Today I attended my first global virtual conference on Gov2.0. There were more than 300 participants from around the world (all virtual) including Mexico, USA, Australia, Canada, Spain, Brazil, Israel, UK, India, Singapore, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Lebanon, Georgia, Romania and Kuwait. The conference had five great speakers:
David Eaves from Canada
David talked about open government data; of particular note is Vancouver where the city has passed regulations covering free sharing of open and accessible data, rapid implementation of open standards, and adoption of open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems.
The presentation contained many examples of innovation at the city, provincial and national level, including GCPedia, a collaborative work tool for federal employees. David also talked about the economic value of providing government-held data for free.
Joel Whittaker from the US Institute for Peace
This presentation had a particular focus on the use of Gov2.0 and mobile technology in post-conflict countries. Joel made the point that in a lot of developing countries the level of mobile phone access is significantly higher than internet availability and the use of mobile phones provide an infrastructure for government information and services with huge coverage of the population. It’s worth noting that according to the latest ITU report published at the end of February, there are now an estimated 4.6 billion mobile cellular subscriptions (750 million in China and 480 million in India). Mobile cellular penetration in developing countries is estimated at 57 per 100 inhabitants, doubling since 2005.
Yaron Gamburg from the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Yaron spoke of the importance of bottom-up and top-down as a implementation strategy for Gov2.0 and included a great video on the introduction of internet technology to senior officials.
Kate Lundy from Australia
Senator Kate Lundy has been a leading global figure in this area. She sponsored the Public Sphere consultation process and led by example using Gov2.0 tools to create Gov2.0 policy. Kate spoke about three major initiatives in Australia - the National Broadband Network, the Digital Education Revolution, and Gov2.0 - involving citizen centric services, collaboration with citizens to co-design government and facilitating innovation through open data and open source.
Dominic Campbell from London
Dominic summed up the current situation - the UK got here first, the US brought sexy back, and now we are all copying the big stuff and innovating the small stuff.
All the presenters gave examples and web sites showing the use of Gov2.0 and open data. The presentations will shortly be on the conference site, and the transcript of the chatroom during the three-hour conference, which includes a number of useful links, is also online. There is also a world index of open government data; if you have open government data in your jurisdiction, register it here.
As well as the outstanding material presented and the discussions that took place during the three hour conference, I was excited by this unique opportunity to link with people around the world. Colleagues looking at the same issues, facing the same challenges, and sharing stories about how to introduce Gov2.0 and open data into their own organisation.
I would encourage you to attend the next one. It costs nothing but your time.
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China’s e-government infrastructure, which is growing at a similarly brisk rate, is falling behind in its capacity to ensure that all Chinese enjoy the fruits of e-government.
In the recent United Nations E-Government Survey 2010, China dropped seven places from the last rankings in 2008, despite the central government having spent billions on e-government projects over the last two years. In an interview with FutureGov, Haiyan Qian, the UN’s Director, Division for Public Administration and Development Management, singled China out as a country that has struggled to provide inclusive services in its hurry to embrace e-government.
She said that although the Chinese government promotes lots of policies and services, it takes time for them to work their way through from central to local government level, and to those who are supposed to benefit from them.
China has, probably more so than any country in the world, an opportunity to use ICT to involve its most far flung citizens, from the farmer in Hunan Province to the cockle-picker in Hainan Province. Qian points out that China’s efforts to expand its e-government infrastructure are commendable, but more can be done to ensure that more people have access to the flurry of government services that have sprung up online - or are given new ways (such as mobile) to access and use them.
Yes, let’s not forget that China is probably the country in which making e-government work is more difficult than anywhere. But this should not be used as an excuse for slow development.
Wang Feng-Ming, Deputy Secretary-General of Municipal Government of the northeastern Chinese city of Hengshui, told me that e-government initiatives have the habit of creating “digital islands” because only some cities benefit from, and know how to make use of, opportunities created by e-government initiatives devised by the central government.
This does not only lead to economic and social inequalities in China’s urban landscape, but also its rural areas. Farmers and countryfolk are only just beginning to feel a flavour of a digital age that has passed most of them by in the decade since e-government began in China. ICT can warn farmers of bad weather, give them intelligence on market prices and keep them up to date with the latest farming technology.
In this regard, China would do well to examine how its great rival, India, is faring in its efforts to close the digital divide in the countryside. No, India didn’t do particularly well in the UN E-Government Survey either (dropping six places into 119th; China is ranked 72nd). But that was for its efforts between 2008 and December 2009. India’s ‘e-Panchayat’ project will see close to a billion US dollars spent on improving service delivery at a local level in 2010.
A similarly large amount will be pumped into e-governance projects in China in 2010. Here’s to hoping that China’s e-government adventures in the year of the Tiger bring benefits to all, not just the fortuitous few.
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ERP is in place, financial results are presented, images are integrated into the clinical system and order entries are computerised. What’s next for a hospital’s IT journey?
There are very good metrics to measure how advanced, or competent, a hospital is in leveraging IT, such as the HIMSS EMR Adoption Model in the clinical space. However, they are not perfect. Hospitals face a problem when projects with commonly-agreeable benefits are well on schedule… What to do next?
In a recent conversation, Dr David Bates, Director of General Medicine of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a leading researcher in Health IT, told me that his most proud recent achievement was the bar-coding of medication. This perplexed me. Given the advanced status BWH has in the health IT field (order entry was computerised in 1995 there), one would expect them to have done that long ago.
“For many years we were about to implement it. But when the funding was finally approved, it always gave way to competing priorities,” Dr Bates explained.
New healthcare IT modules do not come cheap, and the benefits are often unevenly spread. Voice recognition benefits doctors and radiologists more; nurses and pharmacists get more from bar-coding. When the benefits are spread out, sequencing the priorities becomes a jostle between different parties. Nurses and pharmacists do not, naturally, have the same bargaining power as doctors; even though bar-coding would bring more immediate benefits to the hospital and the computerisation of notes is much more difficult to do. That was why BWH’s bar-coding project had been repeatedly delayed, explains Dr Bates.
I argued a long time ago, in this column, that it is important to distinguish between what is ‘necessary’ and ‘desirable’. It is the same principle here. Competing priorities exist because people see things through the prism of their own professional goals.
IT should be actively anticipating the needs of different departments, comparing them, calculating the benefits which are normally spread out and work out a roadmap for the organisation. Of course, to do that would require hours of work: observation, consultation and - not least - persuasion.
In a recent chat, Dr Chong Yoke Sin, CEO of Integrated Health Information Systems in Singapore, pressed the importance of such hard work on the ground, with enterprise architecture and a roadmap in place. That’s how the organisation, formed after the merger of all public care providers’ IT departments, achieved so much in just two years.
While hospital managers should bestow more power to the CIO, or CMIO, to make this happen, they should also make sure the man or woman who is given that power is competent to do the job. It’s not uncommon that IT decision makers fail to serve as the integrator between business and IT.
