“The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide,” in the first line of the famous historical novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”, 14th Century author Luo Guangzhong observed the recurrent political patterns since antiquity.
In fact, he also aptly described the way IT facilities evolve. From consolidated and virtualised mainframes, people moved to distributed data centres for different department or business functions. Later on, consolidation and virtualisation became the main themes; and recently, the notion of ‘cloud computing’ enters everyone’s conversation –leveraging storage computing power over the internet which most likely will reside in distributed data centres.
While most governments are still cautiously observing this new development, a few elements of cloud computing, such as service-oriented architecture and Web2.0 tools, have already been adopted by many government agencies. And the ‘cloud’ might well be the future of computing for governments as well.
Luo’s notion of history starts with the twilight of Zhou Dynasty, where seven warring kingdoms sprang up, until they were conquered and absorbed into Qin. The mighty empire collapsed shortly after, resulting in Chu and Han kingdoms, with the latter reunifying China. A few hundred years later, Han itself split up into three kingdoms, where the novel began, all the way until the world under heaven was unified under Jin.
Then this pattern of divide-unification kept dominating the rest of the history of the middle kingdom.
According to Chinese historians, every unification or breakup in the history was a result of the incumbent system no longer suiting the demand of the socio-economic situations. Therefore a new system which would make better case came into place, provisionally or over a longer period of time, until being replaced by a newer system.
The same applies to IT facilities. Mainframes were replaced by servers based on microcomputer designs because the latter were cheaper to acquire and much easier to control given the IT policies and practices at that time. Consolidation and virtualisation of servers were amid the challenges of surging information volumes, limited floor space and rising energy costs. And cloud computing, with its locations of servers determined by optimising costs and availability, saves the organisation the burden of maintaining legacy IT facilities.
It is a seemingly recurrent, but inherently evolving process.
View/Add Comments
Browsing through electronics stores we have seen dramatic falls in price in the cost of laptops – from US$2000 five years ago, to around US$250 today for an ‘ultraportable’ or ‘netbook’ such as the ASUS Eee PC.
With such dramatic price declines, surely Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) consortium is within spitting distance of its objective to deliver US$100 laptops to children in the developing world to help them bridge the digital divide. Not really is the surprising answer.
It has been one year since the first Eee PC was launched by ASUS, then a chipset manufacturer not really well known for its laptops. The unit, marketed as “Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play”, was lightweight and Linux-based. Current models now support Windows.
Despite its head start, OLPC is making slow progress – both in terms of the cost of units (they have got the price down to around US$170), as well as actually getting their devices into the hands of the children they were intended for.
OLPC only sells its laptops to governments. Therefore distribution is through whatever rickety channels the government has in place – and it’s the sluggishness of this top-down approach which has prompted OLPC to cast around for alternative distribution models. Late last year the consortium announced its ‘give one, get one’ initiative. This allowed non-target consumers to buy a double-priced OLPC laptop, enabling a free laptop to be distributed to a disadvantaged child.
Further signs that the not-for-profit consortium lacks the business smarts to deliver the dream are that it only appointed executives to head up efforts in China and India a few weeks ago – previously these markets with the most potential were covered by someone from Europe. Did its not-for-profit status impair its ability to attract the talent sooner? Or was it just muddling along?
Recent statements from Jerry Shen, ASUS’s President, revealed that the company will launch a US$200 model in the next few months – almost the cost of a current OLPC laptop. This will come WiMax-enabled, making them able to reap the benefits of rapid development of the wireless broadband network in rural areas over many parts of the region.
Eee PC has already been adopted by some educational institutions in US and Europe, and nobody doubts their ability to deliver more to developing countries as the price point comes down.
Dell, Acer, and niche player Everex have all launched their versions of low-cost PCs. It all looks encouraging for the children in poor countries – the goal of OLPC will be achieved perhaps, ironically, but someone else driven by the profit motive.
In a world where Capitalism’s reputation has been taking a bit of a knock, it is interesting to see that the power of the market is delivering innovation into the hands of those who need it.
View/Add Comments
As British Prime Minister and novelist Benjamin Disraeli once said, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. He might have added e-government surveys to his list, as in my experience they can sometimes create more emotion than clarity, no matter how well meaning their intentions.
Long term readers will know my frustrations with Darrell West’s annual e-government survey. It’s been around longer than most of the other surveys of e-government, so I’ll give Professor West due credit for being quick to market. But was has he done with his first-mover advantage?
