Andrea DiMaio

Every other year the ministers responsible for e-government in the EU member states, candidate accession countries and those in European free trade area meet to discuss respective progress on e-government as well as common future objectives. This year they are meeting at a conference in Malmo (Sweden) on November 19-20.

Why a declaration?

The most important political outcome of this event is a joint declaration by all ministers. The ultimate purpose is to task the European Commission with a set of initiatives (and related budget) to launch projects of common interest and facilitate best practice exchanges. Notably e-government is not one area in which the EU has any regulatory authority, hence the importance of the declaration to empower it to take initiative.

This is an important factor in explaining the apparent lack of balance of this year’s EU Ministerial Declaration on E-Government on the topic of Government 2.0.

Main Themes

In its initial part the declaration sets four main themes for 2015:

- Citizens and businesses are empowered by eGovernment services designed around users’ needs and developed in collaboration with third parties, as well as by increased access to public information, strengthened transparency and effective means for involvement of stakeholders in the policy process,

- Mobility in the Single Market is reinforced by seamless eGovernment services for the setting up and running of a business and for studying, working, residing and retiring anywhere in the European Union,

- Efficiency and effectiveness is enabled by a constant effort to use eGovernment to reduce the administrative burden, improve organisational processes and promote a sustainable low-carbon economy,

- The implementation of the policy priorities is made possible by appropriate key enablers and legal and technical preconditions.

The first theme is about government 2.0 and is the most innovative part of the declaration, while the other three objectives relate to initiatives that the European Commission and Member States have already in place (such as large pilot projects for identity management, e-procurement and implementation of the service directive, as well as a large program for the reduction of administrative burden).

Is This the Dawn of Government 2.0?

The first theme is articulated in the five objectives:

Improve eGovernment services to cater for the different needs of users and deliver them in the most effective way. We will develop user-centric services that provide flexible and personalised ways of interacting with public administrations. We will develop multi-channel strategies in order to deliver eGovernment services in the most effective way. We will develop inclusive services that will help to bring down barriers experienced by digitally or socially excluded groups. Efficient eGovernment services built around the needs of users will increase trust in government and contribute to higher user satisfaction whilst achieving efficiency gains.

This first paragraph has little to do with Gov 2.0. It is more about the continuation of traditional user-centric e-government initiatives, as they are measured and celebrated by a series of benchmarking report, the last of which has been issued in conjunction with the declaration

Invite third parties to collaborate on the development of eGovernment services. We will actively seek collaboration with third parties, for example businesses, civil society or individual citizens, in order to develop user-driven eGovernment services. Collaboration with third parties will stimulate the creation of innovative, flexible and personalized services, increase the overall effectiveness of services and maximize public value.

This second paragraph is way more interesting. Although it does not mention communities or social network, it suggests to reach out to third parties and introduces the concept of user-driven services. I hope that this has been somewhat influenced by Gartner positions on citizen-driven vs citizen-centric

Increase availability of public sector information for reuse. We will increase availability of public sector information for reuse, in accordance with the spirit of and the conditions established by Public Sector Information Directive 2003/98/EC. We will encourage the reuse of public data by third parties to develop enriched services that maximize the value for the public. New demand-led information products and services enabled by the reuse of public sector information will support the transition of Europe to a knowledge-based economy.

This paragraph clearly may prelude to the development of something like www.data.eu and the endorsement of similar public data access channels in member states, to facilitate mashups.

Strengthen transparency of administrative processes. We will explore how we can make our administrative processes more transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and trust in government.

This is a rather generic call for greater transparency, which is somewhat subsumed by the previous objectives. And finally:

Involve stakeholders in public policy processes. We will actively develop and promote effective, useful and better ways for businesses and citizens to participate in the policy processes. Increased public engagement through more effective methods at all levels enhances government’s efficiency and effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions and services.

This last paragraph is consistent with previous calls for increased citizen engagement. It does not say anything about how different the “more effective methods” will be and to what extent they will leverage existing avenues, such as social media or service delivery itself (as citizens are more likely to be engaged while they are already interacting with government in service delivery mode).

