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Conclusion

Overview

The report, New Zealand E-government 2007: Progress Towards Transformation, assesses the extent of achievement towards the Networked State Services Goal and the 2007 milestone of the E-government Strategy: "that networks and Internet technologies are integral to information and service delivery in the New Zealand State Sector to citizens". It draws together and analyses the results of three research streams:

Each of these offers different perspectives from which to view the progress of e-government. Together, they engender interaction and counterpoint in the narrative of progress, and circumvent the ascendancy of any particular perspective. Thus, the story of the progress of e-government in New Zealand is at once balanced and enriched.

This conclusion provides an integrated analysis of that progress. It first takes a broad temporal view, comparing the salient areas of progress in 2007 with those in 2004 to bring key developments into relief. It then examines the four core themes emerging from the research in the context of the characteristics of successful e-government, and identifies some implications for the future.

Progress to date

The achievements of government are assessed within the context of the three broad characteristics of successful e-government, as set out in the E-government Strategy:

  • Convenience and satisfaction – People have a choice of channels to government information and services that are convenient, consistent, easy to use, and deliver what they want in a way that suits their needs.
  • Integration and efficiency – Information and services are integrated, packaged, and presented to minimise cost to government and users, and improve results for people, businesses, and communities.
  • Trust and participation – Government information is authoritative, reliable, and secure, and people and government are willing to share it across organisational and sector boundaries; people are better informed and better able to partner with government in delivering outcomes.

In 2004, agencies were, almost without exception, using information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve staff access to information. Online services for New Zealanders were primarily based around individual agencies, requiring customers to contact several agencies to complete related transactions and processes. By 2005, the number of channels and services available online were increasing and agencies were starting to integrate their services, grouping them to allow New Zealanders single-point access to services originating from different agencies. Successful integration of technological systems underpinning the cross-agency service had resulted in measurable efficiency improvements. More importantly, it signified the increasing integration of processes among agencies at not only the technological, but also the business and relationship levels.

In 2007, the beginnings of a trend are apparent, towards working more collaboratively with the support of major all-of-government infrastructure. The Government Logon Service (GLS) and Government Shared Network (GSN), intended to serve as platforms to support cross-agency services in the future, have been built and their operations are gaining momentum. There are notable examples of systems infrastructure being built on the basis of cross-sectoral collaborations – a change which is being driven by both technological factors and business needs. Sectoral ICT strategies are reinforcing a whole-of-sector view in planning to strengthen the operational and management infrastructure of agencies to serve sector interests.

Convenience and satisfaction

2004

User convenience and satisfaction was based on the kinds of services agencies provided on their websites, such as online subscriptions, downloadable material, and content updates. The degree to which the internal IT systems of agencies were integrated was an important factor in ensuring that service staff had adequate access to information to support service provision to the public. Increasing the number of service groupings and improving traditional channels were regarded as priorities for development towards 2007.

2007

As reported in Transforming the State Services, there are more service groupings and a greater variety and mix of channels tailored to the needs of users in 2007. While advances have clearly been made in some sectors in using ICT for service delivery, there is room to improve information-sharing mechanisms among agencies further. Rather than taking a "one-size-fits-all" approach, the design of services could be improved even further by taking into account user needs or incorporating user participation in the design process in some cases.

Although it is still necessary to consider what agencies provide on their web sites, it is now apparent that users also derive satisfaction from being able to participate directly in the creation of content or policy. There are signs of a gradual shift in the service delivery paradigm, away from the perspective of what an agency can provide to viewing service delivery through the lens of what the citizen is able to contribute.

Integration and efficiency

2004

The GLS and GSN were both in the early stages of planning. Agencies were increasingly adopting the E-government Interoperability Framework (eGIF) standards, which are critical to supporting interoperability and integration. The government portal (www.govt.nz, now newzealand.govt.nz) was seen as a highly effective way for agencies to network their information with others', but the searchability of information was reliant on ensuring that an agency's metadata was robust. Optimising user accessibility to ensure that different information needs were met was a priority. Although agencies were sharing information with each other, they cited privacy legislation as a barrier.

2007

Major developments in e-government are pointing to the beginnings of a paradigm shift in how agencies conduct their business. Both the GLS and GSN have been built and are in operation, and agency uptake is gaining momentum. Improved New Zealand Government Web Standards have been introduced after a comprehensive review of agencies' implementation of the Web Guidelines. The Web Standards Wiki enables standards to be developed in a more agile and collaborative way. In addition, the refreshed newzealand.govt.nz portal has adopted a more efficient, search-based approach to information retrieval, moving away from the manual indexing of online resources by agencies.