Basically this is the globally marketable adjunct to his survey of United States e-government, and using the same methodology, essentially views the world through a North American prism. The latest report came out at the end of August, and I’ve only recently finished reading it. I read it because I have to, and also because the yo-yoing rankings of major countries and the oddly skewed ranking methodology never cease to amuse me.
Apparently, the United Kingdom fell 30 places to 35th position, rating it essentially the same for e-government as India. Meanwhile the UAE, so we are told, is substantially worse than Liberia. Nonsense, on both counts.
Sitting by his window in The Brookings Institution, Professor West believes that the key features determining the success of e-government in a country should be the number of web sites in a sample selection that have – audio clips, video clips, online publications, commercial advertising, premium fees, privacy policy, credit card payments, web site personalisation, PDA access … and last but not least, an English language version of the site.
Sorry, but this is a world far removed from the e-services landscape I’ve been a witness to in Asia for the last 10 years. Having spent the best part of three weeks reviewing nominations to the Government Technology Awards (see pages 40-43 for the total list of nominations, as well as the shortlist), I can tell you that governments were motivated by delivering new services as simply, cost-effectively and reliably as possible.
Very few people in India have credit cards, so it was not a key priority in the submissions I read. Likewise Hong Kong went down the path of having commercial advertising on their government e-services site five years ago, and was quick to back pedal when citizens objected to the commercialisation of government service delivery. A privacy policy is a fine and wonderful thing – but surely better to measure and give credit to whether any personal information is being usefully collected in the first place. And is e-government in Indonesia really treading water until they bring out English versions of their e-services web sites? I don’t think so.
So, the moral of this story is that to rank a country’s e-government maturity, you have to run the rule over it with measures appropriate to the ambitions and needs of its people. There may be commonalities that cross borders, and even remain constant wherever you are in the world. But I would argue that you have to measure what matters, and you need to have a broader sense of what matters than the domestic priorities of where you live. Is it time for a made in Asia e-government rankings?
View/Add Comments
When you have a very large scale IT project, chances are – it will go wrong at some point of time, maybe many times.
That’s what is happening to England’s £12.7 billion (US$ 22.9 billion) National Programme for IT (NPfIT) – reckoned to be the largest non-military IT project in the world.
Initiated by the nation’s Department of Health, NPfIT aims to move the country’s publicly-funded National Health Service towards a single, centrally-mandated electronic care record for patients and to connect 30,000 general practitioners to 300 hospitals, providing secure and audited access to these records by authorised health professionals. An agency called NHS Connecting for Health (NHS-CFH) was created to be responsible for delivering this programme.
Sadly, but perhaps not unsurprisingly given the unprecedented scale of the project, this programme has a troubled history of cost overruns (the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee believes that the final cost will be as high as £20 billion, or US$35.4 billion), late deliveries, defective deliverable and inadequate security. And several London health trusts are allegedly plotting legal actions over the ‘chaos’ the administrative system, implemented by BT.
The programme was divided in four clusters according to geography; each was to be implemented by a major contractor. Fujitsu, a contractor for Southern England which quit in May this year, is now claiming CFH £700 million (US$1.3 billion) as part of an arbitration process. This is most of what it would have been paid had it carried out the £896 million (US$1.6 billion) contract to completion.
The contract was terminated by NHS when Fujitsu walked out after the negotiations on costs of the deployment had failed. Fujitsu is the second among the four to quit. Accenture, the original contractor for North East and Eastern regional health clusters, withdrew in September 2006, after failing to delivery on schedule.
Richard Granger, the former head of NHS-CFH, shifted a vast amount of the risk associated with the project to service providers, which have to demonstrate that their systems work before being paid. The contracts also specified that withdrawing from the project would leave the providers liable for 50 per cent of the value of the contract.
Being the highest paid civil servant in the UK, Granger is famously harsh towards contractors. In an interview with the Financial Times in 2004, he said: „we have seen big cuts in the prices for electronic patient records, for servers and for other infrastructure. We now need to see the same for picture archiving systems. If we don‘t get that we will subject the suppliers to radical surgery.“
Despite the tough talk and the big pay packet Granger left NHS-CFH in February 2008.
