Andrea DiMaio

Just a few minutes ago I had a very enlightening conversation with the CEO of an organization who is in charge of a single government portal. The portal has a good brand and is enjoying some considerable success with constituents, while being appreciated also by different departments whose information and services gets delivered through the portal.

The CEO told me that the portal is being built in such a way to allow third parties, including social networks, to use information and services provided by portal, in order to arrange them in way that will suit particular constituencies. When I challenged the CEO saying that the current home page of the portal does not give any hint to any “government 2.0” functionality (such as widgets, social bookmarks, feeds, and so forth), she sais that this will be available in a future version, but their priority today is to get constituents reliable information and services.

We agreed that the main challenge will be for the portal not to be victim of its own success, as the demand for different ways to access, combine and consume both information and services could come very abruptly (think about the rapid dynamics of social media) and it is difficult to anticipate today when and for which elements of the portal this will happen. Further developments will have to ensure a degree of openness that goes beyond internal government interoperability needs and make information and web services usable in contexts that cannot be entirely planned in advance.

I maintain my position that government portals are just an intermediate solution on the way toward complete personalization of how constituents will consume public information and access government services (see earlier post). However nobody today can really say when this will happen, and which domains will be affected first (although all will be ultimately affected).

So is it better to keep delivering on a more traditional government portal approach, or to just give up and declare that “government 2.0” will take over? Isn’t there a risk that jumping on the “government 2.0” bandwagon is just a way to find an elegant excuse not to face the difficult challenges of getting departments to agree on channel strategy, data modeling, common or integrated business processes (which is what this CEO deals with on a daily basis)?

E-government planners and program managers will keep walking on a very fine line between providing an integrated government electronic channel and enabling multiple channels of choice, in a never-ending dynamics between centralization and decentralization. As the CEO implied, the best way to find out the right course is to relentlessly pursue constituent value.