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THE RILEY REPORT - February 2005
from Thomas B. Riley RTRiley6@cs.com
www.rileyis.com
Following is the Riley Report for February 2005. Please feel free to pass this on as you see fit. If you wish to use any or part of the Report in an offline publication please acknowledge the author or contact the author if to be fully republished offline. If you are not currently subscribed to the Riley Report (there is no charge) you can email RTRiley6@cs.com and simply put subscribe in the body of the text.
Successful e-Government Initiatives
By Thomas B. Riley
For the fourth year in a row Accenture, the international consulting firm, has ranked Canada first in e-government implementation. There are many factors at play that have led to Canada being a world leader in e-service delivery. One of the most successful factors was the top political and public service leadership and support. From 1997 onwards the former Prime Minister made speeches on the importance of e-government, as did various Ministers. The current Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Paul Martin, has continued this commitment. This initiative has been on the political agenda from an early stage. It was followed up with sufficient funding over the years with the program being made a government wide priority in the speech from the throne at the October 1999 opening of Parliament. Within the public service a Committee of Deputy Ministers, (TIMS - The Telecommunications and Informatics Management Subcommittee), was assigned the responsibility of ensuring that the government's promise on e-government was kept.
This leadership from the top echelons of the political system and the public administration set the climate for the continuing evolution of a multitude of projects and eventual success. An important factor in the Canadian government leadership is that it allowed for proper funding for e-government programs to evolve to implementation. There were many other important steps taken and followed that brought the Canadian e-government initiatives to the top ranking in the world.
The government officials responsible for e-government, and what became the Government Online (GOL) initiative, looked at the delivery of services by taking an all government approach to e-service delivery. What this means is that services were organized by category and not delivered on a department-by-department basis. More information on GOL can be found at their site at:
www.ged-gol.gc.ca/index_e.asp
The Canadian government focus has been not on what the government thinks the citizens want in the way of services but what the citizen wants. This has been accomplished by a combination of professional polling of the public and the results of focus groups conducted across the country. The government did not make assumptions on what services were needed by the public and spent considerable resources getting to know what services the public wanted. The Government also formed a GOL (Government Online) Advisory Committee of prominent citizens, business people and academics to advise Ministers on implementing the government online initiative.
(Reports of the Advisory Committee can be found at: www.ged-gol.gc.ca/pnl-grp/index_e.asp )
The government followed up this strategy with the regular use of a unique Canadian outcomes analysis approach called "Citizens First" in the case of individuals and families, and "Taking Care of Business" in the case of companies," which used further surveys against the "Common Measurement Tool" that the government officials responsible for GOL have developed. With this tool the government has been able to measure client expectations, priorities, and actual percentage satisfaction with government services at all levels of government, and track how that is changing.
(See www.iccs-isac.org the web site of the non-profit group set up to support this approach at all three levels of the Canadian government - federal, provincial and municipal.)
A target of 2005 was set for the delivery of online government services with all Chief Information Officers (CIO) in individual departments required to submit plans to bring the services of their particular departments online by 2005. Departments laid out their plans and how targets would be met and submitted their plans to Treasury Board Secretariat. The departments were then held accountable for meeting their targets on their announced plans and these were then publicly posted on their web sites. Cross cutting multi-department committees were set up to coordinate various aspects of the program with a Committee of Deputy Ministers, approving major investments for the programs submitted and tracking progress.
A factor of going online was that departments were encouraged to re-engineer their business processes when bringing programs online. It did not work to simply put old offline processes into an online effort. This equation led to the realization by officials that it was also important to focus on modernizing and integrating their "back offices" systems. This is an affirmation of the basic tenet that the advent of information and communication technologies (ICTS) has changed the way we operate as individuals and organizations, whether it be government, large corporations, academic institutions, NGOs, small business operations, entrepreneurs or individuals. The Canadian government has had a good grasp on the changing culture and acted accordingly in developing new and modern "best practices" to ensure success of their programs.
One of the most important factors in their success in the development of Government Online (GOL) was that new money was invested in four areas:
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Development of policy, technical standards (e.g. "Common Look and Feel"), legislation, and privacy requirements;
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Development of measurement tools and a communications/promotion program;
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Development of departmental staff to enable them to work in the new online services environments and interface with clients;
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Development of common technology infrastructure such as Digital certificates and common networks.
The Government of Canada avoided the failures in e-government implementation that occurred in many other countries through strong leadership from the top, working cooperatively across government through committees, setting the right priorities, determining public needs and public wants, and ensuring there were sufficient personnel and funds to get the job done. Failures were recognized early on and corrections made.
The next evolution from e-government is going to be "Service Transformation" which will involve not just program re-engineering but taking into account all the new technologies evolving into society but also the realities of the needs of people in the offline world. The government is also working towards the development of "Service Canada" sites where, says Michael Turner, Assistant Deputy Minister, Information Technology Services Branch of Public Works and Government Services Canada, "a broad range of citizen services can be obtained from knowledgeable front line service workers, supported by the cross channel systems." Business is also in the loop and a series of integrated federal/provincial Canada Business Centres in each province is now moving into more provision of integrated, cross channel services.
The Government Online Initiative (mandated by legislation) had been given a target date of 2005 to develop and implement many of the government initiatives. Most of these are achieved; an assessment of progress to date and a Report, both to go to Parliament, are to be made by the end of 2005. The Canadian government is quite aware that the process of e-government, no matter what name it is given, is an evolution in progress. Their evolution has been far-reaching. The 52% of the 76% of Canadians online, who go to the Canadian sites for services, and the multitude of people who receive better services because of the attention to e-government initiatives, are the beneficiaries.
Thomas Riley is available for consultations, preparation of reports, presenting workshops or delivering speeches at conferences and seminars on e-government, e-governance and e-democracy. Please contact me at the email address below for further details.
Thomas B. Riley
Executive Director and Chair
Commonwealth Centre for E-Governance
www.electronicgov.net
Visiting Professor, University of Glasgow
President, Riley Information Services Inc.
www.rileyis.com