When you plan to implement a project as complex, expensive and drawn out as NPfIT you should expect that there will be tears before bedtime. Despite the inevitability of a certain amount of discord, all sides need to work together to forge as close a working relationship between the client organisation and its suppliers. A blame culture leads inexorably to a fear of communicating, and as night follows day, a failure to communicate. And that’s when projects fail. Especially big expensive ones like the NPfIT.
View/Add Comments
The current financial turmoil, and the broad-based support for government intervention, is going to fundamentally alter citizens’ expectations of government. FutureGov – thoughts from the morning of day one, continued…
I like to keep my speeches short and sweet at the best of times – and when you’re standing up in one of our two tracks, infront of 60 GCIOs, Permanent Secretaries, Director Generals, Chief Executives and Commissioners, the pressure to trim the waffle is greater than normal.
So my opening remarks at FutureGov Summit merely made the point that as we gathered in Bali, events in the wider world were demonstrating the unparalleled role of government as the trusted provider of last resort. But there may be more to this than meets the eye – if the unprecedented intervention to rescue the global banking system succeeds, it will have a lasting impact on citizens’ expectations of what government should do.
Interestingly this theme was amplified by successive speakers, starting with Matt Miszewski, General Manager, Worldwide Government with Microsoft, and the followed up by John Suffolk, Government CIO of the United Kingdom, Ian Buchanan, Senior Executive Advisor of Booz & Company in Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Kemal Stamboel, Vice Chairman, National ICT Council of Indonesia.
… I’m going to develop my thoughts on this, with the help of the top officials here with me in Bali. It will be interesting to see how far the pendulum swings in favour of government interventionism - and what impact this is likely to have on public sector IT deployments.
Not sure if I’m going to have much time to blog further today, but I’ll try again after dinner.
View/Add Comments
I’ve only been in Bali for the FutureGov Summit for 24 hours, but I’m knackered already! There’s been a bit of a late rush, as we’ve had to accommodate changes in schedule to a few CIOs who decided that, actually, they did want to attend the region’s most senior gathering of government IT leaders afterall. So that takes us to just over 120 top-tier government officials.
Happily the latecomers still made it to Bali just in time for cocktails last night which was a rather lovely affair on a hill overlooking the Lombok Strait, with the umbul-umbuls flapping in the breeze, and some great conversations competing with the gamelan band.
I met up with a number of old friends, including CICT’s Tim Diaz de Rivera, and RS Sharma from Jharkhand, and John Suffolk, GCIO of the United Kingdom. We had an interesting conversation about raising IT literacy standards - and the role of the civil service machine in widening access to government services for the rural poor. A key challenge that kept cropping up was creating sustainable programmes - rather than short-lived initiatives that were launched to great fanfare, only to quietly die down subsequently.
That was yesterday … after an early start with the team this morning, we dived into the first few plenary sessions. And have already heard from Microsoft’s Matt Miszewski, General Manager of Worldwide Government who flew in from Redmond for the event. IBM’s Wayne Janzen, who is responsible for Government with their software group has likewise flown in from the States to be with us, probably just pipping their air miles accrued by the United Kingdom’s Government CIO, John Suffolk, who just finished speaking a few minutes ago. John is an interesting chap … over drinks last night he shared what is preoccupying him: information security, information security, information security - and animal husbandry. The focus on information security is hardly surprising, but a thing few people know about him is that he rears pigs on his farm!
That’s just one of the reasons why I love the annual FutureGov Summit - it just attracts the most interesting and senior government officials of any event I’ve ever been to. I’ll be looking to distil my thoughts about the presentations I’ve heard later today (fingers crossed). But now I need to go and prepare for an afternoon break out session on delivering citizen services to local and regional government. I guess there’s no rest for the wicked…
View/Add Comments
For much of the region education is going digital – but will this leave some countries and students behind? I had the good fortune to be in Bangkok recently for a UNESCO-organised seminar focusing on the role of IT in driving the modernisation of the region’s education systems – and this was a persistent theme for participants.
When you are struggling to provide an education in straitened circumstances, as many teachers are in the region are, having the imagination and perseverance to propose investing in technology to improve the educational experience marks you out as out of the ordinary.
This was one of the reasons why I felt inspired by the opportunities for development more than down-heartened at the scale of the challenge: at the UNESCO event the bulk of the participants were people like Julito Aligaen, part of the project team which won a UNESCO award in recognition for being a noteworthy ‘Education Planner and Administrator’. A computer, a 21” TV and audio support – and the rest was magic, providing students with access to a world of knowledge, as well as to their peers in the country. And all for US$8 per student annually.