“For a hospital to be successful in IT, you need to have a visionary,” the witty Dr Karanvir Singh, CIO of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in Delhi, told me last year. “Unfortunately, we didn’t have one for many years.” So the old systems became terribly outdated and had to be abandoned altogether.
Before we resolve competing priorities, however, let’s not forget that for many hospitals in the region, getting the basics in place is undoubtedly the most pressing priority.
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The key issues facing governments in Australia and New Zealand are very different from those of governments in the Asia region. That’s the conclusion I reach when I compare and contrast the Futuregov Forum Singapore and the Government CIO Forum in Brisbane that I spoke at last week. The theme of an event is, to some extent, created by the agenda, which in turn is a function of the speakers and sponsors. However, the themes are also evident in the discussions with delegates, and the general “feel” of the event.
The main area of focus in Australia and New Zealand is on reducing ICT expenditure and shared services (its first cousin). Secondary issues that flow from this are improved sustainability, through consolidation of data centres and server virtualisation, and better response to cyber-security threats, by consolidating technical expertise and focusing on a smaller number of perimeters.
However, the dominant theme is budget reduction for the CIO.
One speaker in Australia said: “I tell the business leaders in my agency that there will be more systems being used by more people, more of the time. But I’m still expected to operate for less.” Investments in IT that can drive down costs in other parts of the business - streamline business processes, move customer service transactions to the more convenient and lower cost online channel, and reduce office costs by encouraging remote work - do not appear to be on the radar in Australia and New Zealand.
In Asia, governments have committed to universal broadband and high-speed mobile networks, are placing government services on-line, driving uptake, and asking “what more can we do to deliver better value to our citizens?”
I see two radically different responses to the waves of change that are washing over government as we move into the 21st-century global information economy. In Australia and New Zealand governments are adopting the hedgehog response - focusing inward, curling up in a ball, and waiting for the waves to pass. In Asia, governments are grabbing the surfboard and looking for every opportunity to ride the waves.
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Ray Roxas-Chua, the Chairman of the Philippines’ Commission on Information and Communication Technology (CICT), has just spent a week and a half lobbying congressmen for a bill that would upgrade his agency into a fully fledged department with a mission – and real power - to make government more efficient, transparent and accountable.
But his words, and those of officials from the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP), fell on death ears as the Senate became bogged down with the saga of an election hopeful who is alleged to have “interfered” with a P6.22 billion (US$133 million) road extension project.
Now the CICT, which was only ever intended as a temporary platform upon which a bone fide department would be built, is in real danger of being scrapped altogether by the incoming government. None of the contenders to succeed Gloria Arroyo’s administration have made much noise (or any noise at all) about the transformative power of IT in their election pledges.
Another irony is that if it wasn’t for the CICT, the people who corruption hits the hardest, the disadvantaged, would be worse off now than they were when the Commission was formed in 2004.
Digital inclusion is not easy on an archipelago of 4000 inhabited islands. With limited funds, the CICT has set up community e-centers to provide affordable access to the internet, email, fax, voice over IP and distance learning, and it was no surprise to see the CICT’s iSchools project fight off stiff competition to win the Digital Inclusion award at the Government Technology Awards (now known as the FutureGov Awards) in Bali in October last year.
But now other projects, such as the five-year plan to create one million jobs within the ICT sector, and the development of the Philippine Cyberservices Corridor, a 600-mile strip housing 75,000 call centres and business process outsourcing companies, look vulnerable if the next administration does not recognise ICT is a strategic priority for government.
The Philippines fared poorly in the recent United Nations E-Government rankings, dropping 12 places on the last survey in 2008, while the Southeast Asian countries below it in the table (Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos) either improved or fared less badly. If the CICT is disbanded, it is probable that the Philippines, which like India harbours ambitions of becoming a world leader in IT outsourcing, will have slumped further by the next UN ranking in 2012.
The Philippines performed better than average for Asia in the UN table for online services, e-government development and human capital. But it lags the region on infrastructure and ‘e-participation’, the extent to which citizens have access to, and use, e-services. Internet penetration has grown rapidly over the past few years, but it is only expected to have reached 30 per cent by 2013, while broadband penetration will have grown to just five per cent.
The CICT’s work in partnering the private sector to open and improve the service quality of internet cafes (which are now pretty much everywhere, even outside of Metro Manila) needs to continue if the archipelago’s digital divide is to narrow and the CICT’s mission to “Empower the Filipino through ICT” be in any meaningful way fulfilled.
There is plenty of work for the CICT to do in government, too, which it can’t get done effectively while it remains a commission and not a fully fledged department with teeth. South Korea, Japan and Singapore have always done well in e-governments rankings, because IT in these countries is well supported from above. In the Philippines, the reverse is true. And this shows in government.
Most Filipino government officials use Gmail or Yahoo! email accounts in preference to their own systems, and the majority of systems and processes remain paper based. Efficiency, accountability and transparency will struggle to materialise unless automation is wholeheartedly embraced.
So much hangs on the general election in May. Not just who the winner is, and what their policies on ICT will be. But on the election itself, which – if all goes according to plan – will be the first automated poll in history. If the Precinct Count Optical Scan machines stand up to the scrutiny of political watchdogs, NGOs, IT analysts, voters and, lest we forget, politicians come election time in May, then ICT will have gone someway to prove itself to those who have failed to see (or rather chosen to ignore) the transformative power of ICT.
As the saying goes at Filipino elections, there are no losers, only winners and those who feel they have been cheated. Automation should give losing candidates less to complain about when the votes have been counted, and the winner can be satisfied in the knowledge that his or her victory has been fairly won.
Let’s hope that as the hysteria of victory subsides, the new administration sees ICT as a pathway to modernise a country that was, until not so long ago, a model for Asia’s government modernisers to follow.
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Gone are the days when government could sit behind fortified walls, with the only outgoing messages borne by official messengers and incoming information conveyed by appointed leaders. Today, a citizen can tweet the Prime Minister anytime of the day and an entrepreneur can download a city map and mix it with his own data. Web2.0 provides governments with the opportunity to break the ice for real engagement and the sharing of data with citizens and businesses.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government is a strong believer in being an open government. CIO Dr Sung Jung-hee told FutureGov that Seoul’s Gov 2.0 strategy is one of ‘open data, open spending, open expertise and peer review, open policy making and open problem-solving on an open platform’.
Speaking at the recent FutureGov Forum Singapore (26-27 January), Dr Sung impressed all with the extent to which her government is interacting with citizens. Seoul Oasis, a web site for the public to submit ideas to the local authorities, receives 25 new ideas a day. The Cyber Policy Forum has held more than 170 discussions, with the option for citizens to create new discussions of interest. And e-Poll, available both online and via mobile, lets citizens give instant feedback before the formulation of major policies.
