I’ve just finished moderating the first ever FutureGov Summit in China - and over the last three days have had the opportunity to discuss the informatisation of Chinese government, particularly at the municipal government level with officials throughout the country - from Inner Mongolia to Guangdong, from Shenyang to Ningbo.
China, as the world’s largest country, has a lot of local government - and I already knew that there is a wide variety of Chinese e-government models being developed. What I only discovered during the event, held in Dalian (a port city of 6 million people, an hour’s flight northeast from Beijing) is that much of the work being done at municipal service bureaux is as advanced in intent as anywhere else in the region.
Time and again, speakers from Taiwan, South Korea and Japan remarked on the general emphasis of municipal government in China on service delivery. Even a government delegate who had flown in from Bremen in Germany remarked that he was returning home with a “suitcase full of ideas” on improving citizen service workflows.
As I count down the days to my own move, from Hong Kong to our new office in Beijing, I now have the next few months mapped out - with a full itinerary of site visits to city administrations the length and breadth of China. It will certainly make for an interesting homecoming (I’ve lived overseas for almost ten years), and enable me to get reaquainted with developments in the country as I lead the team launching the Chinese edition of FutureGov magazine.
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I came into office rather snappily dressed today, as I had a lunch meeting planned with a bank manager - though happily for all concerned this was the World Bank’s Oleg Petrov, who was in town and wanted to catch up to swap notes on government transformation.
Based in Washington DC, Oleg coordinates knowledge sharing and the learning programme on ICT for development at the World Bank - and was bouncing between meetings, as he chaperoned a delegation from Moldova which is about to embark on a major (US$15 million) government transformation programme. Earlier this year John Suffolk, an old FutureGov friend, and still the GCIO of the United Kingdom, had flown into Moldova’s capital Chişinău (you get points if you can find that on a map) along with Andrea di Maio and an assortment of the great and the good of government ICT to try and pin down what e-transformation means. It’s certainly easier to say, than to do.
If e-transformation, or government transformation, means anything then it has to represent the shift from rolling out e-government services, to leveraging ICT infrastructure to empower civil servants to work smarter, enable change and accelerate the reform of governance; quality over quantity, if you like.
What it shouldn’t be seen as is e-government with a bit of lipstick slapped on. Already I sense that in civil servants’ enthusiasm for being seen to do something, there’s a temptation to do anything - provided it can be tagged as ‘government transformation’.
We’ve been here before, when seven years ago there’d be breathless press releases about whether a city state had 1500 or 1600 e-services. But that kind of progress only gets you to first base.
Earlier this year, over a nice cup of tea and biscuits in Delhi, the Department of IT’s R. Chandrashekhar made the same point, as he shared his perspective on government transformation: “E-governance was the first step. Putting the technology in place is relatively easy. Appreciating what you want to do with it, and getting an organisation the size of the civil service to move forwards in a timely manner, this is where challenges arise.”
Organisations like the World Bank, and FutureGov naturally, will play a big role in separating the government transformation hype, from the reality. Certainly watch this space - I will hopefully to be able to announce further collaboration with the World Bank in due course.
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“The risk to successful technology programmes is driven by competing and vacillating political agendas; and citizen perceptions and the public will”.
I came across this statement at a presentation sometime ago and felt that it encapsulated a truism about the way governments tended to roll out many information technology initiatives in the Asia Pacific. While we know that most economies in the region have information technology (IT) master plans that cover periods ranging from five to ten years, most elected governments must often face their electorate in general elections once every three, four or five years. This excludes the numerous by-elections and local elections that can take place in between these general elections and serve as a barometer of public sentiment about how well the government of the day is doing.
This creates a situation where IT programmes are often held ransom to the political demands of the day. IT master plans serve as a good roadmap for both public sector officials and the private sector and if well implemented will ensure that the original objectives of benefitting the citizen will be achieved. However, the impact of such political demands often causes a deviation in such plans to the point where objectives become unclear and very often end up benefiting only pockets of citizens.
The upcoming elections in Australia serve as a good illustration of this with the fate of several IT programmes being subjected to conflicting political agendas. One such program generally acknowledged by local commentators being the National Broadband Initiative to connect the entire country.
How then can an economy ensure that IT programmes that benefit citizens become immune to such competing and vacillating political agendas? In a recent survey of over 120 public sector officials conducted by FutureGov across the region, respondents highlighted that two of their key business priorities were to deliver cost savings and to demonstrate (evidence of) improved effectiveness. These priorities were being driven in part by increasing customer demands of government services and specific organisational objectives.
While the priorities themselves are not something we are unfamiliar with, they do highlight the fact that government organisations often have common ongoing challenges as well as specific organisational needs. The key then is to identify these challenges (e.g. greater operational efficiencies) and drivers (e.g. customer demands) and craft the programs to target these needs within a specific timeframe.
By addressing specific needs, such programmes will have a higher chance of success. And as they speak of the ‘desires’ of the citizen (who ultimately forms the electorate), it is likely that the second part of the statement “citizen perceptions and public will” will play a more influential role in reducing the risks associated with technology programmes and ultimately help ensure its success.
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It is unlikely that the kerfuffle over the BlackBerry over the past fortnight will do anything but increase the popularity of the devices that brought email to the palms of our hands.
