Where is the innovation in e-government?
I recently listened to the Economist's recent special report on e-government.
I think the report was, by and large, accurate and to the point - the biggest lessons seem to be:
- Its right and proper that citizens have access to and interact with local and national Governments (durh!).
- Government IT projects cost a fortune and fail often.
- Lots of Government IT projects focus just on the IT, not the social implementation. And fail because of this.
- Seldom does a project simply improve how existing stuff gets done, augmenting with simple IT.
- The big consultancies cost lots of money, and love Government's IT spending.
- (IT) Wheels are being reinvented constantly. Little reuse of commercial tools or Open Source.
- The agility and commercial pressure that drives IT in the business world is simply missing in Government IT projects.
- Bad organisations don't become good organisations, just by adding computers.
Underpinning these points, the best article, and one of the few success stories, was about the newish CTO of Columbia, who uses Google Maps and Spreadsheets to push data management to the edges of the municipal areas - focusing as much on process as technology - even going so far as replacing $6000 radios with iphones...
There is, however, far more innovative work going on in the UK. It's just not by the UK government.
I was surprised, and disappointed in the Econonmist's report, as it didn't mention the fantastic work being done in the UK to enable online access to MPs, civic data and local councils, generally enabling democracy over the web by MySociety (disclaimer, I donate to mySociety).
Sites like fixmystreet.com and theyworkforyou.com are great examples of real, working innovation in enabling public access to national and local Government.
I'm sure many in Government read the report (it makes a nice balance to the Consultancy sponsored WhitePapers). I hope they pay MySociety a visit too.