The torrent of questions posed to Sung showed clear interest from other Asian governments represented to be more approachable. As I caught up with delegates over coffee – many from the Singapore public sector (including the Ministry of Home Affairs) – they spoke of plans to engage citizens and research has been underway on what works best in different contexts.
Melting the barrier between government and citizen not only eases the inflow of citizens’ feedback but opens the public sector data bank for all to access. Open government data is a hot topic now – Laurence Millar blogged about it and Robin Hicks reported on it. Naturally, it was brought up several times over the two days.
Adrian Goh, Assistant Director, iGovernment Planning & Service Delivery Division, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore gave the example of the collaboration between Land Transport Authority (LTA) and Google. “LTA provides traffic information and incidents, which are mashed up on Google Maps. Commuters and motorists in Singapore can access this information online or via mobile and better plan their trips in advance to prevent jams,” he said.
As governments unlock data to businesses and maybe citizens, other questions will emerge. Victor Lam, Assistant Government CIO of Hong Kong, asked Goh if Google pays for the traffic information provided by LTA. Questions around privacy and information security cropped up too.
I for one welcome the concept of a borderless government with open arms. It is 35 minutes past six and time to head home now. Google Maps tells me it is going to be a smooth ride back. Thank you LTA!
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More than thirty stimulating presentations from government officials and technology companies over two days at the FutureGov Forum Singapore left me exhilarated and exhausted. There were big ideas such as the Hong Kong i-government strategy and Singapore’s education master plan. There were visions of the future - Smart Cities, such as Seoul, Singapore and Taipei, building future government services on ubiquitous mobile and broadband infrastructure.
There were presentations on the critical issues in maintaining security and integrity, by building resilience against cyber-attacks. There were insights from European government officials, and a series of thought-provoking questions from conference attendees. And we were privileged to hear the perspective of Hon Samson Tan, Legislative Councillor, IT functional constituency, Hong Kong and Zaqi Mohamad, Member of Parliament and Chair of the Parliamentary Committee, Ministry of Information Communications and the Arts, Singapore on a panel discussing how politicians can drive public sector modernisation.
From this smorgasbord of presentations, four areas emerged that will be important for governments in 2010 and beyond – sustainability, citizen engagement, technology innovation and managing data. Sustainability of IT and sustainability through IT will become increasingly important, building smarter cities and collectively managing our scarce natural resources - land, energy, water, waste, air, and carbon. Citizen engagement (Government 2.0) will increase in importance as citizens expect more involvement and participation, and governments must understand the opportunities for using social media to better connect with citizens. We were reminded of the need to continuously rethink how we do our jobs, when technology such as text analytics, smart real-time sensors, and 3-D modelling become widespread.
The star of the show was government data, in all its forms, and with all its challenges: publishing data, managing data, data as a service, extracting meaning and intelligence from the data tsunami, data open by default, governments learning from the open source movement (release early, release often) and moving from retail to wholesale data providers. I previously wrote that 2009 was the year of open data, with Vivek Kundra, the United States government CIO, saying: “they gave us the Beatles, we gave them data.gov”; last week, the UK government responded, setting a new benchmark with the launch of data.gov.uk. At the Singapore Forum, one speaker proposed that in 2010 data.gov.xx should be the aim for every country in the region.
I’ll be speaking at the Government CIO Summit in Queensland, Australia this week, and will compare and contrast the themes and ideas from the two events in my next post.
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Rather a lot, it would appear. A review of China’s government web sites by the China Center for Information Industry Development (CCID) reached some damning conclusions earlier this month. The first is that China’s e-government efforts have failed to provide efficient public access. The second is that too many web sites fail to provide enough information that is of any use. Ouch.
This may come as a bit of a surprise. Ok, so public services in China are not considered to be world-class yet. But given that the GDP of a number of small countries has been spent on developing China’s e-government infrastructure over the past decade, Chinese citizens have a right to expect more of what their government provides for them online.
In the cover story of Public Sector Technology & Management (now FutureGov) in October 2004, we wondered whether the speed at which e-government services were being launched would prove to be a liability. Thousands of sites were being hurriedly created to keep up with the millions of citizens going online to transact with government. But was the US$5 billion being spent a year too much on a good thing?
Lots of good stuff was (and still is) happening, with virtual offices, online examinations and permit applications all key areas of focus, particularly at a local government level. But as Yang Feng Chun, Professor of e-Government at Peking University, pointed out in 2004: “Further development will largely depend on whether we can adopt the right measures and common standards to solve existing problems.”
Roughly US$100 billion was spent on fulfilling China’s web government strategy between 2001 and 2005, during which time the number of government web sites exceeded 10,000. But as Professor Yang observed, a lack of standards led to the creation of information islands and e-government development began to bottleneck.
As big a problem as islands of information that are inaccessible to related government agencies – and to the citizen - is information that is left unused altogether. The CCID review found that only 75 per cent of government web sites in China are used by citizens, and less than half of those interviewed have ever accessed information on government web sites.
This says one of two things. Either that Chinese citizens do not like interacting with government online. Or that the value of the information government is prepared to make open to the public is not useful, interesting or in some other way valuable.
“Despite the surging number of government websites, the depth of published information and scale of public services are far from enough,” says Wang Youkui, Assistant Director of the China Software Testing Center, of which the CCID is a part.
One piece of information that is often missing on government web sites is budget reports – only 10 per cent of government site publish them online. “Some governments are unwilling to do so [publish budget reports] because they fear that problems will be revealed in their work,” Wang suggests.
A willingness to make government data available to the public is a key factor in determining the 2010 United Nations E-Government rankings, and China slipped seven places in the recently released table. China now sits in 72nd. Meanwhile, countries such as Vietnam edge nearer to it in the table, and the likes of Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia and Singapore climb further above it.
With 328 million netizens to keep happy, China is under more pressure than any government in the world to deliver on rising expectations for service delivery. And while no one can doubt that service delivery has come a long way over the last half a decade in China, Professor Yang’s assertion made five years ago - that China’s e-government construction had reached a “critical point” and faced “problems and choices” - is just as true now as it was then.
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Going by FutureGov’s Survey of the Week this week, the answer to the question above is probably ‘yes’. At last count, well over half of you said that you still “pay attention to e-government rankings”.
Of course, where your government is in the table may have influenced how you voted. It is unlikely that many of our readers from Korea, which is sitting pretty at the top of the 2010 United Nations E-Government ranking, will have clicked ‘no’ (our content management system keeps the identity and location of voters anonymous).
Though Korea’s e-government exploits over the past two years shouldn’t be knocked, all e-government rankings, including the UN’s, have taken a hammering from critics in recent years. And arguably for good reason.
Rankings like these have been around since e-government entered the Oxford English dictionary a decade or so ago. Back then things like how many services were online, or how pretty a government web site was, mattered. E-government was the new frontier and many administrations were at a similar stage of development. Lining one system up next to another was useful, interesting and made sense for government stakeholders.