There were a lot of other ‘Aligaens’ sharing their stories with me at the seminar, and a common theme was how little awareness they were able to achieve for their hard work to improve the systems within which they operated.
Aligaen lamented to me his disappointment in the lack of support from his native country from a publicity point of view, in contrast to the support he received from UNESCO Bangkok and the newspapers in Thailand, such as the Thailand Post and The Nation. “It is difficult when you are not supported morally, much less, financially,” says Aligaen. He explained that his project team had to use their spare time to meet education planners informally to garner support, in a public vehicle or even at the market.
Typically when stakeholders discuss digital inclusion issues we tend to focus on access and budget - whether to electricity or to the funding of a laptop for every child. But a crucial element – providing support to the change agents themselves is as important. Capacity development is more than IT literacy and investment in hardware; it needs to be viewed as providing mentoring, encouragement, and respect for those rare individuals who see opportunities where the rest of us see nothing.
Sri Lanka’s Minister for Education, Susil Premajayantha, was also present at the event, and told me that the key issue was whether the system was as committed to the individual teacher as much as the teacher was committed to the system. Wise words; now we just have to live up to them.
View/Add Comments
Beware self-appointed experts at the best of times, but particularly when it comes to planning your Web 2.0 strategy. I popped along to an informal gathering held at Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority yesterday, and listened to an interesting panel discussion debating how corporates could leverage the rise of the social internet.
First the bad news. At least half the panel of MNCs and PR strategists didn’t quite understand how to engage with citizen bloggers. One PR professional asked the audience of bloggers what would motivate them to attend a media event: “Freebies? Competitions? Food? Beer?” Another individual, a representative of an MNC, said that you should apply pressure to bloggers, by advertising with them, or threatening not to do so, in order to get them to play ball.
My heart sank. These, afterall, were the ‘experts’.
I know that a key challenge of leveraging Web 2.0 to engage with citizens and consumers is simply that these technologies are so new, that people are still only in the initial stages of exploring how best to deploy them. Even Web 2.0 darling Facebook (feel free to add me at james.smith@alphabet-media.com) has struggled to understand the dynamics of social media - as demonstrated by the alienation of users with its ‘Beacon’ advertising recommendation service last November.
But the idea that traditional marketing messages can be translated into the language of the social internet by celebrity bloggers receiving ‘guidance’ in the form of a steady drip feed of freebies from public and private sector organisations … it’s almost too stupid to comment on. So let me try and shine a little light for those of you looking to be a positive part of citizens’ online conversations.
The first thing you need to bear in mind is that you need to be invited to take part: the social internet does not recognise traditional top-down information delivery structures. No matter how important a minister’s initiative is to his or her ministry, government has to understand that it is now competing in a multi-million channel universe: their hot breaking news is merely one message amongst a multitude.
The logic of the internet’s ‘long tail’ is that I can surround myself with everything that matters to me as an individual, and opt out of anything I find tedious. I can choose to ignore government unless I find it engaging.
The second thing is that government needs to realise that to be part of a conversation is to lose control of the message. That alone is going to require an almighty culture change in government communications strategies. If you talk to me, but I disagree and tell my friends that I disagree, there’s not a lot you can do about that. The only thing you can do is to really, really try to understand me as an individual citizen in order to frame the discussion in as convincing a way as possible. The alternative - of not trying to engage me - runs the greater risk of me passing on misinformed comments to my friends, or to simply ignore government completely.
Before you start getting palpitations regarding this loss of control over the conversation, this is not really very new. People have been having conversations with their friends for a long time. The only new thing with the social internet is that the content of these conversations is now more visible, and that these conversations can now scale to reach many more people as Web 2.0 extends our social reach.
The third thing touches upon what it is that bloggers want. It’s not free food and drink - it’s content and status. Similarities with traditional journalists are only superficial - scratch the surface and you’ll see that they are driven by different things. A journalist may be paid to dutifully turn a press announcement into a story; bloggers do what they do for its own sake - the vast majority are motivated by passion, not money.