Grievances aired by an army of governments, mostly in the Middle East but also India, China and Indonesia, that they cannot access encrypted content on BlackBerry’s Messenger, email and web browsing services will only provide assurance to the enterprises that use them. Not least some government departments, who were at first skeptical that the devices were not secure enough for them to use.
The Jakarta Regional Planning Board, which impressed delegates at the FutureGov Summit last year with a presentation on how the BlackBerry could be used as a mobile disaster management network, will have been quietly alarmed by the news that Indonesia’s Communications ministry spokesman Gatot Dewa Broto wanted to ban the things.
Broto later denied he wanted BlackBerry services blocked, but said he wanted Research in Motion, BlackBerry’s maker, to build a data centre in Indonesia to get around the problem. With Indonesian sales of the BlackBerry growing by 500 per cent last year, it would be tempting for RIM to do as asked.
However, the laws of branding would suggest that asking BlackBerry to relax its data security would be like asking Google to hand over the source code to its search engine, and the company which made US$4.4 billion in the first quarter of 2010 will have enjoyed some good PR for standing its ground.
RIM’s security policy is very clear: “The BlackBerry security architecture for enterprise customers is purposefully designed to exclude the capability for RIM or any third party to read encrypted information under any circumstances.”
The ease with which government officials use the device has rested on this promise, although talk of BlackBerry cutting deals with a select group of governments (most likely the recent victims of terrorism) to decrypt communications has muddied the waters.
Even so, news of a possible ban in some countries will probably not curtail the use of the BlackBerry in others, says Matt Poelmans of Citizenlink, of the Dutch Government’s Ministry of the Interior. If it did, it would be to take a step backwards for an increasingly mobile government workforce, he says.
“Mobile government is probably one of the most promising roads to Gov 2.0. Especially in countries where many people do not have a computer at home. Almost everyone can afford a mobile device these nowadays. A ban would also limit the further development of commercial services in the fields of banking or ticketing.”
Limits on the use of the BlackBerry would irk those at the highest levels of government. The Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maxime Verhagen, uses his Blackberry for daily tweets and dialogue with citizens. Recently he complained that his ministry wanted to limit his use for security reasons.
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I have just finished a very successful and enjoyable week in Australia. The FutureGov forum in Canberra was an opportunity to share views and insights into the key issues faced by federal and state and local government CIOs in Australia. There were more than 100 attendees from three levels of government, as well as IT vendors and international speakers from Europe, New Zealand, and the United States.
Gov 2.0, citizen engagement, open access to data, and consolidation of shared services are the four main areas that I heard during the conversations over the two days, and they are consistent across all levels of government.
The Australian Gov 2.0 TaskForce report, released in December 2009, continues to provide the strategic direction (in the social media world six months is approaching the half-life of any initiative), and in the week before the forum, the Australian government issued the Open Government Declaration.
There continue to be questions about how these fine words will result in actions by government agencies. Stephen Collins (Gov2 activist based in Canberra) gave his take on the event, and Nicholas Gruen followed up his presentation at the Forum with a discussion on public servants participation in Gov2.0. Here is a more cynical take on the current position in Australia.
As readers know, I am always looking for a common thread – the themes that allow us to make sense of the multiple challenges and opportunities. For this forum, I was left with a sense that it’s all about sharing – sharing infrastructure, sharing systems, and sharing experience; sharing data within and across agencies, sharing knowledge and people between teams, projects, agencies and different governments.
Later in the week I was delighted to have the opportunity, with Bill Shrier CTO from Seattle, to attend a lunch with 14 public officials from the Victoria State Government, together with Cisco and FutureGov colleagues. I love Melbourne as a city, and have always thought of the State of Victoria as a world leader in the application of ICT to the business of government and the government of business.
The balance between innovation and cost-reduction has been a key theme of our sector, and getting it right is an important factor for success – the balance needs to reflect the values and strategy of the government and the community. So I was not surprised that while Victoria has a strong infrastructure standardisation agenda, officials are also looking at geospatial, land, and information management for the next wave of innovation.
During the Forum, we were lucky to be able to tap into the experience of public servants from the USA, New Zealand, Netherlands, Austria, and the OECD. Governments can find it difficult to take systems and experience from one jurisdiction and apply them in another – but that is a very effective and powerful method of reducing cost and time to market for new systems, as well as evolving a common approach across boundaries. This applies whether it is different states or cities in the USA, states and territories in Australia, or countries in the Europe Union.
In the future, we will need to pay more attention to the re-use of systems from elsewhere, if we are to meet increasing stakeholder expectations – Ministers, citizens, employees, communities, businesses, other government agencies. Remember, it’s good to share.
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The following has happened to many health IT vendors: big in the US and/or Europe, sound product with an excellent track record, started their Asian operations a number of years ago with high hopes to conquer this emerging market – and recently found their key executives in the region leaving. I don’t have to name specific ones – readers from the industry will know very well who I am talking about.
In contrast those for whom health is not core business are aggressive and prospering. Again, I don’t have to give specific names.
There are many factors contributing to this seemingly coincidence, but the long strategy or often, the lack of it, of many health IT vendors’ headquarters is certainly a key reason for many good people to depart.