An Asymmetric View of Government 2.0

Not surprisingly the declaration confirms the asymmetric view that many have about government 2.0: information flows from government to citizens (through reuse of public information) while engagement flows from citizens to government. However, as indicated in a previous post, the reverse flows are equally if not more important. Information must flows from existing communities and social media to government, and government employees need to engage with citizens on the citizens’ turf (e.g. consumer social networks)

Government 2.0 Gets Lost in Declaration

Later in the declaration there are statements such as

We will ensure that open specifications are promoted in our national interoperability frameworks in order to lower barriers to the market. We will work to align our national interoperability frameworks with applicable European frameworks.

which apply to both traditional e-government initiatives and to government 2.0. Unfortunately there is no element to judge whether a new architectural approach will be pursued and whether the use of open specifications is promoted only to achieve interoperability among government organizations, or is meant to address also more innovative scenarios, where government services interoperate with non government ones.

From this point onward the declaration mostly restates concepts and mechanisms that are very similar to those of previous years. For instance:

The Open Source model could be promoted for use in eGovernment projects. It is important to create a level playing field where open competition can take place in order to ensure best value for money.

Without prejudice to the relevance of open source (especially as a mechanism to socialize and co-develop specific vertical solutions), the genericity of the reference above seems to recall behaviors from several years ago.

Also the reference to innovation, although mentioning service architectures and new computing paradigms (cloud?), carries the legacy of previous declarations and reveals one of the fundamental purposes of the declaration, which is to secure resources to continue supporting existing programs and initiatives.

Regard innovation as an integral part of our way of working. We will promote innovation in eGovernment services through research and development, pilot projects and other implementation schemes. We will explore and develop the possibilities offered by new open and flexible service architectures and new computing paradigms. Innovation is a central part of eGovernment and will contribute to the goal of making Europe a leading knowledge-based economy.

In fact the last section mentions studies, programs and initiatives that clearly map on on-going initiatives and interest groups and there is no reference to truly innovative schemes.

There is still hope, or not really?

One should consider that the declaration is a very high-level document and there is still plenty of room for changing the type of initiatives and mechanisms. Unfortunately the publication of the most recent e-government benchmark, which is the first outcome of the renewed contract between EU and Capgemini, shows a disappointing continuity with the old e-government approach.

If government 2.0 is about discontinuity, enabling bi-directional flows and engaging new stakeholders, the EU declaration has failed on every account.

Last month I expressed my reservations about the usefulness of mashup contests, i.e. those initiatives where people are invited to submit applications that use public data available on government web sites to create new view of that data. After the various AppsForDemocracy, AppsForAmerica, INCA and others, it is now the Australian mashup contest to capture my attention.

I am in Sydney at the Gartner Symposium and I just met a client from a federal government organization, who seems to get web 2.0 right and expressed his doubts about the kind of response met by the Australian mashup contest. I have not reviewed it in any detail, but it seems to mimic, both in quantity and in quality, what we have seen in previous contests.

I am not really surprised. In fact, for how widespread web 2.0 use is, those who are able and have time available to write an app and submit it are still in a minority. “Citizen developers” will be a reality in a few years time, but are still an exception today. Yet, citizen do use social media to gather together and discuss issues that matter to them. These communities are the best place to socialize data and make people think about mashups. So the real question is how to get their ideas as opposed to the usual geeks’ and web 2.0 enthusiasts’ ones.

What are government 2.0 strategic planners doing to bridge that gap? In my humble opinion, not much. The only way to bridge the gap is to empower government employees to reach out to those communities and socialize data. But, again, how many government organizations have any such plan?

The US Navy has published a “one-stop-shop of its social media pages across various social media sites”. This is both a simple and a great idea. This directory serves multiple purposes:

• It works as an inventory tool. Once different parts of a complex organization start establishing their presence on social media, it is easy to lose track
• It is a reference for authentic social media pages. There is plenty of pages that are created by supporters or opponents of government organizations, and a single source to identify the real ones is certainly helpful.
• It acts as a starting point for other parts of the organization that are considering to establish their presence.

