A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a Town Hall session being hosted by the Corporate Chief Technology Officer for the Ontario government. A colleague of mine, Brian Gordon, attended and I asked him to prepare some notes.
Much of the discussion was centred around a theme of Government 2.0: How new technologies can transform and enhance Government.
Ontario’s Information and Information Technology Organization was set up to implement the Ontario government’s integrated approach to I&IT.;
To strengthen its citizen-centred approach to government, the province has begun to develop a strategy on citizen engagement. One component of this strategy is intended to expand the use of electronic channels, mainly the Internet, to help bring citizens closer to their government. The goal is to ensure citizens have access to a wide range of tools and information that will enable them to participate more fully in the democratic process.
For many at the Town Hall, what the Ontario government has implemented to date is e-Government or Government 1.0. While some 10.8 million transactions were carried out on the Ontario government portal in 2006-07, speakers at the Town Hall said this has simply put a pretty face on the traditional, industrial-age, hierarchical type of government organization: rigid, input-oriented and closed.
Government 2.0 requires a major cultural change taking place within the public sector. It needs to move away from a traditional organization that acts in vertical silos to one that is organized in such a way that it can think and act laterally, collaborate and share and uses an open network. This cultural change is as fundamental to Government 2.0 as the technological changes that will be required. Technologies allow for a networked government, permitting it to more effectively interact with the community of citizens.
Will government be able to transform itself to deliver better quality services for less cost?
As Glen Murray wrote in the Sunday Toronto Star,
Government is becoming more risk averse with a diminishing capacity for creativity. Innovation by its very nature requires risk as it assumes a departure from the tried and true and therefore has an inherently higher risk of failure.
Moving to Government 2.0 will require plenty of trial and error and experimentation since there are a lot of unknowns. Trials are inherently risky; they aren’t all going to have positive results. Media coverage of failed trials is such that it puts the bureaucrats who proposed and implemented them and the politicians who approved them and who are ultimately responsible for the decisions on the firing line with very little chance of rebuttal. Would you want to carry this responsibility on your back? Not very likely.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons that partnerships with the private sector make sense for innovative government transformation. Otherwise, it is unlikely that we’ll see Government 2.0 any time soon. Still, according to a recent CATA study, there is widespread dissatisfaction with government procurement processes.
At the end of the day, it may not be an issue of technology – but whether government will allow itself to be changed.