Bloggers should be seen as social entrepreneurs - their currency is social capital. As every blogger can tell you, blogging is at some level an act of egoism. You’re saying to the world ‘I have an opinion worth sharing with strangers’. Likewise, every memorable incident in the life of the blogger is liable to be turned into a blog post. What follows from this is that if you want to engage the blogosphere, you have to have something that they will find noteworthy.
The final point I want to make is that the path ahead is necessarily a bumpy one. The kids get it, because this is their world. The staff most likely to understand the dynamics of the social internet are, for now, your most junior civil servants. To the senior decision-makers brought up on a diet of measured, controlled and accountable policy formation and distribution, the social internet is definitely not ‘business as usual’. But it is where business is going to be conducted in future nevertheless.
View/Add Comments
It’s taken me a tad longer than expected to sift through the 450 separate nominations for this year’s Government Technology Awards, and the hardest work in weighing up the competing claims to determine overall winners still lies ahead. Still it is already clear that the nominations have been taken even more seriously this year by government.
We have had visits to our office by government agencies looking to talk about how they should present their projects for nomination, and at the same time we have seen a surge in interest from government organisations throughout the region. As one of my fellow judges, Bill Sullivan, Commissioner of State Revenue at the Department of Treasury and Finance in Western Australia, told me the nominations showed that there was “lots of great and innovative work being done in the region”.
Not everyone can make it to the shortlist, much less win the ultimate prize - so there are a lot of very fine examples of innovation that aren’t going to receiving the attention they arguably deserve. As an editorial team we will try to bring the stories behind some of these non-shortlisted organisations to you through this web site and FutureGov magazine. However I do want to pass on my thanks to all the government agencies that took the time to nominate themselves.
So here, in no particular order, are the shortlisted nominations for each category - look out for the announcement of the winners on 17th October following the Gala Awards Dinner in Bali
Technology Leadership
Recovery Aceh-Nias, Indonesia
eKL, Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit, Malaysia
e Lekha, Office of the Controller General of Accounts, Government of India
Marikina City’s Facility of Wirelessly Integrated Network Systems, Marikina City, The Philippines
Information Access Management Framework, Defence Science and Technology Agency, Singapore
Digital Inclusion
West Bengal State Wide Area Network, West Bengal Government, India
TeleRadiology, Municipality of Boac, The Philippines
Youth.gov.hk- A youth Portal, Government of Hong Kong SAR, Hong Kong
Citizen Service Centres, Government of Jharkhand, India
Programs Supporting Information for the Disabled Groups, Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity And Promotions Division, South Korea
Geographical Information Systems
Housing Geospatial, BRR Aceh-Nias, Indonesia
Land Information Network, Singapore Land Authority, Singapore
Bahrain Spatial Data Infrastructure, Central Informatics Organisation
Integrated Planning and Land Use System, Urban Redevelopment Authority, Singapore
Green Government
Employment Pass On-Line, Ministry of Manpower, Singapore
ePassport System, Hong Kong Immigration Department, Hong Kong
Cluster PACS, National Healthcare Group, Singapore
Free downloading of Statistical Publications and Tables, Department of Census & Statistics, Hong Kong
West Bengal State Wide Area Network, West Bengal Government, India
E-Government
Licence Application Tracking Facility, Administration Office, Efficiency Unit, Hong Kong
Unified end-to-end e-Procurement Platform, State Government of Karnataka, India
Youth.gov.hk- A youth Portal, Government of Hong Kong SAR, Hong Kong
Integrated Information Infrastructure, Government of Goa, India
my CPF, Central Provident Fund, Singapore
Digital Approach-eGovernance Initiatives for Natural Resourse Management, Jharkhand Space Application Centre, Department of IT, Government of Jharkhand, India
Wireless Government
Marikina City’s Facility of Wirelessly Integrated Network Systems, Marikina City, The Philippines
Design and implementation of BuddyWorks: Using Telehealth Network Services in Community Partnership Project, Medical Informatics Unit- University of the Philippines-Manila, The Philippines
West Bengal State Wide Area Network, West Bengal Government, India
Hazmat Incident Manegement System, Singapore Civil Defence Force, Singapore
Command and Control, Communications and Computer integration System, Royal Malaysian Police, Malaysia
Wireless@SG, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, Singapore
Business Process
Computerised Clinician Order Entry, National Healthcare Group, Singapore
Employment Pass On-Line, Ministry of Manpower, Singapore
eKOSH (Comprehensive Online System of Treasury Accounts & Pensions, Chhattisgarh State Centre, Directorate of Treasury Accounts and Pensions, India
