have to slash the cost of their operations (finance management, HR, procurement, general administration) and put some programs on the afterburner (as they contribute less to economic recovery or welfare). On the other hand they will have to focus on reinforcing critical programs and launching new ones (such as bail-outs for entire industrial sectors or new infrastructure investments) of a nature and a scale that are almost unprecedented.

This will lead to consolidating and commoditizing IT related to general administration , wherever feasible, by imposing shared or centralized services: interoperability won’t help much (besides using legacy data), as agencies will need to transition toward common services, applications, infrastructures, as opposed to running their own in an interoperable fashion. Where this is unfeasible or requires too much time, things will be left as they are, just reducing budgets.

Low-priority programs will be left lagging behind, with just the IT support that is required to let them survive, but little or no money for any significant enhancement, let alone major architectural redesign.

Finally, high-priority programs will have very specific interoperability requirements that are likely to break the boundaries of current efforts in the field. They will have to engage resources, information, processes in different industry sectors. For example, how to measure the impact of several dozens or hundreds million dollars? How to prevent misuse of such funds? How to adapt job creation and support measures to the changing landscapes in various sectors and parts of the jurisdiction?

Interoperability will become (or - in a certain sense - remain) a tactical issue, to be faced in conjuction with a specific problem to be solved. There will not be much space left for one-size-fits-all measures, any more enterprise architecture, or religious battles about which flavor of an open standard is open enough.

Interoperability will still play a role to help cushion government agencies from the risk of defaulting IT suppliers responsible for maintaining legacy products. In many cases, these products will be proprietary in nature and hardly interoperable with new products that are candidate for replacement. Therefore, backward compatibility with proprietary data formats will become a key criteria in selecting new, open-standard-compliant alternatives.

In essence, in a long and deep recession the attitude to interoperability will become much more pragmatic. This is an opportunity to show what its true value is, and a challenge for those who still pursue too an ambitious and (sometimes) abstract approach to it.