Government information matching has continued to expand – there are 76 authorised programmes in 2007 compared with 28 in 2004. New technologies have created new difficulties for enforcing law, such as questions of jurisdiction. The Privacy Act 1993 was not drafted with the Internet in mind, uses some outdated terms, and is ambiguous with regard to Internet publication. Partly in response to technological developments, an extensive review of the Act was begun in 2006 and will be conducted in four stages over several years.

Trust and participation

2004

Government web sites had only basic features enabling online participation. The extent to which consultation was enabled electronically relied on "pushing" information out to participants – making policy documents available online and providing features such as email notification, newsfeeds, or an events calendar. In some cases, it was possible for submissions to be organised and made readable online.

2007

There are examples of advanced user participation online in a range of policy consultation activities. With a few mouse clicks citizens can make an online petition to the council, for example. Ensuring the accessibility of information remains important, and a growing number of agencies are enabling newsfeeds and making consultation documents available online. In addition, agencies are investigating innovative methods to gather feedback and engender user participation in the policy formulation process using social networking tools. It is interesting to note that the technology required to support high-quality engagement need not be highly sophisticated. In most cases, only the most basic technology has been necessary to garner user participation.

Core themes

These themes provide important lessons for all involved in the process of transforming government through technology:

  • values – accountability, transparency, and trust
  • relationships – government relating to its partners
  • people – user-driven e-government
  • agencies – infrastructure for collaboration.

Values: Accountability, transparency, and trust

Values – the democratic values that define the contract between citizens and government – remain constant, but new technologies might test our ability to express them authentically using electronic media.

People do not regard government as a faceless entity. Every point of service delivery exemplifies the face of government and the user's expectation, even if only implicit, is that every public servant encountered there can be held accountable. To the people taking part in this research, empathy from public servants is a desirable quality; they expect them to listen and abide by their promises and commitments; they do not regard public servants as "ventriloquist's dummies"; they expect them to be accountable for the quality of their service experience.

From the service delivery point of view, public servants have a duty to ensure that people are aware of their rights, entitlements and obligations as citizens, so they will know what to expect and in turn have confidence in government services and processes. In terms of citizens' participation in policy development, this includes enabling their full understanding of the process, and letting people know that their voices have been heard and how they have been heard. Transparent processes would make results of citizen participation more discernible, and in turn encourage further interest and engagement.

While this is not surprising, it carries implications given the rate at which modes of online interaction continue to evolve. This research reveals that when people have direct experience of their personal contributions making a positive impact on others, they can feel a greater sense of ownership in their community and government. This signifies the shift of power to the citizen; in other words, trust is made personal by, and originates from, the individual citizen. It is at this point that people have a sense of confidence in their ability to make a difference through their contribution, to generate new ideas, make good decisions, or take ownership for an outcome. As this virtuous cycle continues, appreciation of the value of the process of engagement between government and citizen would grow and might become self-generating.

If this scenario is to become more common online, our assumptions as public servants and citizens might need to evolve. For instance, in the online environment where public and private personae easily overlap, how should the Code of Conduct for public servants be applied? Many such questions are new and will have to be addressed. (Some of these issues are elaborated under Cultivating participation capability, below.)

Relationships: Government in collaboration

Given the hybrid nature of e-government, existing models for collaboration and governance will most probably need to be revised.

Blurring boundaries

It is evident that, increasingly, government collaboration with intermediaries and non-government entities is becoming the default mode of operating. The margins of government are slowly but definitely morphing. New questions about the lines of responsibility and accountability for the information that government provides and manages – who creates, disseminates, and owns it – will require radically different approaches to information management in order to accommodate contemporary demands for data repurposing.

Government is increasingly presenting a cohesive, all-of-government brand to the public. This might mean that, over time, the user will perceive each part of government as less separately distinguishable. On the other hand, the users' stories hint at the reality of agencies' already working with a wide range of intermediaries. More interestingly, they suggest there is scope for more effective use to be made of these middlemen relationships in service delivery. It is unclear what this implies for the roles of agencies and their partnering intermediaries in the future, and this merits further investigation. At the very least, clarifying roles will help ensure that visible interfaces for government services – irrespective of the provider – appear humane and accessible.