HIT in the US is booming, especially since Dr Blumenthal, the current National Coordinator for Health IT, has been bestowed a strong mandate from the White House and billions of investments are pouring into electronic exchange of records.
And the business model of some US based health IT companies are reaping the benefits of this boom – their business model contributes to this as well.
In Asia, rarely a conventional hospital is able to afford a large dedicated customisation/maintenance team for specific systems, and the high cost which goes with it.
Therefore sales executives of these companies in Asia are at a naturally disadvantageous position – the biggest deals they can secure look very pale when compared with those sold by their colleagues in richer geographies. The more dollars you bring in, the more say you have in the company – that’s how capitalism works.
Public companies are bound by ROI pressure from their shareholders – so you know what the consequence is. These listed companies have less leeway as compared to private companies when it comes to audacious decision making.
Nevertheless, not all privately-held companies are leveraging this advantage they have: the way private companies’ decision making power is centralised means that if the key decision maker doesn’t understand the market, so is the whole company – that happens to a few privately-held companies as well.
Of course there are risks here – when you develop a Chinese version of your existing HIS/CMS package there is much more to be done than converting the script. The question is that whether you are willing to take those risks and whether you can see the potential rewards beyond them.
Unfortunately a few encounters told me that many are not yet to understand there is a difference between Asia and their home turf. If you come to a tertiary general hospital in China and talk to people there about improving appointment booking and complying with HIPPA – you are one of these.
And the few big IT companies venturing into healthcare, though having a hard time to get into the market, are clearly more determined and have a better long term strategy. Guess one big factor here must be their understanding of Asia and appreciation of differences through dealings in other sectors/verticals in the region.
In contrast to many who believe health IT has taken off in Asia, my take is that it is on the runway and about to take off. As a vendor, it is prime time for health vendors to establish themselves, leveraging their core expertise and working to reap part of the huge market in the future. A tiny few of them are doing an excellent job here – it is no harm learning from these ones.
Good health informatics professionals are scarce in the region – those who can sell are even fewer. So when you make up your mind, move faster before you lost all your good people to your competitors.
For hospitals, the phenomenon adds one more complexity when they choose a partner to work with. Nobody wants to end up in a situation where you have spent millions on a solution then the provider pulls out of the market you are in altogether. So choose wisely – it has to be someone who is adept in the field with a sound track record, with whom you can have the bargaining power, and ultimately who is committed to the region and willing to make changes to suit your needs.
P.S. my colleague Raphael Phang at FutureGov Research is currently leading his team on a study about the market, leveraging the contacts and relationships we have in the field – hopefully this will be useful reference for those of you who are struggling to put your case through to your boss in the corporate headquarters.
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The introduction of new technology into government operations has always led to changes in the way public servants do their work, and changes in how citizens interact with agencies. Herman Hollerith invented the punched card device to improve the data gathering and analysis associated with the 1890 US Census. The US Census Bureau was also the first government agency to buy a computer - a UNIVAC mainframe in 1951. In many countries, the first mainframe computers were installed in government organisations, creating different types of jobs, and changing the way work was done in offices.
The last 20 years has seen dramatic change, and most government officials now use computers, e-mail, the internet and online systems for a large proportion of their working day. Over the last ten years, since the rise of e-government, the citizen has been using the internet to access information, undertake transactions and interact with the government. These changes have affected the way employees and citizens spend their days, but the changes often appear as accidental consequences of the introduction of technology.
In our work to improve citizen centric services, government efficiency, or economic performance, we often underestimate the most important area in the adoption of e-government. The way that people react to new technology is the single most important factor influencing the speed of uptake. We are becoming familiar with the rapid dispersion of new technology – this week Facebook expects to announce 500 million users in just six years, there are almost 10 million new mobile phone users in China each month, 3 million iPads were sold in 80 days etc. For online government services, however, we have yet to see anything like the same meteoric rise in usage that we are seeing in these consumer markets.
What can we learn from this? While no government service is ever going to be as compelling as a free Facebook account or a new consumer electronic device, there are lessons from technology innovation that we can apply within the government.
Firstly, the importance of design, and in particular, the ease of the initial customer activation and provisioning. There are now well recognised standard approaches that customers expect. Governments should study the way that these consumer services are provided in mass markets to see how they can be applied to online government services.
Secondly, the importance of communications and marketing. This is not an area that governments traditionally include in the development budget for online services. Yet, we should be more interested in the use of e-government services, rather than just making services available online. Government e-services will only be successful if they get widespread usage, and they will only be widespread if citizens are encouraged and incentivised to use new services and new channels.
Thirdly, the importance of building on others’ successes, and using platforms that are already in place. If you are trying to reach out across the digital divide, recognise that your target customers will have a mobile device long before they have access to an internet browser and develop a mobile delivery strategy.
Research by the European Commission found that 50% of the cost of major e-government projects expenditure over five years was on organisational change rather than technology development. In a mass market world, the percentages today should probably be higher than in 2006, when the research was done. Look at your most recent e-government project — what percentage of the budget was taken up by hardware and software? How much was left over for change and communications associated with implementation and uptake? If the budget for change and communications is less than 40% of the total, you should not be surprised if your project does not achieve the level of uptake that will make it successful.