The layout is very effective, with a simple alphabetical list and the icons of mainstream social media (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube) as well as of possible blogs. At the top of the page there is a useful notice that explains the principles that apply to social media presence, as follows

Social media is all about collaboration. While we encourage candid conversation and frank exchange of ideas, we request you voice your opinions in a respectful manner.
You participate at your own risk, taking personal responsibility for your comments, your username and any information provided.

We do not under any circumstance allow graphic, obscene, explicit or racial comments or submissions, nor do we allow comments that are abusive, hateful or intended to defame anyone or any organization.

We do not allow solicitations or advertisements. This includes promotion or endorsement of any financial, commercial or nongovernmental agency. Similarly, we do not allow attempts to defame or defraud any financial, commercial or nongovernmental agency.

We do not allow comments that suggest or encourage illegal activity.

This is exemplary in its clarify and immediacy, and an example that should be followed by others.

I have just publish a note that provides Gartner definition of Government 2.0 as the use of IT to socialize and commoditize government services, processes and data.

While there is a research note (access for clients only) explaining the definition in some detail, I want to provide the main highlights here.

The socialization of information has multiple facets (government to citizens, citizens to government and government to government) and the boundaries between these facets are increasingly blurred. The next step will be the socialization of services and processes by engaging individuals and communities to perform part of existing government processes or transform them by leveraging external data and applications.

Commoditization – which has already started with consolidation and shared services to reduce the diversity of infrastructure and horizontal application – will gradually move toward services and business processes.

Government 2.0 has seven main characteristics:

• It is citizen-driven.
• It is employee-centric.
• It keeps evolving.
• It is transformational.
• It requires a blend of planning and nurturing.
• It needs Pattern-Based Strategy capabilities.
• It calls for a new management style.

Most conversations about Government 2.0 assume that:

• Government provides data to citizens to provide openness and transparency
• Citizens engage with government to improve policy-making and service delivery

This approach implies that data flows from government to citizens and engagement flows from citizen to government. This is what I call the asymmetry of Government 2.0, since flows appear to be somewhat mono-directional, or very biased in a single direction. But these capture only one part of the story.

What about case managers who access to external communities rating government as well as non government care facilities to make a decision about where to place a case subject depending on a combination of financial constraints and customer ratings? What about a procurement officer looking at communities discussing prospective suppliers’ performances? Or HR professionals looking for information about candidates LinkedIn or Facebook? What about citizens tagging pictures put by museums and cultural heritage organizations on Flickr, so that they help the museum describe and organize their collections?

There are plenty of examples where data goes the other way around, from citizens to government, and government can use it in combination with data it owns (such as financial, HR, case-related ones, as well as taxonomies) in order to improve the way it deliver services or to initiate policy changes. A prediction we are about to publish says that by 2012 up to one in five government processes will be based on crowdsourced (i.e. external) data.

The assumption that citizens are mostly on the receiving end of open data and mashups needs to be changed. While the idea of citizens as application developers and data mashers is great, those who are most likely to benefit from all this are governments themselves, once they empower their employees to access, assess and use data outside their own perimeter.

Government 2.0 implies a bidirectional flow of information and services. It will require business intelligence suites that integrate data analytics with social networking analysis to help identify patterns revealing future behaviors; case management tools that give case managers the ability to alter case processing on the basis of data from external communities; online citizen services that can be integrated with third party portals; and indeed open data repositories that allow citizens to develop value added mashups and new applications.

Over the last few days, while the Italian government is working on its budget, part of the political debate has focused on the apparent lack of 800 million euro for investments in broadband which had been announced earlier.

