Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

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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
188 Public Management and Administration networks with a personal computer on the desk of every public servant, intranets and greater use of the Internet, meant that what was foreseen in the early 1990s had now become possible. Other countries have developed national strategies for e-government. Examples include the e-Europe Action Plan 2002 endorsed at the Feira European Council in June 2000; Portugal’s Society of Information 2000–2006 programme, which ‘encompasses elements of e-government development around social requirements and broader technology access issues’ (Accenture, 2001); the Netherlands’ Electronic Government Action Plan, and Australia’s Government Online strategy. In the United Kingdom there is a policy target of 2008 for all public services capable of being delivered electronically (Prins, 2001). E-government is still under development but there is an international trend towards its implementation, even if there is some way to go. As mentioned earlier the kinds of products and services government delivers are particularly suited to electronic delivery. They are also often tasks undertaken under sufferance, such as renewing a car licence, where speed of delivery is desired. Many consumers like shopping in person and this reduces the possible impact of Internet shopping: very few like standing in line at government offices (Holmes, 2001). E-government stages There are different ways of classifying e-government interactions. In the development of e-business, the earliest phases are those where information only is provided and later there are two-way transactions. There are also different kinds of interaction possible between government and other parties, notably with citizens, businesses and other government agencies. There is a generally agreed four-stage set of developments dependent on the level of interaction allowed, particularly by websites (see The Economist, 24 June 2000): ● Information The first stage, which is as far as most governments had progressed by 2002, involves departments and agencies using the World Wide Web to post information about themselves for the benefit of external users. Websites provide information in a passive way outlining the purposes of the public organization and how to contact it. This information does not include real provision of services. Websites are provided by departments rather than functions and have limited capacity for updates. This is the most common form of website. ● Interaction These sites become tools for two-way communication, allowing citizens to provide new information about themselves (i.e. change of address), gathered using instruments such as e-mail. It is no longer necessary to phone or write a letter to contact government. Content files present information about more issues, functions and services which can be downloaded; forms may be downloaded and completed offline and posted in the
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Public Management and Administratio
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Also by Owen E. Hughes AUSTRALIAN P
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© Owen E. Hughes 1994, 1998, 2003
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Preface Over the past 20 years the
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viii Preface the Colorado link such
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3 Public Management Introduction Th
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5 Public Enterprise Introduction Pu
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7 Strategic Management Introduction
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14 Conclusion: A New Paradigm for P
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284 References Borins, Sandford (19
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286 References Glor, Eleanor D. (20
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288 References Jordan, Grant (1997)
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290 References Monroe, Kristen Renw
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292 References Putt, Allen C. and S
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294 References Wilson, Graham K. (1
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296 Index bureaucracy 1-5, 9, 15-43
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298 Index information and communica
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300 Index ‘one best way’ thinki
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302 Index Ritter, G. 85, 86 role of
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Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

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