ePassport System, Hong Kong Immigration Department, Hong Kong
Procurement System, Defence Science and Technology Agency, Singapore
eKL, Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit, Malaysia
Information Management
Financial Management Information System, Provincial Government of Bulacan, The Philippines
Optimised Operating Theatre Scheduling System, National University Hospital, Singapore
Interactive Data dissemination System, Department of Census & Statistics, Hong Kong
Recovery Aceh-Nias Database, BRR Aceh-Nias, Indonesia
The School Cockpit, Ministry of Education, Singapore
Service Innovation
eVisitors Programme, Immigration & Checkpoints Authority, Singapore
Social Security Pensions, Government of Andhra Pradesh, Department of Rural Development, India
Youth.gov.hk- A youth Portal, Government of Hong Kong SAR, Hong Kong
Interactive Data dissemination System, Department of Census & Statistics, Hong Kong
CHITS, National Telehealth Centre, The Philippines
Connected Government
eLocal Government Units, National Computer Centre, The Philippines
e Lekha, Office of the Controller General of Accounts, Government of India, India
The School Cockpit, Ministry of Education, Singapore
One Stop Centre, Department of Local Government, Malaysia
Jharnet, Department of IT, Jharkhand, India
Information Security
Information Access Management, Defence Science and Technology Agency, Singapore
Roaming Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for eFiling System, Inland Revenue Board, Malaysia
CIRIS, Immigration & Checkpoints Authority, Singapore
Government Service Bus, Saudi eGovernment Programme, Saudi Arabia
Smart Cards Project, Government of Andhra Pradesh, Department of Rural Development, India
View/Add Comments
A recent United Nations survey sheds light on the United States’ harmful disposal of e-waste in Asia. As regional authorities give more attention to greening their IT infrastructure, you have to ask what the point is unless agreements are put in place to ensure that the entire technology lifecycle is greened - and not just the initial 3-4 years of active use.
China is the country worst affected by US companies’ off-shoring of their e-waster, according to the UN report, closely followed by South Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam and India.
In this instance, one man’s bread is almost literally another man’s poison - recycling old IT assets sounds pretty virtuous if you’re in the American Mid West, but if you’re ripping out the toxic guts of old IT assets in the outskirts of Shenzhen, it’s not quite so environmentally friendly. Sure, there’s a degree of reuse - but take a look at the photos of where this work is being done, and all notions of minimising environmental impact go out of the window.
According to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) “A substantial quantity (of the estimated 20 million pounds of waste) ends up in countries where disposal practices are unsafe to workers and dangerous to the environment.”
There can be no ‘green IT’ until the recycling of technology assets is safe and clean enough to be undertaken in America’s backyard. Governments in the region need to focus not just on power consumption - what you do when it’s time to refresh your equipment is as much a part of the green IT jigsaw puzzle, as energy-saving features.
View/Add Comments
I don’t normally complain when someone else is shouting me lunch, but at a recent CXO lunch meeting co-hosted by FutureGov and Fuji Xerox I didn’t get much eating done. However that was more than compensated by the quality of the conversation – which shed light on the views of Singaporean government officials towards information management, and the role of third party providers.
On the issue of information management, there was an easy consensus. The increased volume of information being created by ‘the system’ clearly shows no sign of slowing down; existing processes for handling information and archiving records were not intended to cope with these increased volumes; finding staff willing to dedicate themselves to a career in records management is hard, and likely to get harder as long-serving registry officials retire, and as populations age.
There were a few areas where agreement was harder to come by. When it came to responding to the above challenges, the senior civil servants were split fairly evenly down the middle – into two groups, which I’d refer to as ‘muckspreaders’ and ‘elitists’.
The first of these groups is named after the machines that spread manure across arable farmland. Why? Because they seemed to believe that the answer to managing the increasing amounts of data is to spread responsibility for information management far and wide throughout the organisation – that all staff need to take personal responsibility for filing and archiving their information.
The other group, the elitists, saw further specialisation as being the best way to tackle rising information volumes. For this group, it was considered safer to create a centre of excellence which took responsibility for all of an agency’s information and records management activities. Such a centre of excellence could be an internal unit, or outsourced to a third party provider.