While I have no strong feeling either way, I thought I would share a Facebook message I got earlier today from my Italian friend Ugo, who has been living in Germany for many years :

Dear Andrea,
I just had a recent experience about Italy and the Web which I wanted to share with you due to your experience in this field and in eGov.
I did a 10 day trip from Germany to the Netherlands, Italy, Slovenia and back.
Arrived in Leiden (NL) I had WiFi access immediately, at no cost and with no restriction from anywhere, even in the taxi waiting at the traffic lights.
Then I went to a conference in Venice (I): no access to available WLans, the host had to install a specific Wlan for the conference participants, each of us had to give credentials before getting a personal access code for single use, and after 6 pm the Wlan was down since the tech-guys went home (no joke). In the hotel no WLan but LAN with same ID procedure and some Euros each half hour. In both cases I could NOT synchronize with my mail server, since they configured the access in such a way that this was not allowed!! So I had to log onto my provider’s mail system to read/send mails!. After some days there I went to Caorle (50 km from Venice), where in summer there are 8 internet points (4 of which wireless). In winter…. only 3! Further they are expensive and with opening times like shops (closing at 18:00, sat/sun). Incidentally, everyone I met at those internet points was very angry for having to make photocopies of personal documents, and register time and computer or access code connected to it: nice thought, consume paper for being allowed into the digital world
Then I went to Slovenia… Hotel…WiFi running everywhere for free. I was in 2 bars + 1 Institute… free WiFi without access restrictions anywhere…
Is the Italian Government aware that ARPA started 40  years ago, in 1969? The Illusion of being able to control content by restricting access is complete nonsense. Who is making such rules? Are they ever traveling themselves? The only result is that Italy increases the gap to the 2nd to last country and produces angry and Web-illiterate (young) people.

It is ironic that Ugo had so many issues in a city like Venice, which praises itself for having a world class WiFi infrastructure for all citizens. Maybe, as a visitor, he was not seen as a customer.

While supporters of broadband investments will read this as a clear proof that those investments are required, one interpretation is that – does not matter how much bandwidth is available – a country and a culture that do not value customer service is unlikely to use it very wisely.

I have been preaching for a while that investments in government portals need to be critically reassessed, as citizens look for different and more convenient ways to access. My position on this, dating back to 2001, well before anybody would even spell “Web 2.0” was based on the simple observation that governments cannot easily provide a compelling value proposition either offline or online. This position, suggesting that government portals risk being irrelevant, has been fought by several clients, most vendors and even some of my colleagues.

As I’ve always said, government can be relevant in areas where their is no other easier or more natural way to get to its services and information, as well as in cases where government has a consistent tradition of high customer service and intimacy, as it happens in places like Singapore or some of the Scandinavian countries. Even there, though, the emergence of peer-to-peer networks, where information can be socialized before or while interacting with government, is going to have a disruptive impact.

I was not surprised then when I read about an initiative by the citizens of Birmingham in the UK to develop their own web site and to ditch the expensive official one. The council has not been lucky, since their web site went over budget and behind schedule, but this is just a sign of the times.

As citizens have increasing access to technologies, most of which are designed for consumer use, they will be more and more able to self-organize and turn into legacy also the most recent government channels.

One of the (unintended?) consequences of the open government movement and of web sites like data.gov could be to accelerate the irrelevance of many government web sites and portals. Those who do not believe this may be the case yet, better take a look at the Birmingham Do-It-Yourself site.

As the agenda manager for the government research team in Gartner, I am in the process of gathering input from clients and non clients about the areas we should be researching about in the course of 2010.

You are welcome to respond to our survey, which asks three very simple questions:

• What are your top three technology issues for 2010?
• What are your top three IT management issues for 2010?
• What are the top three challenges for IT caused by the economic downturn and recovery initiatives?

I am looking forward to collecting your responses by November 30th. Please use the link above rather than posting a comment if you want your input to be part of the survey.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Over the last year or so I have had several conversations with some Gartner clients as well colleagues about how government organizations should address social media, which have shown apparently divergent viewpoints.

One school of thought suggests that the use of social media should be carefully planned and controlled by government, and that having a sufficiently compelling purpose is strong enough a guarantee that communities will be sustainable and thrive.

Another school of thought says that – in the case of government – no planning is really possible or useful until when you have figured out what exists already. This means that, even if a government organization identifies a compelling purpose, it still needs to look for existing or emerging communities and assess whether to join them, complement them or do something different.

