Analysis, Central Government, Policy

Why e-government isn’t working

By James Smith | 1 August 2008

As the region’s economies prosper, lifting more people out of dependency on the state, the role of government becomes less central to citizens’ lives. It may remain important, but it becomes just one amongst a number of other important elements such as family, work, leisure.

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So the region’s more developed countries, with their higher internet penetration and larger number of net-savvy citizens, face a particular challenge in reaching out to them.

Like elsewhere in the world, there are more government web sites, blogs and online services in Asia than ever before – but government’s share of the internet continues to decline, both in terms of volume of content, as well as number of visits.

The logic of Chris Anderson’s ‘Long Tail’ is that the internet is a great enabler for businesses to serve niches, allowing them to deploy limited resources to meet the needs of specific customer segments. It also allows for the development of user-initiated social networks and services. This contrasts rather with government, where the ethos of ‘public service’ means serving the needs of all citizens. It is a sad irony that this desire to serve the public good leads to a one-size-fits-most approach that fails to translate online.

Government felt conceptually comfortable in the old world of Web 1.0 with talk of ‘portals’ and ‘gateways’. But it now needs to find its feet in a shifting world of wikis and blogs.

This touches upon a key issue - that there remains a lot of confusion in government about what the internet is for. The web is not a door, or a shop window or even a highway. It’s a conversation.

Success online therefore hinges on being part of the conversation – and slick transactional e-government sites can only make existing government transactions run more efficiently. They can’t make you part of the conversation. And the funny thing with conversations is that if your opposite number loses interest, they leave the room and the conversation ends.

Government doesn’t operate in a vacuum. I may have to file my taxes with it online – but if it wants to engage with me it has to compete for my attention like never before. I’m very engaged with government, as you’d expect from the editor of a public sector magazine, but I’ll be honest with you – its market share of my attention (‘mind share’) is decreasing, and can only decrease as ever more business, family and leisure content becomes available online.

The Stone Age didn’t end because of a lack of stones. Likewise e-government won’t fail because government stopped having something to say – it will be because there was nobody listening.