Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

190 Public Management and Administration
life events and citizen needs. For example, many of the compliance tasks
involved in foreign travel can be linked with each other on the same website.
Passports, visas, health warnings and vaccinations may be accessed together
when someone, or their agent, books travel. It is much easier, as noted earlier,
to renew vehicle or drivers’ licences or pay fines through links of this kind.
E-government allows public agencies to provide many services whenever its
clients require them and without having to attend an office in person. Renewing
of licences, changes of address or even completing forms for provision of welfare
can be done on-line. It is also cheaper. An on-line licence renewal in
Arizona costs $1.60 per transaction compared to $6.60 normally and, with the
processing carried out by IBM, under contract, both the state and the company
gain economic benefits (The Economist, 24 June 2000).
Providing services more conveniently reinforces the view of the citizen as
customer. For many services this is an appropriate perspective. There is potential
in the increasing use of tools such as Customer Resource Management
(CRM) software to enhance the service provided. Correlating information about
location, status, dependents, and other demands on government enhances the
ability to identify an individual’s current situation and anticipate future needs,
although there are obvious dangers if insufficient attention is paid to privacy and
security. Customer resource management techniques allow a closer relationship
with citizens – for good or ill – by making better use of information already
collected through techniques such as data warehousing and data mining.
Another, relatively unsung, part of G2C is the greater availability of information
on government services that can be accessed by citizens. Even if much
of this is essentially one-way, there is much more information available which
is more easily accessible than previously under the traditional model of administration.
In that model information was held centrally and released only grudgingly,
usually by printed reports that were difficult to get and did not
encompass much of the inner workings of government. It is now much more
common for information of all kinds to be released as it is completed, in downloadable
form for anyone to access.
Government-to-business links (G2B)
E-business in the sense of electronic exchanges involving commercial and feefor-service
transactions is a rapidly growing sector of the economy in a number
of countries. In manufacturing, large companies such as Ford and General
Motors use the Internet to source parts and have required their suppliers to
adapt their internal workings to comply. Public organizations, too, are placing
significant resources into delivery and procurement systems for their interactions
with business. If using the Internet is becoming more common in the private
sector for business-to-business interchange, it is hardly surprising that
government would wish to do the same. Increasingly, governments are requiring
suppliers to operate as e-businesses.