I have recently been introduced to Digital-Government.net and been given the opportunity to comment. It is good that they are looking at the challenging dynamic of change brought about by the application of ICTs to Government, the “Challenge of social and information science in the areas of governance and democracy” they are hunting the elephant in the room. There are real tensions brought about by political mandate, statutory function and a new citizen expectation arising from the freedom to publish and to be heard.

In the interview with Professor Fountain Erdem Erkul begins with the statement that E-Gov is highly effective for the provision of public services. G2C, G2B, G2G. – What about citizen to government, C2G? The use of the term citizen is important, implying a democratic engagement as opposed to a consumer relationship (purchaser of services), I am not sure that the e-commerce comparison is the right metaphor. For me, the true potential of ICT in government will only be realised once we exploit the potential for personalisation not just in terms of the individual but also the locality. At the moment the focus is on “Martini” Government, any time, any place, anywhere; but it is in meeting the needs of communities and individuals that we will see its true potential for social benefit.

There is no denying that E-government is highly effective for information-intensive services. How can data held by government be best used to facilitate better targeting and delivery of services? The data belongs to the citizen and regulation is the glass filter that facilitates the supply of raw data – How significant was Tim O’Reilly Apps for America experiment? How far is it the role of civil servants to decide what data to release? How far do they just apply the filters?

The shift in focus that Professor Fountain indicates, moving beyond a focus on services to a deeper meaning for e-government, is a crucial one, though I am unsure about the “novelties” of networked government, privacy and civil servants as knowledge information specialists. Traditional government is hierarchical, a series of vertical bureaucracies.  Political representatives with a mandate to administer empower civil servants to deliver services. These in turn are either delivered directly by public sector agencies or commissioned and delivered by the private sector, often on a not for profit basis. The initial promise of ICT was for efficiencies brought about by downsizing, outsourcing and, in theory, decentralizing. Often these efficiencies have not been met, at least not in a cashable form. In the same way information processing demands and the demands of management have led to a re-centralisation of the IT function and the rise of the call centre. Much of this has been due to the use of efficiency models and service re-design methodologies that rise from the commercial sector, for example, in the form of “Lean” thinking. In order to realise the potential for ICT there needs to be a series of cultural shifts to organisations that are matrixed, innovation driven from below and transformational; focussed on inbound, not outbound messages.

The power of Social media tools and e-government can increase the level and depth of public participation, and in turn we can see the use of groups to solve complex problems. The tension that needs to be understood is between the cultural behaviour of political organisations, the observations of Hindeman and Flichy that the Internet is not democratic and the capability and expectation of the politically engaged citizen. Where does the power really lie in a virtual bureaucracy? Social Media has raised an expectation that is currently not met; is this because of the politics of power or cultural incompatibility between the bureaucracy and the newly empowered citizen leading to institutional deafness. It is not the fear that our behaviour will be tracked particularly in the information technology domain, paranoia is a more general condition This is a frustration at not being heard.

Yes, active, informed citizens are at the core of democracy but are we simply shifting the focus to a new political “neterati”? What of the disengaged and excluded who are often the biggest users of government services.

The term “virtual state” implies “beyond national borders”. It makes more sense to talk about a virtual bureaucracy, which then opens the door to a distributed back office grounded in localism. When bureaucracies design a service for citizens in response to a statutory duty there should be three main influences: the state, in the form of the local bureaucracy; the delivery organisation, which may or may not be the state; and the service user. In order for the latter two bodies to make a valid contribution then they need to be informed, hence the importance of the information held by the state. In turn the state needs to be open to the potential innovations enabled by the understanding of the delivery organisation which is grounded on the knowledge gained in situ and the user journey which is informed by the service users. Interesting work has been put forward from the realms of marketing in the private domain on the power of emergent stories as a means to inform the design of products and that the design of services can also benefit from this approach. What this means is that through the use of ICTs the back office function of government can become both distributed instead of centralised and it can become grounded in the locality of the service users.