Roles of government

The roles of government are likely to differ according to context. For instance, government might act as a neutral platform, a facilitator of public debates, or an equal partner – and it has explored these roles to some extent in a number of collaborative projects. Individual agency roles might change, given new ways of operating and planning for service delivery with a wide range of intermediaries, some far removed from government control. Furthermore, wider environmental influences, such as changing business paradigms created by the introduction of new technologies in some sectors, might also affect the nature of government's service relationship with the public.

Already foreseeable is the need for new skills sets in the State sector to cope with such developments. So, too, are implications for existing governance models, for example on the ownership and management of resources.

People: User-driven e-government

Everything that government does is ultimately intended to benefit the citizen. Nonetheless, if service delivery and civic participation are to be transformed in the future, it will be useful to recognise distinctions in the notion of value from the citizen's perspective.

Value for users

The drive to give users what they value has both motivated agencies to venture into collaborations beyond traditional government boundaries, and encouraged the development of user-centric systems and services. This is exemplified in the open-source projects initiated by some agencies, but the effect is nowhere more obvious than in the widespread use of Web 2.0 technologies in the world at large. This user-driven trend is a manifestation of how very powerful a motivator the desire of the user can be.

However, intuiting user desire from a service provider's point of view is not an easy task. The user stories offer perspectives on what people value in their experience of government services. These may be efficiency values, indicated for example by the user not having to retell their story to government repeatedly; they may be relationship values, such as the perception of reliability and integrity. Moana's story, for instance, demonstrates that satisfaction can be gained despite the desired outcome not being obtained, because of the value the user places on her relationship with the provider of government services.

The needs of users are unique, and it will continue to be challenging to cater to them. It bears repeating that what is valued will vary from person to person, and may vary from service to service for any one person. However, the greater challenge lies in observing and preparing for what happens when users are empowered to control their own experience, when the dynamic between the service provider and recipient is turned on its head.

Cultivating participation capability

Access to basic ICT infrastructure is essential if an informed civil society is to work as an integrated whole. However, technology alone will not suffice. Building capability is as much about empowering people to act autonomously as about equipping them with the tools for action. New technologies might help dissolve some barriers to participation, but ICT is only one aspect of enabling participation intelligence – the ability for all to be fruitfully engaged in civic and political matters, in considering problems, seeking options, and perhaps implementing solutions.

Enabling participation capability will stem from a combination of ICT, digital and information literacy, and an awareness of both the issues and the means by which one might participate. This will lead to greater motivation to become involved, and in turn, feed a virtuous cycle of participation. Improving citizens' access to information and knowledge is fundamental if the full potential of technology is to be harnessed to support collaborative policy deliberation. The user stories show that lack of awareness of and access to information remains a significant impediment to people being able to answer their own questions or meet their information needs independently.

Potential exists within various domains for co-creation and collaboration both to allow knowledge sharing and to harness the skills and experiences of citizens to the rigour of policymaking. Given the increasingly global nature of problems, creative solutions will require addressing not by governments alone, but through collective endeavours where "policy and people power" meet. There are calls for user-driven systems and processes, and the creation of new spaces in which user-driven conversations can take place. Robust infrastructure will need to underpin such developments, the foundations for which are being laid at present.

Agencies: Infrastructure for collaboration

Due to the sociotechnical nature of the infrastructure of e-government, there will be network management challenges in future, requiring the rethinking of current models of knowledge exchange.

Knowledge management

The future of service delivery will encompass more than the citizen being able to file their tax return, access application forms online, or receive information about government policy. This technical capability is already built into most agencies' basic service delivery infrastructure. The next generation of network infrastructure (for example, the GSN) will support all-of-government operations, especially tighter cross-agency service integration. Although agencies' use of ICT has improved users' experience of government, there is still room to enhance agency collaboration on common services to integrate services more seamlessly.

On the other hand, e-government will not only be about what agencies can provide. It will also be about how individual citizens can contribute, and in turn, how agencies might value and make relevant their contributions. Increasingly, data held in some government domains will be made available for analysis and repurposing. In future, when this becomes more commonplace, citizens will be enabled to make decisions independently about how and who accesses their information, based on their own defined outcomes.