Investing in the people side of technology-led change is the most important and often most neglected part of a successful e-government programme.
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The football world cup in South Africa has just completed its month long celebration that saw 32 teams battle it out for one nation to be crowned world champion. The tournament though has faced its fair share of controversies, especially for the refusal of the authorities not to exploit technologies to avoid just such controversial issues (of goals and fouls that should or should not have been given). These were ironically highlighted by the use of familiar technology available to the masses in the form of ‘instant’ television replays. Although these are not new issues, many are now saying that what has happened ‘proves’ that the organisers should have used similar technologies.
Hindsight is a convenient and powerful reason as it allows us to pass judgment without consequences, given that we already know the end result. It is pertinent then for us to consider both the use of technology in e-government initiatives, and the value of hindsight when things go wrong.
Very often, government organisations are faulted for not doing the ‘right’ thing when something goes wrong, especially when there are many options on how something could have been done better. The use of technology has thrown up its fair share of such accusations, from a simple breakdown of a government inquiry e-service to more serious breaches of security where citizen data is lost.
While I can understand why people make such accusations, I would caution that they take time to reflect on the situation and not let the frustration of the moment overcome them. Like the proverbial ‘counting to ten’ before acting to manage anger, taking time to understand the facts of a case will often allow one to not react in an unreasonable manner as this will only dissipate energies on all sides in dealing with an immediate problem rather than managing (and hopefully solving) the real situation.
Key to this approach then is the need for government organisations to be more responsive and open about the real reasons for any failings, however small. It is only when one is assured that things are being looked into and that an answer is forthcoming that one be more willing to ‘count to ten’! Towards this end, what is often termed ‘Official Speak’ should be used less and ‘citizen or customer centric service’ used more.
E-government initiatives often start off with good intentions and most of the time; they are implemented well enough to meet their objectives. However, it has to be remembered that such initiatives are still services that the government is providing citizens and that the use of technology - be it the internet, mobile devices or any other new technology - is really an enabler to improve that service.
As complaints go, they are often (thankfully) made only after an incident together with accusations of what or how things should not have been done (with hindsight). Given the experience that we have all had with e-government services over the years, this valuable experience can be used positively by providing suggestions for improvement, and this will represent a better and more productive use of energy.
As Dr Who the time traveller will attest to, having the ability to move back in time does not always equate to the ability to change things for the better as some things are beyond our control. We can however use the benefit of hindsight to improve in the future by being proactive in a positive manner!
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“Doctors will never ever use a PDA-like device for clinical purposes, especially in private hospitals,”
Melvin Choi, Hong Kong Adventist Hospital’s CIO, told me over a drink recently. He said this was based on his three decade experience working for both public and private caregivers.
Private hospitals in Hong Kong largely employ visiting doctors, who normally have tighter workings schedule than their resident counterparts. And naturally many of such input duties are pushed down to nurses.
Choi believes it makes more sense to make these systems more usable for nurses, and make nurses more receptive to such systems.
Not surprisingly, how to empower nurses with practical IT solutions has been on the agenda of many hospitals in the region. The job title “Chief Nursing Officer” is not uncommon nowadays in the more sophisticated economies. And more often you see these “CNOs” together with their CIOs– such as at our FutureHealth Forum ASEAN a couple of weeks ago.
I remember when I sat down with the nursing director of a big hospital group last year, she complained about the difficulty for her to train nurses whenever there is a new system in place – especially for sisters who are usually not tech-savvy.
But at the young ones necessarily better?
Recently I drove through the North-South Expressway at Malaysia’s west coast. What surprised me was that literally all the overhead bridges (and there are many of them) were covered with advertisements of nursing colleagues, which are equally abundant.
While globally there is a shortage of qualified nurses, in the developing world there is no shortage of young girls who want to follow the path of Florence Nightingale.
The next day I spent some time with two of the country’s most prominent professors of medicine at a famous cafeteria adjacent to a general hospital. I told them about my observation; and they expressed their concerns over the phenomenon.
“The issue is, in the rush to offer training to more aspiring young people, many schools have neglected the quality of such training,” one of them said. “We ended up having a lot of nurses who only speak Bahasa Malaysia but not English, let alone using IT.”
Not a problem – you might think – in a country where English is not the first language. Nevertheless, all the Western Medicine doctors are trained in English and so are the IT systems hospitals in the country use.
We tend to assume that young people are more IT savvy than their more senior counterparts; but it is just wishful thinking of people who live in rich societies. Many young girls from villages in poorer parts of Southeast Asia or Sri Lanka have not seen a computer before they are enrolled in one of the nursing colleagues. This might change soon (with all the digital inclusion programmes), but is the reality now.
And young nurses hospitals across the region are hiring are normally from such backgrounds.
Not every hospital trains nurses; not every nursing college offers placement in practical setting. While hospitals are increasingly IT heavy and nursing colleagues increasingly competitive, the latter has to do more such that their graduates would suit the needs of modern caregiving environments.
I recently also spoke to Tina Mullard, who is a lecturer of medical informatics at the nursing department of Unitec, a colleague in the New Zealand city of Auckland. The school is known for preparing its students with IT skills useful in their later practice. They have not only developed a comprehensive e-learning environment for their 400 nursing students, but also been training them the skills such as PDA input and bedside EMR access based on actually needs from hospitals. Regular review is also conducted to make sure the IT curriculum is up to date.