Now most governments have hundreds of services online (the government of Bahrain still pumps out weekly press releases to announce the launch of a new web-based service) and countless web sites, each with links to Twitter feeds and Facebook pages. The more e-government systems mature, the more they become tailored to a highly defined governance structure, and the less they resemble the misnomer that is a universal e-government model. Like for like comparisons become increasingly hard to make, and decreasingly useful - except as something politicians can shove under the noses of the opposition.
But, as one government official told me this week, perhaps e-government rankings make more sense in an economic downturn. Which is why the timing of the UN survey’s release makes sense too.
A choppy global economy has proved to be a leveler for many governments’ economies. And as flawed as e-government rankings may be, to have some indication of how effectively online service delivery, infrastructure and “e-participation” are proving to be relative to countries similar in size and governance structure to your own, is useful - as long as the tables are taken with a pinch of salt.
As is always the case with tables like these, they are only as good as the quality of their data. A weakness in the UN’s methodology is said to be the Infrastructure index. What the UN is trying to do is measure the ability of citizens to access e-government services and connect with governments. But the coarse measures of the number of mobile phones, PCs and telephone lines do not give much of an indication of this, say the survey’s detractors.
But say what you like about the UN’s e-government survey, the organisation has done something right from the start, or at least interesting. It has released the survey’s raw data early, before the survey’s official launch, expected at the end of January (2010).
The UN E-Government Development Knowledge Base not only allows governments (and citizens, if they are so inclined) to play with the data in a way that is useful to them. It is a practical example of what the UN takes very seriously in its methodology – making data publically available for others to use.
This information may not prove particularly useful to all governments, but for now it should be fun for Korean officials play with.
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December is the month that public servants, at the end of the year, publish the results of their work, and take some time off to spend with their families, knowing that the evidence of their achievements during the year is open for review by the public. Three governments – USA, UK and Australia - released major documents in December, and I thought I would use them as signposts for the trends that we can expect to see in 2010 and beyond.
On December 22, Australia published Engage – getting on with Government 2.0, the report from a TaskForce set up by the Prime Minister to make recommendations on improving the accessibility, transparency, innovation, and collaboration of government. The report contains an excellent statement of the benefits and challenges of using ICT, particularly social media/web 2.0 tools. The report makes strong recommendations for government action, proposing both policy and operational changes to secure the identified benefits. The Task Force places a high priority on the value of freeing up public sector information (PSI), listing how PSI can be managed as a national resource to deliver increased accountability, economic growth and social benefits). It is particularly encouraging that the Task Force practiced what it preached – with extensive use of the taskforce blog, and community participation during the development of the report. (Disclosure – I was a member of the international reference group).
Earlier in the month, on December 8th, the UK government published Putting the Frontline First: smarter government, which also contains a strong emphasis on the value of opening up government data. The report has a broader aim than the Australian task force, considering how to improve the quality of public services through the use of ICT, devolving more responsibility to the frontline for regional and local services, and streamlining central government. Of particular relevance to readers of FutureGov will be the sections on “Accelerate the move to digitalised public services” (placing the emphasis on increased usage of online services, and a new “Tell Us Once” service), “Radically open up data” (creating a single access point for valuable public datasets, making them free for reuse), and “Harness the power of comparative data“ (using data on frontline performance to drive better performance, by giving citizens and professionals the tools to act as catalysts for change).
Also on December 8, the US government issued the Open Government Directive, which establish a clear action plan for individual government agencies to implement the commitment made by President Obama in his Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, issued on his first day in office January 21, 2009. In a remarkable year, the Federal US government has demonstrated strong leadership in the use of Open Government to strengthen transparency, participation, and collaboration.
Over the coming weeks, I will write about out a number of common themes from these three landmark publications; here I discuss just one – Open Government.
All three governments recognise the value of opening up government data (covered in my final post as New Zealand’s Government CIO in April 2009). It is not an exaggeration to nominate Open Government Data as the most important idea of 2009; at the start of the year Open Data was an emerging concept, and each of these end-of-year publications shows how deeply the idea is now embedded in core government policy and operations. More links on this major shift in government policy thinking can be found in this article I wrote before joining FutureGov.
All three reports highlight the importance of engagement between government and citizens to strengthen trust in government, develop better policy, reduce operating costs and release resources for front-line service delivery.
Ensuring that government information is freely available is a foundation concept that has been enacted in legislation in a large number of countries, and a number of governments have also established independent agencies to monitor and oversee the operation of the legislation.
Government agencies are not able to respond to the demands for information – from individuals, the media, businesses and not-for-profit organisations. This is because government is currently operating as a “retailer” of information – using data that has been collected to prepare official reports; government needs to move to being a wholesaler of information, allowing the community to create the reports using government supplied data.
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Before I could even blink, I was here again, on the waterfront of Victoria Harbour, watching the cheerful crowds counting down the New Year and the ensuing fireworks across the beautiful skyline of Hong Kong.
It’s my second New Year in this busy city, after a very hectic year of 2009 – if you have ever sent me an email which needed a reply, you would know what I mean. Here I offer my apologies.
But things are looking great here. The Government Technology Forum Hong Kong 2009 has been a resounding success, attended by more than 170 government officials from Hong Kong, Macau and other cities in the Pearl River Delta. Experiences from many countries around the region, and from as far as Seattle were shared, ideas bounced. Everyone was happy.
Continuing the discussion, FutureGov Forum Hong Kong 2010 is going to take place on March 9 - 11 this year. And the level of participation is even more impressive. You can check the brochure for more information.
And for the first time, we have a Pan Pearl River Delta Panel which talks about greater cooperation between the different jurisdictions whose economies have been very tightly interwoven. Participants would include the Central Policy Unit of Hong Kong, Director of IT office of Guangzhou, Macau’s public sector modernisation department, Maoming’s IT office, and so on. I really look forward to an captivating exchange.
For me, the year ahead in Hong Kong will be more about a profound understanding of the territory’s administrative culture and structure, the issues and challenges, and how foreign experience can help. Civil servants in Hong Kong are a diligent lot: countless times during interviews I, as a journalist, became interviewee as the government official kept asking about what is going on elsewhere in the region, based on the knowledge and network FutureGov has built up over time.
It’s also been a dizzy year for me, and my colleague Wang Zhen, who also covers Greater China. But it’s been a fulfilling year for FutureGov in Hong Kong, Greater China, and beyond; everyone who has travelled with a Chinese domestic airline will know what I mean. Cementing the relationships we’ve created over the past few years, we launched a Chinese web site in early 2009, and our first FutureGov Forum is to be held on September 1-2 this year.
The support for our first-ever event is proving to be phenomenal. While many conference organisers have to work very hard to get the local government of a proposed venue on board, we are facing a different challenge while many reputed municipal governments are competing for the event to be staged in their cities.
