Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

E-government 187
external environment (including information about markets and customers) and internal
processes (including the movement of stock or the performance of employees);
● Permit greater flexibility in arranging who may access and exploit information
resources, and how information-dependent processes are undertaken;
● Permit new kinds of interactive communications within and between organizations
(including between organizations and their suppliers or customers).
They add that it is these kinds of facilities that are demanded by the new public
management (Bellamy and Taylor, 1998, p. 47).
The final stage is that of ‘transformation’ described as ‘using business process
re-engineering to totally reorganize across boundaries, to share data’ (Bellamy
and Taylor, 1998, pp. 51–3). This last stage could be regarded as the goal of
e-government, although Bellamy and Taylor do not use the term. Delivery services
can be organized by ‘life event’, or for particular groups, such as the elderly
or students, instead of organization by department or agency. The dream is
‘the simple but hugely potent claim that liberating the power of new technology
will drive down the costs of public services and, at the same time, help to
rebuild relationships between governments and their citizens’ (Bellamy and
Taylor, 1998, p. 64).
By the late 1990s, rapid changes in technology did start to affect the organization
of government. In the United States, the reinventing government movement
of the earlier 1990s did foresee that organizational changes would need
to be made, following its explicit aim of creating a government that would work
better and cost less. Technology was a way to do this. Osborne and Gaebler
argued that bureaucracies designed earlier in the century ‘simply do not function
well in the rapidly changing, information-rich, knowledge-intensive society
and economy of the 1990s’ (1992, p. 12). The Gore Report refers to the impact
on public organizations of what it called ‘electronic government’, one of the
earliest uses of that term (1993, p. 114):
In the future, the concept of electronic government can go beyond transferring money and
other benefits by issuing plastic, ‘smart’ benefit cards. With a computer chip in the card,
participants could receive public assistance benefits, enrol in training programs, receive
veterans services, or pay for day care. The card would contain information about participants’
financial positions and would separately track their benefit accounts – thus minimizing
fraud. Electronic government will be fairer, more secure, more responsive to the
customer, and more efficient than our present paper based systems.
At the time, however, the capability for carrying out such a vision was not
really in place. As The Economist argued in 2000, ‘reinventing government a
fashionable but premature idea a decade ago, is at last being made possible by
the Internet’ (24 June 2000).
In the UK in 1996, the government launched government.direct, a Green
Paper for the electronic delivery of services. This prospectus was ‘said by ministers
to herald a new phase of public service reform’ (Bellamy and Taylor,
1998, p. 10). A few years later, at the end of the 1990s, distributed computer