Government's foray into Web 2.0 technologies represents an attempt to tap into this potential but it has not been without its challenges. There are drivers, potential risks, and effects associated with their use which are quite unique to government. The traditional consultation process provides one example: while the formulation of policy typically involves the participation of multi-stakeholder groups, where formal and informal consultation is the norm, the comprehensive gathering of feedback through the traditional processes of physical consultation has been limited by the scarcity of resources, as well as barriers of time and distance. These real-time challenges have persisted to some extent with the emergence of electronic platforms for asynchronous interaction, but the online environment has also opened possibilities for new ways to gather feedback from individuals and through networks.

Going forward, there will be continued exploration of the means and opportunities to actively involve stakeholders in agenda-setting, developing options or practical solutions in a contemporaneous way, and encouraging the development of new relationship networks. To cope with the new dynamics arising from responses to changing agency needs, processes for effective knowledge transfer will have to be built into government's information infrastructure in the future.

Relationship networks

Relationships are essential to the evolution of e-government because e-government involves a multi-disciplinary mix of expertise, and is a domain to which no single authority as yet can claim complete knowledge. The totality of knowledge in e-government always relies on the sharing and exchange of knowledge amongst players to deal with new issues that often arise in an unanticipated fashion. It is vital, and will increasingly be so, to cast a broad net to gather information from relationship networks in order to understand the nature of these issues and practically apply the information to continuous policy review and service improvement. The question therefore centres on how technology might be used to harness and build on the dynamics of agency networks, so that engaging with the wide range of government's stakeholders might concentrate dispersed knowledge and generate solutions to shared problems.

A key part of partnership is about facilitating, maintaining and linking up both formal and informal conversations at various levels, in order to measure and sustain the flow of critical knowledge to all parts of the networks. E-government will be interested in not only data and information, but conversations, experience, and expertise, as well as network patterns.

Culture change

The most visible achievements over the last three years have been the result of extensive efforts put into developing sectoral and cross-agency ICT infrastructure and services, of which the citizen is the ultimate beneficiary. The all-of-government infrastructure, for instance, will create efficiency gains through enabling secure information exchange and value-added services that work across agencies and networks. In future, this will support the consistent capture and flexibility of information tailored to different purposes, which will in turn deliver a more seamless online service experience for the user – such as not having to provide the same information to government repeatedly.

The realisation of this scenario has depended, however, on the gradual cultural shift that has happened within government. These changes have been inevitable, in a sense, as seen in the manner in which agencies have had to rethink their approaches and processes to service delivery to meet new user expectations, and in their active exploration of the potential of new technologies by directly participating in the wider online community to learn about the new terrain and build the capability to respond to evolving needs and pressures.

These efforts have influenced fundamental assumptions – such as our values, attitudes and behaviours – about how government operates and relates to the citizenry. These changes have come about from a combination of influences in the wider online environment as well as deliberate agency efforts to grow. Collaborative mechanisms are gradually becoming hardwired into technical and policy frameworks, and this bodes well for a radically different future.

Final thoughts

Technology is not only integral to the delivery of government information, services, and processes, it is the backbone of the collaborative infrastructure supporting the next generation of collaborative government and transformed service delivery.

The emerging trends are pointing to a paradigm shift in the way agencies conduct their business, which has been driven by both the availability of new technologies and user demand. Intermediaries continue to provide assistance to those who are not digitally connected, as paper-based processes gradually give way to the electronic, and manual methods become slowly superseded by automatic mechanisms. In general, more print information is now available via the Internet compared with in the past, and social networking tools have introduced dramatic changes in engagement processes. These developments will have radical implications for the design and management of future knowledge systems for government.

The typical contemporary Internet user uses the Internet to access free and instant information, often to the point of relying on it as a sole source. He or she not only consumes, but also publishes content and enriches that of others. It is becoming evident that young people growing up in a networked world may have different attitudes from those of previous generations to matters such as privacy. The meaning of many existing concepts and categories – such as publishing, authoritative information, and personal information – have been deeply redefined. These changes in the wider digital universe are being reflected in the state of e-government, and have required e-government to evolve with them. The policy responses enacted to meet local needs are actually driven by fundamental technological as well as sociocultural shifts in a globalising world.

As the interests of the local are inextricably linked with the global in a networked world, there will likely be newer, more unfamiliar dynamics, which might result in lasting changes to society as technology continues to evolve. In future, e-government would have to enact strategies and actions that effect outcomes that are positive not only in the local context, but in their implications and ramifications on the global stage.


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