It is worth noting that most of Unitec’s trainee nurses are from Asia and indigenous Maori communities.
“Slowly hospitals are becoming IT-heavy; and there are lots of things nurses need to do using such tools,” says Mullard. “So being able to use IT and comfortable with it should be one integral part of nursing education, rather than an optional add-on.”
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Are we letting technology call the shots on how our next generation is taught? That was a major concern I felt among policy makers and educators at last month’s FutureCampus Forum. Are we being seduced by exciting new IT devices and software, making them the focus of teaching and learning?
It is easy to put a computer in a classroom and train a teacher to use the screen instead of the chalkboard or paper. “But we are not interested in teachers using IT for old pedagogy,” said Dr Norrizan Razali, Senior Manager, Smart School Department, Multimedia Development Cooperation, Malaysia. “Being trained in basic IT does not mean teachers know how to leverage technology to enhance students’ learning or to determine the best time to use it.”
Razali’s observation reminded me of a conversation I had with Dr Tran Thi Thai Ha, Senior Researcher, Vietnam National Institute for Education Sciences, last November at the 13th UNESCO-APEID Conference on ICT in Education in Hangzhou, China. She described the challenging situation in her country: “Technology is viewed as a silver bullet. Every lesson becomes ‘incomplete’ if you do not use Powerpoint or the internet. When the teacher holds a hammer, everything becomes a nail.” They struggle with getting educators to use technology simply as a tool for complementing pedagogy.
In order for real change to take place, new content must be developed. The creation process must intimately involve teachers, who not only know the subject matter, but how best students tend to learn.
In Hong Kong, the digital education material provided by the private sector did not fulfill the schools’ needs. “The Education Bureau plugged that gap by starting a repository for content. But it is not realistic for the government to continue to prepare all materials,” Alice Cheung, Principal Assistant Secretary (Education Infrastructure) of the Education Bureau noted. “It is crucial for schools to partner with commercial content providers. We want to move from being technology-led, to pedagogy-led. The teachers should tell technology and content providers what they need.”
Cheung told me that this is the true transformation she envisioned - the creation of new pedagogy.
I am aware that I have just written that putting a computer in the classroom and training your teachers is not the solution. Nevertheless, this is the first step. And this is exactly what the Philippines is doing – setting up IT infrastructure.
“At the moment, 80 per cent of schools have computer laboratories; and 60 per cent are connected to the internet,” shared Paul Soriano, Director Technology Services, Department of Education. He revealed that more than 37,000 primary schools will have internet access by 2013; and massive preparations are underway to boost IT literacy among teachers.
Whether developed or developing – Vietnam, The Philippines, Hong Kong, or Malaysia – the goal of an education ministry is still the same. They are tasked with the critical mission of preparing the next generation of workforce to keep the country competitive. Technology has made it a little more complex, but I believe that in the long run – after we have sorted out the nuts and bolts of how this ‘machine’ works – IT can open doors for new pedagogies to take flight.
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For civil servants in China, social media platforms are tools that should be handled with care. Say the wrong thing, and a trap door could open under you.
Just recently, I met with a group of Chinese civil servants for a chat about, among things, social media and the rise of micro-blogs (Twitter-like sites that allow users to express themselves in a few sentences).
Jiang Yichun, Deputy Division Chief of the Administrative Service Centre in Dalian, my home town in the northeast, told me that these channels are great for making friends, sharing pictures and having a bit of fun. But for “serious issues” such as public policy? Forget it.
Yichun points to the experience of Hu Jintao. China’s Premier launched his own mini-blog last year, only to close it down soon after.
In such an open environment, where anyone is free to say whatever they want, the opportunity for false rumours to be spread by China’s enemies, or the government to be misunderstood, misrepresented, or to lose face, was not deemed worth the risk.
Even so, there are some in government who are, as the saying goes in China, being “first to eat the crab” (as perversely alien as it may look, the rewards are worth wrestling the claws).
Just recently, local authorities in Yunnan and Guangdong launched micro-blogs to popular acclaim. Observers said the move was a sign of the government’s growing confidence in, and on, the social web.
The advantages of micro-blogs over traditional methods of communication - phone, fax, email, BBS (bulletin board system) and blogs – are compelling. They are even less difficult use, require little effort to keep up to date, and are better at communicating with citizens in a new world - the world of the soundbite.
But it is just as easy to fail in this medium as it is easy to use.
Micro-blogs require speed of action and diligence. If someone responds to your post, you’d better give a response back. And quickly. They are, by nature, interactive platforms for discussion and dialogue. They are not pellet guns for propaganda.
The micro-blog is a good way for China to get closer to her citizens. But these are tools that require a new approach to citizen engagement.
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At the time, it did not strike me as surprising. I was at Singapore’s annual government IT procurement briefing. Details on how US$800 million would be spent had just been announced, and I was scurrying to a room where the country’s next e-government masterplan was about to be unveiled. When I got there, the doors closed in front of me. Sorry, I was told. This is a private session. Invitation only.
Fair enough, I thought. The plan is still being worked out. It makes sense to keep things under wraps.
