Andrea Di MaioIn my research about the future of government I’ve been looking for some time at the many boundaries that are blurring: between government and intermediary channels, between government and social networks, between employees and citizens, between service providers and service suppliers, between policy making and service delivery.
Earlier today, a client flagged that also the boundary between front office and back office may be vanishing. Front office usually includes citizen-facing services and citizen relationship management, while back office refers to processes that are required to make service delivery happen, but are invisible to service consumers. They include horizontal processes – such as finance, HR, budgeting, procurement, auditing, performance management – but also domain-specific processes that take place behind the scene - such as tax return processing, evaluation of grants applications. eligibility determination for human services.
In the future, though, it will be increasingly difficult to draw a line between them. Think about a few examples:
- Applying crowdsourcing to evaluating grants applications or building the budget
- Accessing external information to assess eligibility for financial support (e.g. pictures on Flickr or discussions on Facebook that may provide evidence that requirements are not met).
- Tapping into external social networks to gather feedback about the performance of government programs.
- Government employees who are in charge of human capital management and use information that their colleagues post on Linkedin.
- Social networks focusing on preventing people on parole or probation from re-offending, and their interaction with parole officers who could also be members.
- A taxpayer being able to reach out to a government tax expert who would not usually be on the front office but happens to be on the same social network
Where is the boundary between front and back office? Where is the boundary between internal and external? Where does government end and society start?
Category: social networks in government Tags: web 2.0 in government
1 response so far ↓
1 Arthur Kruisman April 8, 2009 at 1:27 pm
I agree with most of your future predictions. There is no such thing as ‘a’ citizen, so there is no such thing as ‘a’ government either. This is not government specific, but applies to organizations in general as well. We tend to look at the world in a very mechanical way. Industrial, process-oriented thinking is slowly, but surely fading away.
Social networks provide a way to interact without economic motivation. Weblogs provide an easy way to manifest oneself. All available talent and creativity is finally given a voice without a censoring entity. The crowd decides itself to read, accept, motivate, support or reject. It is self-regulating, sel-cleaning. Microblogging facilities such as Twitter is what i call one hugh human directory. It is succesful because we want to help eachother. Connect with a certain sensitivity, enthousiasm and passion and not only the mind. We want to use eachothers intelligence and human compassion. No single system or automated intelligence can help us the way humans do.
Organisations, in the end, will not sustain. Organic systems like the social networks will gain strength dramatically. Citizens call to interact with governments will get stronger. Governments will be forced to be more participative or their function will disappear automatically.
Front-, mid- and and back-office will be outdated terms in a few years from now. They are rusted signs of old-fashioned process-oriented lineair thinking. Organic, social, human systems will thrive. In my opinion Government functions and services will be swallowed by organic pressure.
Thinking in terms of crowd (collaborative intelligence) and cloud (moving away from cost-inefficient, instable, suboptimal local IT-systems) will help us out.