I was also invited to a couple of private, closed-door roundtables by municipal IT directors, who shared not only their issues, but also their joy and sorrow at making different departments work together to serve citizens better. The experience was enriching, but also somewhat frustrating for me as a journalist – some topics were so sensitive that I had to promise that I would never write about them. I enjoyed the privilege and opportunity to understand something exclusive, but my professional instincts were tested to the limit.
To be honest, although I am a native of China, I was not entirely confident when we started our Chinese language web site. It is well known that China, through its long feudal history and the fact that it has never been fully colonised, has developed very unique administrative systems, with subtle challenges which often impede experiences of the more advanced countries from being applied here. Change management in China is different from that in Western Europe, let alone people management, the biggest headache for many CIOs.
A senior Chinese government official told me in early 2009 that it was basically ‘dreaming’ to think about importing an e-government model from a foreign country (in this case it was Singapore).
As unique as their challenges are, Chinese government officials are nonetheless looking for inspiration, which could be better summarised by, interestingly, a Malaysian e-health veteran. “When you show people what you have done, people will start to ask ‘why don’t I have this?’ and innovation starts follows in leaps and bounds.”
In fact, many Chinese government officials tell me that they are very interested in hearing from experiences from Taiwan. Why? Because of cultural similarities, many issues, though apparently different, actually share a lot in common with those across the Taiwan Strait.
“They have already tackled many problems which we are facing at the moment; and it would be very interesting to see how they did it,” I was told by a vice mayor from Northwest China.
We also thought Taiwan could offer more, in fact, through the surveys we’ve done, in a few countries across the region, Taiwan’s experience is lauded as much as that of South Korea.
That’s why we brought in the Taiwan workshop to our FutureGov summit in Bali. The experience sharing and discussion session was chaired by Professor Jan Chung-Yuan, Ministerial Member of Examination Yuan, and featured presentations from CIOs/IT directors representing eight different ministries.
How did that go, you might ask if you missed that. Well, according to the schedule, the session was supposed to end at 4:30pm, but we had to forcibly end it at 6:45 so that we would not miss our dinner. Need I say more?
In fact, a municipal CIO attending the conference told me later “the issue of certificate authority has been troubling me for quite a while, now I know what I should do”. He was referring to the inspiration gained from the presentation of Jeremy Shen, IT Director of Taiwan’s Ministry who shared, among other things, the Ministry’s experience in developing and managing digital certificates.
By the way, if you are from the public sector and would like to find out more about the Taiwan experience in a specific area, please don’t hesitate to drop me a note (
jianggan.li@alphabet-media.com) and I will try my best to bridge you and the agency/ministry concerned. Of course, other comments/critics/questions are always welcome as well.
Also, you can catch up with Taiwanese speakers at our Singapore, Hong Kong and China forums, as well as the Summit, this year. Details can be found on this web site: http://www.futuregov.net/events/
The new year looks certainly promising, while the road beyond promises to be even more eventful. Of course, this pleases us. Not only because this is our unshirkable responsibility (quoting a frequent Chinese saying). But also because we know that our work is appreciated by you, our dear public sector readers.
I wish all of you a happy, prosperous and successful new year!
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Data centres are energy guzzlers. My conversations with government CIOs about green IT never fail to include power consumption. It is a natural starting point when agencies look to improve their environmental standing.
While older and smaller data centres traditionally rely on grid electricity, newer consolidated custom-built public sector data centres are exploring greener power alternatives.
Take the Japanese government for example. It is working on a new energy saving model for data centres which ranks the use of natural energy – solar or wind power – as one of seven key factors. Hideaki Sugiura, IT Director, Commerce and Information Policy Bureau, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry told FutureGov: “One of the four indicators used to measure the efficiency of a data centre is the Green Energy Coefficient, which is based on the amount of solar or wind energy generated.”
Par Botes, CTO, Asia Pacific and Japan, EMC is another big believer in the potential of solar energy for powering data centres. “Governments should consider this greener option, especially for countries like Singapore where there is abundant sunshine throughout the year,” he told me.
In one of his meetings with the Singapore government, Botes suggested that every roof of every industrial building in the citystate should be lined with solar panels. I hope the garden city will live up to its name and take Par up on his suggestion.
Securing alternative cleaner energy for data centres is also on the agenda of universities, most evident in the United States. Syracuse University in New York, with more than 18,000 students, claimed to have one of the ‘greenest’ computer centres in operation. The 6000-square-foot data centre has an on-site electrical co-generation system that uses gas-fuelled microturbine engines to generate all electricity for the centre and cool the servers. Being entirely independent from the grid, it is expected to use 50 per cent less energy than a traditional data centre.
It is not known if the cost of generating electricity itself will pay back the initial US$12.4 million investment. “Going green sometimes adds to cost,” said Paul Gandel, former CIO of Syracuse University, who initiated the project.
So the obvious question was – why build it? “It is the right thing to do. When you look at how much energy is used for technology, it is clearly an important issue. We have the responsibility to think of how to deal with the rising energy consumption as technologists,” he added.
Gandel is right about the urgency of the issue. “Intense efforts to reduce carbon emissions are needed,” agreed Young-il Kwon, Director, Green IT Department, National Information Society Agency (NIA), South Korea. “We target to reduce 10 per cent of emission by 2012.”
Power consumption by data centres in South Korea has increased more than 20 per cent this year. If nothing is done, Korea forecasts that consumption will more than double by 2013 – from the current 89,718 megawatt hour (mwh) to 216,243 mwh. “One data centre consumes 20,000 kilowatt, which is equivalent to volume consumed by 10,000 households,” Kim Seang-Tae, President of the NIA told FutureGov.
The increasing demand for power has a negative impact of the environment. Carbon emissions by data centres are expected to contribute up to 45 per cent of domestic footprint by 2020, added Kim.
The other Asian governments are facing this same challenge of escalating power consumption. And it has pushed some countries to act. Besides South Korea, my conversations with governments from Malaysia to Japan suggest similar efforts are underway. To keep abreast of these efforts, look out for my upcoming coverage of green government in 2010!
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The medium sized hospital in my hometown, not far from the booming metropolis of Shanghai, recently became the centre of attention. A medical accident left a pregnant mother and the unborn child dead, causing conflict between the family of the deceased and the hospital.
Although this conflict was relatively peaceful, in the hospital director’s meeting room negotiations between both parties and lawyers representing each of them were fierce, while outside, though as usual there was a tense line between clan members of the deceased and riot police, it was calm as everyone was waiting for the result of negotiations.
It is a messy business, not helped by the fact that the pregnant mother is not from the area this hospital normally covers but from the countryside near another town more than fifty kilometres away. The reason why her husband chose to send her to this hospital was because he knew one of the medical staff members there personally, so could get a discount on the cost of the delivery.
Medical malpractice is not uncommon in China, although for many years few hospitals outside major cities took it seriously and made patient safety paramount priority. The reason is that such incidents, while inciting riots, did not really touch on the economic benefits of hospitals.