But now, as sketches of the outline of the five-year plan emerge, the fact that I wasn’t allowed into that room seems a little ironic. Why? Because Singapore’s next e-government masterplan will be, it was revealed yesterday (Monday 14th June), all about openness, collaboration and ‘co-creation’.
At a government event yesterday morning, the head of Singapore’s civil service, Peter Ho, said that the next masterplan will usher in a shift from a ‘Gov-to-You to a ‘Gov-with-You’ mindset.’ He said: “The ‘government knows best’ mindset is irrelevant in today’s world where citizens and businesses can easily access much of the information that governments used to monopolise and control in the past.”
Singapore’s public sector will be putting a lot of energy into tapping “the wisdom of crowds”. Ho cited examples of where services (such as business registration and traffic information) have been developed with the help of citizens and the private sector after government data had been made publicly available (or in a more useable format). Lots more of this is on the cards. The same goes for Gov 2.0. Policymaking will increasingly be shaped in social media, Ho added, “in spite of the uncertainties, unknowns and risks involved.”
This is all very positive, and echoes the intentions of others in the region. South Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia are making similar noises about open data and the social web, not to mention the other key items on Singapore’s e-government masterplan - cloud, shared services and business analytics.
The question is, how far down this path should government to go?
Peter Ho was careful to point out the pitfalls of opening up to greater public scrutiny. Civil servants, he said, need to develop the instinct to separate the noise from genuine feedback in social media, and avoid succumbing to pressures from a vocal minority into doing what isn’t “right for the country”.
These are real reasons to be cautious. And while the potential for finding solutions to problems at little or no cost will inevitably push government out of its comfort zone, it is worth wondering how ‘co-creation’ will really change governments in the coming years.
In 2016, when Singapore is deliberating over its next e-government masterplan, will non-government people be in the room?
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While India’s Unique ID Project, the most ambitious of its kind in history, pushes on despite opposition from civil liberties groups, its erstwhile political tutor, the United Kingdom, has ditched plans to introduce ID cards altogether.
Why? Not only because, according to British Home Secretary Theresa May, the government will save more than US$1 billion over the next decade by canceling the cards. But because in the UK the cards are viewed as an invasion of privacy.
In China, where views on citizen ID cards are very different, there are serious concerns among citizens and government about privacy as the authorities prepare to launch a new version of the card which will contain information on an individual’s health status.
Privacy and security have become very real concerns for pretty much anyone who uses a computer.
The Facebook community, which is now 400 million-strong, was shaken by the news that user information was being shared with other web sites. More recently, Googlers have taken issue with the search giant’s new Street View service, which uses camera-equipped fleets of cars to take panoramic pictures for its online Atlas. And only this week, users of Adobe software received a security advisory that warned of a vulnerability in its Flash Player and Reader products that could let attackers take control of their computers.
It is finally sinking in that privacy and security are very real issues for internet users, not least those who use government services online. But what isn’t always clear is the distinction between security and privacy.
Security typically concerns data confidentiality, integrity and its availability to the right people. Privacy, on the other hand, involves the protection of personal identifiable information. In other words there may be a breach in data security without an attendant impact on privacy - as long as no personally identifiable information is compromised.
The two issues are often, quite understandably, confused. Most of us have a social network account which we use to share any number of facts about ourselves, from photographs to marital status to religion. But we tend to be more careful about revealing what we deem as sensitive information that matters to us, such as our credit card number.
The impact of having the credit card number revealed would be of more value to criminals if they were able to get a hold of this information. even though our privacy is still protected (no personally identifiable information has been revealed).
The key question then to ask is: what matters more to us personally?
In every debate on security versus privacy, we often uphold the importance of both data security and privacy when we really are more concerned about data security. While this situation is not new (how many of you have merrily filled in a prize draw form that requests for personal information, which has subsequently made its way to a marketing agency), the proliferation of online internet based applications has brought this situation into sharper focus.
The adoption by governments of web 2.0 tools only increases the concerns of citizens as we move from the traditionally siloed e-government model of service delivery towards the Gov 2.0 model where government services are delivered in a consolidated, seamless and ubiquitous model over various devices, from personal computers to mobile devices.
It is therefore important that policymakers are able to be discern within their own cultural and socio-economic context what is most important, and view privacy and security through their own lenses.
If you’re interested in finding out more, look out for the FutureGov Research study ‘Data Security and Privacy – Winning citizen’s trust for government ICT initiatives’ coming soon…
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“I had never heard a government official in any country talk about KPIs before,” a typically energised Steve Ballmer said at an event in Singapore last week.
The Microsoft CEO was making a playful reference to a meeting he had with the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak the day before. The two men had discussed, among other things, Malaysia’s Government Transformation Programme, which will see key performance indicators introduced to more than 2000 projects designed to shake up the civil service.
As part of the GTP, civil servant pay will be more closely tied to performance. Several statutory boards in Malaysia already give out bonuses based on KPIs, and the plan is to roll out the system across government.
The idea that civil servants should be paid according to how good (or bad) they are at their jobs may seem a complete no brainer. Not least to someone with a brain the size of Steve Ballmer’s. Public servants are paid to serve the public - a role of unshirkable responsibility. So why not remunerate them according to how well they perform?