If you want my opinion - and seeing as this is my blog, that’s exactly what you’re going to get - although there may be something vaguely appealing about saying “everyone self-file your records”, there are two key problems.
Firstly you run the risk that people won’t tag the information that comes across their desk every day diligently, in which case the system simply falls over. The second, potentially greater risk, is that people will tag their information - and in so doing spend ever greater amounts of time filing information away on behalf of the organisation, rather than doing something productive with it.
Although it may seem a seductive proposition for an organisation to ‘fix’ the problem of information overload by breaking the workload into small chunks and sharing it around the staff, all you’re doing is brushing the problem under the carpet. It’s been estimated, by the boffins at Fuji Xerox I think, that civil servants spend somewhere between 15-20 minutes a day just on filing their records. Extrapolate that across your average government organisation over a year, and there’s surely scope for government organisations to offload this non-core task in future.
Government agencies can try to go down the muckspreading path for now - but as information workloads increase, and as the amount of time civil servants spend filing creeps up beyond 20 minutes to 30 minutes and then more, they will find out the hard way that this approach just isn’t sustainable.
View/Add Comments
I’m not sure I’ve ever had these sentiments before. Thanks to the unprecedented increase in the numbers of nominations for our 2008 Government Technology Awards, I have a lot more work on my hands - and I couldn’t be more pleased. Really!
I remember a siren voice last year commending my team on getting 214 nominations for the 2007 awards, but warning that there would be a big drop off in the following year as people got over their initial excitement.
Happily Mr Misery Guts has been proven wrong because not only have the number of nominations more than doubled (450 nominations from public sector bodies across Asia Pacific and the Gulf States) - but surveying the nomination forms, the quality of the entries has markedly improved too.
I think this reflects the same benchmarking and information sharing dynamic, and maybe even desire for recognition, that I see in FutureGov magazine when we conduct our interviews with the great and the good of the region’s public sector. Certainly I take a lot of pleasure in knowing that the awards process that we’ve created has proven to be so popular with government, and also so well supported by the solutions provider community.
I just hope that my fellow awards judges share my joy at the prospect of sifting through larger than expected piles of nomination forms …
View/Add Comments
I’m just back from Bangkok where I and J2* have spent three days with Microsoft’s public sector team as they showcased the value of its partner ecosystem at their regional public sector sales kick-off meeting in Bangkok.
I was surprised that this was the first of its kind in the region - a gathering together of Microsoft’s product and public sector experts from Asia Pacific and Worldwide to update and engage with regional partners. I say that simply because the company’s sales are made almost entirely through its partner ecosystem - I seem to recall them saying 97 per cent.
But you’ve got to start somewhere - and it was a pretty good first attempt, with over 180 public sector-focused partners registering. I bumped into a number of friendly faces there, including James Wong from Motorola, CrimsonLogic’s Himmat Singh, and Philip Barr from Civica.
Happily I managed to have some great conversations with Dr Arvind Shukla from India-based iBilt, Nurul Kabir of Spinnovation in Bangladesh, and Cecily O’Neil from Australia’s Change Corporation - all of whom were new to me, and to one another.
Like many of the partners present, Arvind, Nurul and Cecily were looking for opportunities to grow across their business in the region. This points to a key message that Microsoft might want to make more explicit next time around in order to build on the 180 participants - “Microsoft has a lot of friends, let us introduce you to them”.
For its partners, the software giant is more than a platform provider - it is also a ‘social network’ for companies to reach out to one another, and to prospective customers looking to build upon their existing Microsoft infrastructure. Looking ahead, this marketplace of ideas, applications and business models holds real value - a goose that can lay golden eggs into multiple baskets.
When I started this post I wanted to talk about Microsoft’s plans for local and regional governments in Asia - but this will have to keep until next week as I’m feeling pretty knackered right now!
*J2 = James Hosking, FutureGov’s (Cornish) Sales Director.
View/Add Comments
It’s hard to take a government’s e-services seriously if the government in question doesn’t take them seriously either. The latest news across my desk is how Dubai’s e-government project is aiming to drum up citizen participation by dishing out freebies.
Now, maybe it’s because I never win anything in these kind of lucky draw competitions that I’m surprised and disappointed with this approach. Certainly I wouldn’t say no to a helicopter trip above Dubai, a three-night stay in 5-star hotel, and an assortment of “electronic and entertainment devices and more”. And I’m not picking on Dubai, because I am sure I recall Singapore doing something similar in the past - it may have been coffee vouchers or stored value cards for early e-filing of taxes.