However, the hospital management was very nervous this time. Barely two weeks before, in a negligence case causing the death of a child, which was extensively reported in the media, the hospital had to pay RMB510,000 (US$7,500) to the parents. Not a lot, you might say. But bearing in mind that China is not a rich country on a per capita basis, and the amount cited above equals the net income of 25 years for a working resident of that city, in current and average terms. And patients’ lawyers now cite this figure when making their claims.
Of course, hospitals nowadays are insured for protection against wild claims and legal action, which at least helps offset liabilities to a certain extent. Nevertheless, the incident exposed a few issues, which are worth noting.
First is the insufficient coverage of medical insurance, which is highlighted by the fact that the person had to flee from his own county to seek care elsewhere. While the ‘one child policy’ is still in force, it is hard to understand why this should not be deemed as essential and covered by social security.
Second is the revenue model of hospitals. There was much excitement among the IT vendor community over the central government’s massive healthcare reform package. Well, as I pointed out a while ago, they made the mistake of taking things for granted.
The part of the reform that concerned established hospitals the most is not IT, but the government effort to strip drug revenue, lucrative to a few but essential for most, from their business.
Many in China are not used to being charged a hefty fee for healthcare services (rather than drugs), as the above case shows. They can now easily vote with their feet. It is less a problem in the cities where although competition between hospitals is fierce, there is a limit to what you can do.
Doctors have the right to prescribe medicine and injection which yield high margins. And many hospitals rely on such to pay for operations and staff salaries. Now, the government wants to reduce the revenue channels of public hospitals from three (namely service, drugs and government subsidy) into two.
Everyone involved would know that the government subsidy could hardly cover costs and establishing a sensible, transparent service fee scheme has never been easy.
If carried out correctly, this reform will prompt hospitals to put more attention on patient safety, as when you rely more on revenue from services, you’d better make sure that your services are up to scratch.
How this can be achieved still troubles many hospital directors, who often rose through the ranks from being doctors, rather than employed as professional managers. A few of those whom I spoke to lately revealed that many were seeking revenue models through many innovative means, such as spinning off the pharmacy business and inviting guest specialists from reputable hospitals in big cities.
Nevertheless, few viewed IT as a priority to address the challenge.
That’s because small hospitals whose (potential) IT procurement budget is not high and often neglected by established vendors, which deem the potential revenue insubstantial. Therefore many, when in need, turned to small local IT houses with neither expertise nor experience. The products they sell, while useful, often fail to demonstrate the greater benefits of e-health.
Adding oil to the flame, recent news reports claim that ‘investments in healthcare IT do not give hospitals ROI’ which a report from Harvard Medical School seemed to have revealed. However, looking at it carefully, we know that the data, which covered barely four years, didn’t reflect the cost of change and the fact that major IT investments often only deliver benefits long after their deployment.
It also didn’t take quality of care into consideration, only saying that quality becomes worse in many places. Well, isn’t that the same issue with change management? When you bring a new system that people are not familiar with, problems are certain to arise. Although how long this will last really depends on the prudence and strategic planning of the managers.
The issue is, you should really look at the centres of excellence, such as Brigham and Woman’s Hospital in Boston, and figure out how the heck they could be pull it off while many with the same level of commitment couldn’t. Simply dismissing IT is not going to help.
Making a sensible IT roadmap is even harder for small hospitals, which lack the resources and expertise to make IT a change agent. In that sense, more government help is badly needed, if not prioritised over other seemingly more pressing areas.
Back to the unfortunate hospital. The deal was brokered after three days and almost three nights of negotiations. The compensation is hefty, although nobody really benefited from the incident, except the guy who runs the fast food restaurant opposite the hospital.
Nevertheless, this latest incident would surely promote more attention to patient safety, which has long been the one of the primary issues the use of IT and electronic medical records has tried to address.
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When we think about knowledge workers, we tend to limit the range to those who are desk-bound and work via a computer. How about other employees of a public sector organisation, such as dutiful drivers, gardeners and janitors, who don’t necessarily have a desk to work with? Can they be meaningful knowledge workers as well?
These employees often constitute a substantial head count of a public sector organisation’s total headcount (e.g. 30 per cent in Porirua City Council, as in this week’s FutureGov news). Some more advanced information and communications systems would include them, making them easily accessible and available to support the business activities of the organisation and benefit from IT systems in terms of scheduling and emailing.
But ultimately, these people are not robots executing pre-defined set of actions; they have their competence and knowledge others wouldn’t simply have, which could be value-adding to the organisation. And obtaining this knowledge is often not expensive to achieve.
In Hospital Selayang, Malaysia’s first paperless hospital, ambulance drivers are included in the total health information system. What do they know apart from driving skills? You might ask. Well, route and traffic information – if you have ever been stuck in the traffic jam, you would know how valuable this information is.
Every time the driver comes back to the hospital from an assignment, he is required to log in to the system and reports the traffic information along the route. And over time, the hospital would get a much clearer idea of how to best dispatch its life-saving fleet of ambulances.
Of course, the movements of such vehicles can be automatically tracked through GPS or a similar system, which collects the information and mapped on a digital map. However, often without descriptions from drivers, you wouldn’t know what the real situations are and what are the other factors affecting the fleet’s efficiency rather than speeds and distances displayed on a digital map. We are all clearly aware of the perils of overlying on high tech systems and ignoring human knowledge.
Hong Kong’s government call centre actively employs business intelligence tools to pre-warn departments to trim tree or consolidate a slope, before complaints come in (in Hong Kong, trees are managed by 12 different departments and slopes seven). The methodology is that data are collected and analysed to work out when the citizens are likely to send in more complaints based on historical patterns, explains W F Yuk, Assistant Director of Hong Kong Government Efficiency Unit, which manages the call centre.
It is a very effective system; nevertheless such data would take months, if not years, to accumulate into a sensible set, because they are based on voluntary offering of information by citizens (in the form of complaints). This care about the society’s well-being is not always available, especially in some societies where there is a culture of people minding only their own affairs.
How about asking government drivers, postmen, geologists and other field staff who pass by a certain area to monitor the situation and input that into a pre-defined system. It can be done in the form of ticking a few options. Information can then be automatically aggregated and processed, prompting department who is specifically responsible to act before any complaint comes in, or any inconvenience caused to citizens. The only difficulty here is, probably, coordinating staff from different departments and training them to input data meaningfully.
For organisations to be green, who would notice when the lights and computers should all be switched off? Your office cleaners who come at the end of the day. They would be at the best position to tell people in which departments, or which areas of a large office tend to work late, having their lights and air-conditioning on. If we include this into their normal log report, the information can then be collected, aggregated, and included as a factor when you next decide how to re-allocate your office space.
Similarly, gardeners in a park can tell you where people tend to litter, security guards can tell you where resting benches and dog excrement collection bins can be best placed; ticketing officers of a stadium can tell you how people prefer to dissipate at the end of a game; and security guards of a senior high school will let you know whether most students prefer to dine in the canteen or outside the campus.