In the latest issue of FutureGov (and the lead story on futuregov.net this week), four out of four officials at the very top of their respective civil services said they support pay by performance, even if such a salary structure is not in place currently.
In India, the idea has been in the pipeline for over three decades, but even though the government has approved performance related pay in principle, no one can agree on what is meant by ‘government performance’. This is why Dr Prajapti Trivedi was plucked from his role as Senior Economist at the World Bank and installed as India’s Chief Performance Officer early last year.
“No entity can improve performance without incentive,” he says. The performance of every Indian government department is now rated on a scale of 1-100, but finding the right formula that links departmental performance to incentive payments is still work in progress.
Connecting pay to performance is not easy. Nor is it a precise science.
In Singapore, civil servant bonuses are linked to the performance of the economy. But many Singaporeans grumble that this system works mostly in favour of the most senior officials, and is unreliable because whether or not the economy grows or shrinks is determined by other factors besides the role of government.
In India, the economy is experiencing a period of sustained, long-term economic growth, and to pay all of India’s eight million civil servants in line with this growth would place a huge strain on government coffers - the country already spends around 3.5 per cent of its GDP on civil service salaries.
In China, as long as you pass the civil service exam and do your job well enough, your job is safe, and a decent wage at the end of the month is guaranteed. Salary is determined by rank, not by performance. And it is no surprise to hear Wang Jun of Yichang Municipal Government suggest that the system is in need of an overhaul.
At the time of going to press, 100 per cent of those who clicked on our survey of the week said yes, civil servants should be paid by performance. Who contributes more, should be paid more, it seems. This is a formula that motivates, attracts and retains talent. Which should, in theory, translate into a higher performing government.
The biggest barrier to this happening is – unsurprisingly, perhaps – the civil service itself. As Tan Sri Ismail Adam, Director General of Malaysia’s Public Service, points out, getting staff at all levels of government – state, local and federal - to accept that their performance will be closely scrutinised will require, in his words, “further fine-tuning” as to how pay policies are implemented.
More performance measures can only be a good thing for the public sector. Officers will be encouraged to act like corporate managers, with greater operational freedom while being held to account for results.
But before performance-related pay becomes a reality, sensible, workable and reliable metrics must be put in place. And more importantly, civil servants (of which there are 74,000 in Singapore, one million in Malaysia, eight million in India and ten million in China) need convincing that it is an inevitable part of progress that will work in their favour - if, that is, they are good at their job.
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My command of Arabic is very limited. I can manage hello (al-salaam alaykum) and thank you (shukran), and although I look with wonder at the beautiful Arabic script, it is a closed book for me to understand. I met recently with a senior government official in Saudi Arabia to discuss the future e-government strategy for the Kingdom, and the meeting was conducted in Arabic. There were some familiar words — broadband, ATM, laptop, BlackBerry, Photoshop, username and password – but I had little understanding of the points being made, and had to rely on reading the notes taken by one of my colleagues in English, and a debrief afterwards.
During the meeting, I found myself thinking about the importance of interoperability to achieve effective exchange of information. When there is no common language between two parties that wish to communicate, transfer of information is only possible through a translator. Inevitably, translation introduces delay and loses some of the subtleties present in the original communication.
While in Riyadh, I have made extensive use of online translation engines to get a high-level understanding of the contents of web sites and documents. However, these tools provide only limited understanding, and further development of them will be essential, as the internet becomes less dominated by English.
Four new country level domains - امارات. السعودية. рф and مصر launched this month, following agreement by ICANN last year for non-latin URLs. Chinese and Thai are expected to follow shortly. This is an important step in developing the internet into a single global information source, but we will need improvements in translation technology to get active communication of this information.
Interoperability is also crucial for the exchange of information and data between systems and between machines. As open data initiatives continue to be adopted by governments around the world, the importance of data standards increases dramatically. In the past, data standards were adopted for the transfer of data between specific systems — for example, the EDIFACT standards for interchange of product information to support trading and shipping of goods between countries. Increasingly, data is being published without knowing where it will be used, and so it is important that standards are in place to enable the recipient of the data to be able to understand it, rather than struggling with a foreign language.
XML is the most successful instance of this idea, and the xBRL standard is a good example of using this approach for the exchanging business information. There is a tension between dedicated standards, that provide more technical efficiency between participating parties, and open, XML-based standards which provide universal interoperability with a higher performance overhead. The outcome of these different approaches will have a major effect on the future of data interoperability.
An even bolder initiative is the Semantic Web, sometimes referred to as Web 3.0, which is based on the use of RDF standards. It seeks to provide a method of describing the meaning of data, so that the data can be processed by machines without further intervention. The complexity involved in this has been a barrier to uptake, and there is a 50/50 split between experts on whether the Semantic Web will be successful.
If we are to truly capitalise on the potential of global information exchange across countries, across languages, across cultures, and between government and citizens, then language translation and interoperability are essential building blocks. I hope the visionaries that are leading the way in these technologies are technically and commercially successful — the potential benefits are extraordinary.
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You may double take when you read this headline. Or not even raise an eyebrow. It depends where you are in the world, and what the prevailing sentiment of the day happens to be.
