E-government 2020: A transformed public sector delivering personalised Public Sector services

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Yih-Jeou Wang

Yih-Jeou Wang is Acting Project Leader, E-Government Project, at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. He has been Head of Division in the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency responsible for national and international ICT security policy, and previously secretary to the Danish Government Committee defining the first national Information Society policy. He has been responsible for developing and implementing e government and ICT policies and strategies for more than 15 years.

E-government 2020: A transformed public sector delivering personalised Public Sector services

One is always told: learn from history and improve the future.

But the future is basically unpredictable and not all extrapolations of history ends up to become true.

Just think back 10 or 15 years: we were in the middle of the digital hype era. We were told that everything should be digitised and online: we talked about the digital economy, online market places, "things that think", ICT in all parts of society whether it was in schools, the health sector, the agricultural sector, industry, etc … we were told it would revolutionise societies and the way people interacted with each other. And of course that ICT would enable the public sector to make citizens' and businesses' life easier, public sector more efficient and effective and enabling governments to reprioritise human resources towards more needed areas of public service provision where human interaction is needed most.

These were in general the political rhetoric back in the 1990s where everyone was excited about the many possibilities ICT offered to all of parts of the public sector. The possibilities of "doing well" with new technologies were infinite, and the promises were profound, visionary, and without limits. At least this was the overall impression in different countries around the world.

What can we see today? How many promises were realised? How much is still political rhetoric? How much is realities today? What can we look back at as the "sweetness of success", and what as the "bitterness of failures"?

What is evident today is that we have within the last 10 to 15 years moved from an over-joyous state of political imposed e-government projects to a more mainstreamed e-government development where e-government projects are seen – not as a goal of its own, but as one of the tools to achieve a multitude of different political goals. OECD countries are today using e-government as a key tool to change different features of the public sector's way of functioning and to support implementation of different public sector policy goals such as: more individualised services in the home-caring of elderly citizens; improve quality of treatment in the public health system; prevent social fraud; provide pro-active public sector services to resource-weak citizens groups; improve education and learning in the educational system and institutions; etc.

Governments are though still facing the same kind of challenges as in the 1990s with increasing demands from citizens and businesses to deliver better and smarter services in order to make their everyday life easier. They are at the same time under considerable financial constraints (both budgetary and staffing), and face rapidly mounting demographic challenges concerning an ageing population and shifts in population composition due to the effects of globalisation. All these trends are pushing governments toward rethinking the organisation of their public sectors, questioning existing structures and – often historically-given – divisions of labour, and looking into new ways of delivering services for less cost.

So where is "e-government" in 2020? Will it still exist?

No. It will have vanished as an area in its own right.

Already today, some OECD countries have strategically taken steps to integrate e-government into broader public sector development units. Examples are countries like: Denmark, France, and Norway. They have organisationally merged formerly independent entities in order to refocus activities of areas like for example: administration policy and public sector reforms, administrative simplification, and e-government. By "joining-up" skills, competencies, and experiences from these areas the expectation is to enable a more coherent implementation of political wishes for the modernising of the public sector.

E-government will be regarded as an important tool among others to modernise – or transform. E-Government will be an integrated part of the public sector activities, all its business processes, service developments and provisions, communication processes, etc. E-Government as an area will have vanished and has become a natural part of the public sector and its many different ways of functioning. The discussions will though still be the same: what can be done to improve public sector’s service delivery? And how can the public sector change its processes and organisation to improve performance and quality of services and service delivery? And the recurrent discussions among and within the OECD countries of how much the public sector should fill in society will still be there as a political question to be addressed and for politicians to consider.

The essence of the debate of the functioning of the public sector will therefore be the same. It will "just" be a new iteration in an ongoing process of transforming the public sector. By joining-up government and having the aim of delivering "seamless services" will change the way public sector is organised. The needs for strong and trusted partnerships across levels of government in order to respond to the citizens' and the businesses' perception of the public sector as one whole and coherent entity will become evident and inevitable, and it will be a challenge which needs to be dealt with politically and administratively.

With the trend of moving from e-government development towards public sector transformation as part of the ongoing modernisation of the public sector is an increasingly clear trend with the aim of mainstreaming e-government activities by demanding sound economic considerations and practices as also demanded by other types of public sector investment areas. The wish of harvesting efficiency gains and reaping the benefits of e-government is clearly indicated in different countries' prioritisation of e-government development: the development and adoption of common ways of evaluating e-government projects with regard to cost-benefit analysis and return of investment considerations, assessments of total cost of ownerships, and imposing a "whole-of-public-sector" view in the overall evaluations of the feasibility of e-government projects. The need to view e-government development as a broad investment area which creates benefits within and across levels of government is slowly, but inevitably becoming a recognised way of looking at e-government projects and activities. This view is perfectly in line with also the broader scope of public sector transformation and the focus on whether transformational activities, including integrated e-government activities, will eventually have the desired outcome for citizens and businesses.

The conclusion is therefore: e-government will still be a concern in 2020, but as an imbedded and integrated area within the broader scope of public sector transformation. The focus of e government will be on the impacts and outcomes of its contributions to the broad range of transformational activities rather than on processes and procedures, as has been the focus of e government development till now. By integrating and imbedding e-government within a transformational agenda will have the effect of strengthening the attention on citizens and businesses needs rather than internal public sector needs and considerations which might be the focus today, but shouldn't be the focus in 2020.

The opinions expressed and arguments employed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not reflect those of the OECD or of the governments of its member countries.