“The notion is, as long as you are part of an organisation, you are knowledge worker and you have the potential to make your organisation more competent,” says Dato’ Dr Jai Mohan, Vice President of Malaysia Health Informatics Association.
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Nine goldfish – eight gold and one black to be exact – moved into our office last week. We invested in the most technologically advanced aeration and water-treatment devices which promised to keep our new tenants happy and healthy. The last time I checked, we had one survivor. There was nothing wrong with the technology – the devices are still running – but it certainly was not the solution we thought it would be.
Technology, unfortunately, is often viewed as the silver bullet in education. This was the common challenge I heard when I engaged in three days of intense conversation with over a hundred teachers, education policy makers and researchers from across Asia Pacific at the 13th UNESCO-APEID Conference on ICT in Education in Hangzhou, China last month (November).
Educators agree that people – teachers, parents, students and the community – need to change if we want to see true transformation in teaching and learning. “ICT will not create a miracle. People will,” said Chen Xiaoya, Vice Minister of Education, China.
“It has been evident that simply dumping laptops into classrooms (or worse, centralised labs) does not do much, and can often be worse than nothing,” Benjamin Bederson, Associate Professor Computer Science, University of Maryland, USA, told me. “Teachers need to be trained. There needs to be appropriate content. We need to develop engaging activities that take real advantage of technological capabilities.”
While governments channel budgets into equipping and connecting schools, teacher development must clearly not be neglected. Developing a new generation of teachers is one of the Thailand Ministry of Education’s four strategic goals according to Minister of Education Jurin Laksanawisit. A portion of his US$100 million budget will therefore be invested in capacity building. How big the portion is though, is unclear.
Similarly, Ministries of Education in Vietnam and Cambodia spoke of efforts to train teachers. According to Dr Tran Thi Thai Ha, Senior Researcher, Vietnam National Institute for Education Sciences, the Vietnamese government has been conducting workshops to help pre- and in-service teachers understand how to integrate technology into pedagogy. “However, the government’s impact is limited,” she added., “Tthere are just too many teachers. We have put courses online for teachers that have not benefitted from the programme.”
So are teachers the problem and barrier to modernising education? Discussions revealed that perhaps policy makers and school leaders have sometimes been over enthusiastic in getting the latest technology into their country or school.
“It is easy to blame teachers and say they are the ones who are not ready,” Norrizan Razali, Senior Manager, Smart School Department, Multimedia Development Corporation, Malaysia commented. “But technology has often been pushed on teachers without consulting them. Technology changes all the time, and each time it changes, it does not mean that we need to overhaul the way teaching and learning is done.”
While teachers and students are more hardy than the fish in my office aquarium, it is still a delicate job to balance how quickly teachers can adapt pedagogy to keep pace with the speed of changing technology. Discussions like those I was part of in Hangzhou, bringing together policy makers, administrators and teachers, are critically needed.
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You may have heard the news on the grapevine by now. Well, it’s true. I am happy to confirm that I have taken on the role of Editor-at-Large at FutureGov.
Why, you may ask? Well, the role provides me with a unique opportunity to keep in touch with how technology is being used by governments in the region. My experience as the New Zealand Government CIO gives me an understanding of the business challenges faced by government organisations. I will use this as a foundation for observations and opinions that are of value to FutureGov readers.
Besides some fruitful brainstorming sessions with FutureGov’s content team, one of my earliest tasks as Ed-at-Large was to chair last Friday’s Government Cloud Forum in Singapore. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was no shortage of substance behind any of the initiatives presented by government agencies. So, for the benefit of those of you who couldn’t make it, what were the key take home messages?
Most of us are now pretty confident that cloud computing can deliver benefits at a whole of government level: rapid deployment and agility, green IT, lower costs, scalability for programmes with unknown or peak volumes such as the Youth Olympic Games or the Census, and reduction in barriers to cross agency working. It is therefore hardly surprising that government speakers from the US and Asia outlined how governments have created panel contracts to enable easy deployment by government agencies.
Probably the most comprehensive is the federal US site www.apps.gov, which provides shopping cart purchasing for US government agencies from a catalogue of over 3,000 applications. IDA Singapore also described a range of Software as a Service applications including Product Life Cycle, HR management, Accounting and Financials, Recruitment, Enterprise Feedback, and Customer Loyalty.
Of course, as prudent public servants with a careful eye on risk management, conference delegates were interested in the areas to look out for. The two major areas that were of most interest were transition risks and data issues - data security, confidentiality, lock-in, legislative and other regulatory requirements, control and liability. Governments that demonstrate leadership in responding to these challenges will be the future winners. “In the end the savings offered by utilities become too compelling to resist, even for the largest enterprises”
The quote is from The Big Switch, a book by Nicholas Carr, which compares Cloud Computing with the move from individual power generators to a national electricity grid, from 1890 to 1920. And, by the way, the answer to the title question in this blog is a resounding ‘No’. Cloud Computing is here to stay.
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West Lake, the most famous landmark in Hangzhou, Southeastern China, is a huge stretch of water 15 kilometres around the edges. While walking around it (I only got half way before my legs started to complain), I had plenty of time to think about a theme that is as old as the surrounding hills: the conflict between old and new. I couldn’t escape the feeling that Hangzhou’s steel and concrete modernity were at odds with its natural beauty and rich history.
I felt something similar at last month’s China E-government Awards, the first event of its kind in Hangzhou. The past ten years have seen the rapid development of China’s e-government infrastructure. Just as China has made great strides to build a world-class physical infrastructure, so the government has been at pains to provide world-class e-services for the 300 million Chinese with internet access. This has meant local governments, especially fast-developing ones like Hangzhou, have been mandated to upgrade online services that fulfill local needs. But while China wants to modernise service delivery quickly, it has been careful to ensure that local governments do not rush to upgrade services just because they have to, and neglect the reason for doing so - to better serve the citizen.
The next step is the transition from e-government to m-government as China looks to make use of the world’s largest mobile phone market (see our feature on how the handset is closing the digital divide in the December issue of FutureGov). While it was clear from the entries at the China E-government Awards that the internet is still very much the dominant channel for e-services, there are pockets of innovation in mobile delivery.
Of the two sorts of m-government services, those which takes traditional web services and repurposes them for the handset, and those which provides services designed specifically for the mobile – the Hong Kong government web site’s m-service and Hangzhou’s resident mailbox service show how China is doing both.
But while m-government is likely to play an ever bigger role in China, there is concern among Chinese government officials that the mighty mobile is seen as a substitute for web services.
“E-government infrastructure should not be built for its own sake, but for the sake of the citizen,” Liu Huijin, Deputy Secretary-General and Director of E-Government Affairs for Qingdao Municipal Government told me at the awards show.
