Nick Jones

I’ve been chatting to a client about m-government today and while doing so I started to wonder whether m-government is a meaningful concept, or even whether it actually exists. Sure, there are lots of mobile applications developed by government, but in 90% of cases the technologies and drivers for G2C or G2E mobile apps seem to me the same as their commercial B2C and B2E equivalents. Governments have a lot of mobile workers like building inspectors and health visitors, but the motives that drive mobility for them are just the same as those in the private sector: efficiency, cost saving, user convenience, better service and so on. Applications which we might label government process support, such as reminders about car license renewals are fundamentally no different to other B2C process support applications.

There are some functions that only governments perform, such as law enforcement, but even here the fact that the worker is a government employee doesn’t really affect the drivers and success factors that much. Mobility and immediacy (a time sensitive information need) are still the hallmarks of a good mobile application. It doesn’t matter if the user is a policemen checking fingerprints by the side of the road or a salesman trying to convince me to buy a hundred new photocopiers. The principles are the same, you identify a need, choose devices and technologies, deliver an application and probably re-engineer the business process to exploit the new opportunities that mobility brings. It’s true that government mobility sometimes involves unique details – a client once asked for a mobile device for prison use that was rugged, but not so heavy that it could be used as a dangerous weapon if it was forcibly taken away from the prison officer. But the private sector can have equally bizarre requirements – once when I was young I worked on a financial system for a very traditional insurance company which was like stepping back in time, imagine “the office” but set in 1940. One design constraint was that certain admin staff would never enter data for certain brokers because they’d had a row years before and hadn’t spoken since.

From my undoubtedly cynical perspective there seem to be a fair number of government applications delivered for no reason at all, other than the fact that money was available or a politician thought it was a good idea. When I look at some of the EU funded / sponsored mobile applications I feel that if there was a genuine need for them many would happen even without government sponsorship. It’s hardly necessary for the EU to fund location based applications showing points of interest for tourists when Lonely Planet and Nokia have already got together to deliver the same thing. I’m not dogmatic that everything should be done by the private sector, very far from it. But I am very aware that these applications are being funded by my taxes, and I’d rather they were spent on fundamental research that the private sector might never do.

Once we whittle away all the applications which are just normal m-business, and those mobile applications that should never have been developed in the first place, we get left with only a few cases where governments have a unique advantage or are delivering a special type of service that no-one else would provide. For example m-voting or public safety alerts for floods, tsunamis and so on. There are also some applications where the private sector would never co-operate without being leant on by government, such as accessing the traffic logs of mobile operators to find which handsets were in the vicinity of a crime and sending messages to them to ask for potential witnesses.

So I’m coming to the conclusion that 90% of the applications labelled “m-government”, “G2C” or “G2E” are actually just normal mobile applications subject to the same design and delivery rules as the private sector. The only difference is that in some countries they’re developed by the public sector. But that alone doesn’t change the principles which determine the technology that’s selected and whether the app is cost justified, sensible etc. Maybe 10% of mobile apps developed by the public sector are genuinely unique to government in some way. So perhaps we should stop talking about m-government as if it’s something different and special; most of the time it isn’t.