Reading between the lines, these kind of giveaways occur when citizen participation rates are not what the agency in question would like them to be. And certainly I’m all for a bit of marketing now and then to educate citizens, businesses and visitors about a country’s online services. But particularly in Dubai’s case … these e-services aren’t new. They had about 1600 e-services when I started reporting on all this stuff five years ago.
So I think there’s something not quite right if after a long ‘settling-in’ period, citizen participation rates still require a “daily raffle of prizes” to drive traffic online.
What I take from this is that the authorities are haunted by a sizeable investment in e-services infrastructure that, judging by the response of those who live and work there, is surplus to requirements.
And that’s okay - because it’s a valuable lesson that civil servants should act less and listen more. If you can’t sell a service based on its convenience to the user - chucking a few nights stay in a posh hotel at random citizens won’t help you much either.
Though if you’re going to anyway … throw them my way!
View/Add Comments
Much of the debate around wireless broadband at municipal or even national level is the rivalry between WiMax and Long Term Evolution (LTE).
In fact the two competing technologies are of the same generation developed to eventually achieve 100 Mbps data rates at much lower costs than their predecessors, enabling lots of new services on the air.
One of the key differences is that WiMax is based on open standard, meaning that will be normally cheaper than LTE, who follows the proprietary trend of conventional telecom standards. Nevertheless, this could be an advantage for LTE as well as previously deployed telecom infrastructure will be able to evolve smoothly into the new generation without much cost in building new base stations.
Although the standard for LTE has been finalised and designing of devices has started, mass adoption is not expected until year 2012. That means, the ITU recognition of WiMax last year gives it a significant early-mover advantage.
In addition, the development of IEEE 802.16m, a faster version of mobile WiMax, is scheduled to be completed in 2009.
Of course there are more factors which might influence the outcome of this competition, such as spectrum allocation and backing of major industry players. In fact, a number of vendors and telecom operators have already expressed their interest in both technologies. There are even proposals that the two should merge. The field remains interesting to watch.
From a government perspective, a long term strategy in closing digital divide and delivering wireless services this would be desirable. However the history of technology is littered with great ideas that never saw the commercial success they deserved. Place your bets!
View/Add Comments
South Africa’s Director-General of Home Affairs has declared IT to be the “bane” of the department’s existence. Not quite a ringing endorsement, which is a pity as I know the hard work that the country’s State Information Technology Agency (SITA) has been doing over the last three years.
Apparently the Director-General in question, a certain Mavuso Msimang, is “unhappy with the unstable ICT environment” in his agency, as a result of an organisational refresh of the department’s infrastructure.
Scratch the surface and you’ll see that the ‘instability’ is being caused by the tension between SITA trying to migrate the department to the new system - and that same department’s civil servants clinging to the tried, trusted, and worn out system that they’ve grown accustomed to.
So correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks for all the world like an old fashioned change management issue. And if that’s the case then it casts someone in a rather unflattering light.
Change management requires firm leadership: a strong sense of where an organisation is going, where it’s come from, why it needs to make the journey, and what’s required to make it happen. But this firm leadership, this sense of purpose and commitment to changing staff attitudes, is not something that SITA can provide. SITA has done its job; it’s now time for our friend Mavuso Msimang, and the leadership of Home Affairs to do theirs.
View/Add Comments
For some time now as the team behind FutureGov has been focused on relaunching the print magazine, and charging ahead with the development of our conferences and training, the online community has been a little bit unloved in comparison.
The irony is that FutureGov magazine (in its former guise as ‘Public Sector Technology & Management’) started off as an online-only community back in 2003. At the time it was a not-for-profit hobby that I developed in my spare time, whilst working for my previous employer.
Happily it’s grown a bit since then, and I’ve got some great colleagues helping out these days. However it’s still very much a labour of love.
Hopefully you can sense this from our new and improved online publication; there has been a considerable amount of attention given to how we can provide for our online community of readers here in Asia, as well as further afield.
So in the months ahead you’ll see a broader range of content than in the previous version of the web site, and you’re invited to play an active role in the life of this community, by adding your comments, submitting feedback, and perhaps even joining us for some of the conferences that we organise.
Anyway, more chit chat later. For now it’s just great to be back online.
View/Add Comments