In other words, the mobile should be seen as another way of closing the loop with the Chinese citizen, improving governance structures, and making the China government more agile - not rolling out new services just because they’re new, something China (like many of its neighbours in the region) has been guilty of in the past.
Real progress in China does not usually come in a hurry.
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The similarities between the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the civil service are not immediately obvious. Except, perhaps, that both are heavily peopled by men in dark suits.
It was only after sitting through a rendition of Mahler’s Symphony Number One (I don’t pretend to be an aficionado of classical music; this was my first taste of the stuff) that parallels began to emerge.
I wondered if heads of the civil service, the likes of Tan Sri Mohd Sidek Hassan, Malaysia’s Chief Secretary to the Government, led their people in the same way that the conductor, Alan Gilbert, led his. With complete, unquestioned authority.
A waft of the conductor’s hand in one direction meant a wave of sound came rushing in, bang on cue. Are instructions in your organisation followed with the same religious rigor? If so, is that always a good thing?
The most amazing part of the performance was played by the solo violinist. It was a breathless frenzy of sound. But what struck me was not so much the violinist’s mastery of his art. It was the conductor above him. For the first time, he had put down his baton. It was time to let his most prolific star shine.
I wondered how easy it is for the most talented civil servants to flourish and flaunt their skills. Does your organisation’s culture allow for talent to be recognised and rewarded (the violinist made my hands hurt through repeated bursts of clapping). Or does that old Japanese adage, the nail that sticks out gets hammered down, apply?
As perfect as the performance turned out to be, there was a tension at the back of my mind that never quite lifted. What if the man with the huge drum banged it at the wrong time? What if the woman with the horn blew too soon? What if the doddery old chap dropped his obo? The entire piece would be ruined, the symphony broken.
A mistake in an orchestra is toe-curlingly obvious. But do mistakes in the civil service reveal themselves so clearly? What measures are in place to ensure that they do? The FutureGov Research ‘Measuring up’ survey found that two-thirds of civil servants in Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore surveyed had experienced failed IT projects. Could the New York Philharmonic Orchestra get away with being so error-prone?
Of course, that’s not really a helpful comparison. Civil servants, even fine artists are human. (It was refreshing to see that the world’s best musicians take time to rearrange their trousers and scratch their noses). Laurence Millar, the former Government Chief Information Officer of New Zealand, recently told me that if you are not willing to make mistakes, it is difficult to learn and innovate. And without learning and innovation – the need to move with the times - it is difficult for a civil service to modernise. The big difference with government, says Millar, is that you need to manage the risk associated with change.
With this in mind, the civil service is probably more like a freeform jazz band than an orchestra. There are creative imperfections, yes. But as a whole, the thing just works. Most often through a noisy, experimental process of trial and error.
Even so, the Orchestra is a model to which civil services can aspire. Look closer and you’ll see that there is not just one leader, there are many. The conductor - like the head of the civil service - sets the agenda. His section heads - strings, woodwind, brass and percussion - are like government departments in that they must align themselves with that central vision.
And yes, to build a finely-tuned organisation that is as efficient and effective as possible, you need strong leaders. But you need leaders who can step aside and let the brightest talent do what they do best. If you don’t, watch your best people leave for a private sector that has started to find its feet again.
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During my study of economics at university (which, by the way, was not my major), a word which struck me the most was ‘externality’ – “an economic transaction is an impact on a party that is not directly involved in the transaction. In such a case, prices do not reflect the full costs or benefits in the production or consumption of a product or service.”
Recently, a government data centre manager in China told me that power and cooling is not a concern for him at all. Not only is this because the pressure of data is not apparent enough. But also, more importantly for him, because the electricity bill is not taken from his budget.
The finance bureau pays the electricity bill for the whole government compound where the government data centre is located. And for the data centre manager, his limited budget is spent on physical infrastructure maintenance and upgrading, new technology implementation as well as maintaining and updating the government web portal – or ‘other, more pressing issues’.
It is easy to say that greening is a straightforward thing to do. But any public sector data centre manager would tell you that they have more urgent priorities than you think they do.
Even though greening the data centre brings future electricity savings and a vague sense of well-being for the planet, these savings can only be described as positive externalities for the IT department, which are not sufficient to incentivise them to implement green measures.
Similarly, salaries of all the government employees working on the data centre are under the purview of the bureau of personnel, not under the IT department. So this cost was not considered when any change or upgrade is planned.
A university data centre manager whom I had spoken to earlier, interestingly, had a quite opposite concern. His university allows a few departments and colleges to set up servers as they wish – inside the data centre. And the IT department, as the sole occupant of the building where the data centre resides, unfortunately bears all the costs of electricity and maintenance.
For him, energy saving was an acute issue. So they implemented quite a few measures to make cooling more efficient. But for departments who put servers there, taking measures to save power only brings positive externality.
As Kelly Ng wrote in an earlier FutureGov blog post (“Can tomorrow look after itself?”), some things, seemingly less urgent, tend to slip down the list of priorities, let alone things which create great externalities.
But what is the real incentive for government to green its IT infrastructure? Cost savings or greater public or social responsibility? It depends who you ask.
One thing for sure is that these factors can’t be isolated and looked at alone. They have to be considered alongside government’s long term plans for development. South Korea and Hong Kong are doing great things in this field, while the Chinese government has made firm commitments.
The solution for IT is, undoubtedly, executive ownership and more directly, clear cost/benefit measures to minimise the externalities.
A simple thing to do, in the first case described above, is making data centre managers responsible for electricity usage. And for that university, the CIO needs to have the teeth to take over the right of deploying servers from individual departments.
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The original spark of inspiration which led to FutureGov arose from a conversation I had with a government official. He had bemoaned the lack of publicly available benchmarks for some of the administrative reforms his organisation was then undertaking - and so everything we’ve done over the years since has been an attempt to provide these benchmarks, and to stimulate conversation.
This week sees the official launch of two new features - FutureGov TV, and FutureGov Research - both designed to provide the region’s public sector officials with fresh insight into the process of administrative modernisation.
FutureGov TV sees the magazine’s editorial team fan out around the region, interviewing the members of the FutureGov community - letting you get up close and personal with the perspectives of real officials in leadership positions, as well as subject matter experts from some of the world’s leading technology companies.
FutureGov Research is actually not so new - we’ve been generating research reports charting the priorities of the region’s government, education and healthcare verticals since 2004. However we have recently created a separate research division within the company in order to expand the number and increase the breadth of the reports we create - and our new research section on this web site allows you to access all of these research reports for free (though please do let me know if you wish to reuse the material for your own internal purposes).
Both of these developments come at a point where we have tweaked the functionality of the online publication - allowing you to post your comments to any and all of the articles, as well as rate them - and even share them with your friends and contacts through some of the most popular social media platforms. As I’ve said on numerous occasions before - this community exists to foster information exchange. Please feel free to comment - to commend and criticise - and to be a part of the big conversation!
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