Ke!715 Guía de desarrollos para la administración digital

15 Abr Ke!715 Guía de desarrollos para la administración digital

Durante los pasados meses un grupo de expertos en e-government de Europa han discutido sobre los temas críticos con los que se enfrentará la administración digital en los próximos tiempos. Estas discusiones se enmarcan dentro del proyecto Prelude ( http://www.prelude-portal.org) en el que participa entre otros el consorcio Localret ( http://www.localret.es) de los ayuntamientos de Cataluña. Por el interés que representa sintetizamos aquí los 10 puntos críticos para los futuros desarrollos de estrategias de administración digital. Por primera vez editamos este texto en su lengua original que es el inglés…

(Tiempo estimado de lectura: 5 minutos)

1- The citizen at the center

Improve the analysis of user’s use

• It is critical to develop new tools and methodologies to identify and analyze what the citizen thinks is useful to him from whatever e-gov brings to him as services
• Besides, it is necessary to estimulate the citizens’ participation on the definition of e-government services
• Thus, services should be implemented taking into account both what the citizen says it is relevant to him (participation) as well as what the citizen thinks of whatever of offered to him (user analysis)

2- Usefulness of services

Concentrate of really useful services

• Get rid of traditional government-oriented taxonomies in favour of citizens’-based terminology and taxonomy (services explained in his own words)
• It is not important what we think the citizen needs, but the citizen says it is (through his actual use of the services): put used services first
• Invest on good usability and information architecture
• Move from “quantity” to “quality” indicators
• Think of providing differently the same services to different people, taking into acccount that this requires some sort of new “segmentations” of citizens

3- Local labs

Local government as the place to test, and then upward capillarity

• Piloting of tech-based solutions is critical before “going mainstream”
• It is necessary to overcome typical overlapping of administrations and territorialisation
• So start testing services as closer to citizens as possible, at the local and micro-local (for instance, in neighbourhoods) level
• Regional governments may help move horizontally solutions well tested at the local level (regions as networked services to local government)

4- Holistic approach

Evolve towards a holistic approach, and multichannel services

• Citizens might need bunches of solutions, bundled together, rather that spread-out pieces of solutions (holistic or horizontal approach)
• This means that there is a need for some sort of analysis of the typical situations of citizens that may be solved by “connecting” solutions all spread out across different departments and websites
• This clusterization of services may also bring some help in rethinking the compartimentalisation of the administration (services further apart “on real life” may become “the same service” when put together on a website)
• Multichannel helps to bring services closer to citizens where and when a problem appears (be it at home, in the road, at the airport, at work)

5- Measuring ROI

Measure return on investment

• There is a need to define new indicators of the efficiency (productivity and cost reduction), effectiveness (change management) and citizen’s satisfaction of e-gov
• This indicators should measure what really works, beyond mere quantitative measures (i.e. number of pages, number of uses)
• The is a need for some sort of exchange of best practices in this matter
• Some indicators could be draft from the experience in the private sector (e-commerce metrics)

6- Best practice exchange

Experiment new ways to exchange best practices

• e-gov might learn from the private sector how to replicate best practices (for instance, using the “business case” method)
• It is necessary to develop new ways to incentivate knowledge and experience exchanges
• It is necessary to detect best practices on technology implementation, in areas such as web services, licensing costs, identity management, e-signature, service interoperability, smart cards, etc
• There is a need for a list of areas more prone to the development of best practices, and someone has to pick them up across Europe and disseminate them through the most appropiate means

7-Innovation management

Training on process reenginering to employees

• e-gov is as much of change management as of actual delivery of government services
• Change management has a lot to do with human resources
• Public employees should be given good insights on how e-gov may mean real opportunities to them
• It is necessary to detect and highlight the best practices on e-gov in Europe, and to show them across seminars and other training activities targeted at public employees
• Some sort of political will to change is a must if innovation is to prosper

8-Public-private combination

The role of private companies

• Public organisations should orchestrate efficient relations with the private sector, where actual solutions are developed
• Outsourcing is probably a useful way to develop solutions in e-gov, but data must always be the exclusive domain of government
• Although e-gov responsibles may establish a coreography of citizen-related data among public and private organisations, so that the citizen is well served
• Consortia between e-gov and the private sector that work somewehere have to be detected and analyzed, in order to make others learn from the experience

9-e-gov as a network of services

Rethink government as a network of services, clusterizable

• Collaboration among public administrations is a must: there is a need to detect and analyze good experiences in this sense
• The principle of e-subsidiarity: do locally what can be done locally, and develop searching tools at the regional level that organise (makes searchable) the different local solutions (“google” of local services, available at regional level)
• Web services have to be developed that can be linked from anywhere, in particular from e-gov service aggregators

10-Growth policy

Mapping the evolution of e-gov

1. Some sort of order is desirable in the evolution of e-gov services: it is necessary to start with very useful services (manadatory services) and grow up from there
2. So it is necessary that someone realizes and disseminates the list of critical, primary, services of e-government (services that any e-gov site should take into account)
3. A planning of a growth strategy (“where do we go from here”) could be of actual use to small government units. To draft such a growth map the experience of members of e-gov consortia could be of critical relevance (“what have you done so far, and in which order”)

Alfons Cornella
Infonomia.com