My colleague Anthony Bradley has recently posted about “Piloting Social Media Creates More Risks Than It Mitigates”, where he rightly points out that:

You may only get one shot at catalyzing community formulation. Don’t pilot, test, prototype, or experiment on the community. Don’t artificially restrict participation. The law of numbers is a critical factor in building a thriving and productive community. Why would you only go after a small subset of a target audience when mass adoption is a critical success factor? You will handicap success from the start.

I cannot but agree more with this. But my contention, and the reason why – unlike Anthony – I do like the term “pilot” is that for a government organization is very easy to believe its online presence is relevant just because it has a strong and recognized brand. But what is a compelling purpose for a government organization, may not be so for its target audience. So, before venturing into creating one’s own community, it is imperative to identify whether external communities already exist, possibly join them (as a group of individuals and not as a government organization) and “pilot” participation there.

Is this community valuable to our goals? Can we influence its behaviors? Is it able to generate knowledge that we could not aggregate on a government-branded community? Is there any indication that it can generate public value for our agency? These are some of the questions that employees who experiment with these communities should answer, before doing any planning for a government-driven community.

Over a year ago I published a research note (How Government Can Use Social Networks – access to clients only) that seems to be applicable to most of the cases I have seen, where people are struggling either with finding the compelling purpose to launch a community or with making sure it will be compelling to others and not just to them.

The note suggests a framework called SOCIAL to empower employees to

• Seek communities that are relevant for their job and purpose,
• For communities that seem interesting, Observe their behaviors;
• For communities that seem promising, Complement their content with public information where deemed fit;
• For communities that seem valuable, Involve in deeper discussions (with appropriate disclaimer).
• Up to this point, participation has been at the employee level. It is now time to Assess whether this community can have an enterprise value. If not, it will remain as an individual tool or be discontinued. If yes, then
• Leverage it as an enterprise one

This is the kind of process that government organizations should go through before considering the development of their own external social networks. Seeking, observing, complementing and involving is exactly what I mean by “piloting”. If the outcome of such a process is not satisfactory and the organization still believes it has a strongly compelling purpose, then it can well develop its own presence. However, if such a compelling purpose is difficult to find or to socialize, doing nothing and letting employees pilot new emerging communities is a perfectly legitimate option.

As I’ve said in a recent post, the path to success is from the bottom up, and from the outside in.

After two exciting weeks in North America where I discussed social media in government, I found a somewhat quieter environment among our clients at the Gartner European Symposium in Cannes.

There does not seem to be a real sense of urgency. Engaging citizens remains a noble aspiration but few would consider doing it by reaching out to them on somebody else’s social network. With few exceptions, most seem to be banning access to social sites from the workplace, and there is very little done even in terms of social media strategies and policies, let alone any reflection on the pivotal role of employees.

Do not get me wrong here. European clients are as smart as North American ones, and they can be as articulate if not more. But they seem to be unwilling to challenge the status quo and to believe that anything can happen from the bottom-up and from the outside-in. Most feel comfortable in starting with tackling internal collaboration and – although they know very well that their employees are already using consumer social media – they’d rather ignore the impact that these media might have on internal collaboration goals. When it comes to external engagement, there is no room for individual employee’s initiatives, and any venture needs a political blessing. Unless the mayor, the minister, the governor say that government needs to use web 2.0 to engage people, they won’t.

Although I did not discuss this topic with any UK client yet, it is interesting to note how the fair amount of activity there is probably connected to the political push created by the Digital Britain plan and – earlier – by the Power of Information report. As usual, things take place in government when the hierarchy decides they do, but I’ve certainly noted in North America a greater propensity to explore new avenues, to trust knowledge workers, to step outside traditional boundaries.

So after two days in Cannes, my statement about North Americans being more likely than Europeans to get government 2.0 is even more valid. I hope my last day in Cannes tomorrow will give me hope, as I believe European citizens and government employees are using social media as much as their North American counterparts and denial will not help for long.