The financial crisis of yester-year seems so long ago for many of us, particularly in Asia. Billion dollar losses and the multi-billion dollar stimulus measures that followed have meant that a lot of us are de-sensitised to talk of such enormous sums of money. The latest is the 110 billion euro bailout of Greece and the EU discussions of a 750 billion euro emergency fund, which is having an impact on financial markets around the world.
So what has this got to do with ICT? Plenty, if you were speak to industry insiders. While many see technology playing a key role in helping economic recovery, in industries ranging from traditional banking and manufacturing sectors to the leisure and education sectors, we must remember that ICT is itself a large industrial sector that both enables and contributes to economic development. In fact, the latest rankings of companies from one well-known financial magazine has ICT companies making up 12 per cent of the top 50 companies both in the US and globally.
Many governments have placed their bets, so to speak, on transforming their local, regional and national economies to take advantage of the strength of this sector by offering ICT services in an attempt to spur economic growth. This has been a tried and tested route for many economies in the Asia Pacific, either as a low cost manufacturing base, or in moving up the value curve towards offering ICT services.
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Let’s face it. Although there are thousands of Indian businessmen living in Guangzhou and a century old Chinatown in Kolkata, China and India have not communicated much in the area of government transformation.
Both countries are developing rapidly, and face similar challenges. They are large, diverse countries with disparate levels of development across different regions. On the surface of it, people often believe the difference in governance structures is the root cause of differences in the area of development and conclude that the two countries are too different to talk on equal terms.
Over the past two months, I spent 20 working days in Mainland China and 13 in India, speaking to stakeholders in government and healthcare transformation. At the “Capital Goes Digital – National Seminar on Digital Mode of e-Governance” in Delhi, after I had made a presentation comparing the different approaches of the two countries, quite a number of questions were raised – people are eager to know what is going on and why on the other side of the Himalayas.
Similarly, in a private gathering of 30 IT directors from different municipal governments which took place in Beijing a few days ago, officials were eager to get more information from me, on how India was really getting along with e-governance and how that differs from their endeavours in China.
India’s central planning, demonstrated under the National e-Governance Plan, has been sound and continuous. Everyone knows who is responsible for specific initiatives and programmes. But in China, for a number of reasons, the nation-wide government IT governance structure has been weak – a key challenge for local IT planners as they have to figure out lots of things themselves, and sharing with their peers has been difficult.
One key reason for China’s rapid development was widely recognised to be competition between different regions, especially at second tier city level. Within the legal framework, local governments offer plenty of flexibility for businesses to set up, in terms of taxes and regulatory requirements. While many forward-looking states in India are no less enterprising in delivering benefits for their jurisdictions, in many parts of the country vehicles still have to stop at the state borders to pay tax.
In China, many municipal government call centres have been set up to not only serve as citizen call centres, but also for businesses exchange. India has tested lots of innovative ways to provide services to rural areas at an affordable cost. Many cities in China have successfully implemented multi-purpose smart cards for their residents, while India’s Unique Identification project offers lots of new approaches to practical issues of ID management, which is a big challenge for authorities in China.
April this year marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of formal diplomatic relationships between the world’s two most populous countries. In this global race towards making government more transparent and service-oriented, the two giants are going head-to-head, and there is a great opportunity for both countries to share more in solving practical problems.
This is why, on request from public sector executives in both countries, FutureGov will be launching dedicated magazines to serve China and India during the second half of this year. One of the key focuses of these publications is to draw parallels between international experiences and local context. We hope that will become our humble contribution to developments in both countries.
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The numbers are impressive. Going by the citizen satisfaction rates that can be found on many local government web sites in China, China’s online services are keeping their customers satisfied.
At the Administrative Service Centre of Sichuan Province, the speed of processing a complaint or query has increased by 77 per cent over the past year, and the citizen satisfaction rate has reached a heady 99.96 per cent. In Yunnan Province, the citizen satisfaction rate is 93 per cent on similar scores, while in Liaoning Province the figure rises to 99.75 per cent.
The rhetoric is impressive too. Online news carriers have been full of stories about the Chinese government’s efforts to build network services to better engage with the public. But a few conversations with the people who use these services is enough to suggest that the service quality is not meeting expectations at a local level.
A friend of mine who lives in Zhenjiang, a city of three million which lies on the eastern coast of China, told me that the move by the local authorities to engage the public online is “only skin deep”. The limits imposed on self-expression on public web sites are at odds with the principles of open governance, she says - which is what the government has been in the news for.
My friend takes issue with the fact that there is a 100-character limit in the complaints column of her local government web site. And that accounts for the fact that more can be said in Chinese characters than in English words. Perhaps she is more verbose than most. But her point that a description of a bad experience with a tax official or a policeman cannot be adequately described in a small number of characters is probably true of those who have ever tried to say anything meaningful on Twitter, or the similar Chinese version, 51.com.
That would be ok, another friend told me, if the responses to his complaints were helpful. Six days after my friend from Ningbo City (which is just along the coast from Zhenjiang) asked about plans for road works near his area, the response he got was: “Have read”. This response may not be typical. But his complaint is not unusual among the conversations I’ve had about online services in China.
“A government web site is a tool with which to communicate with the citizen,” he tells me. “It’s not just something that is valuable just because it is new. If a lot of money is spent on new services, then we need to see pretty quickly how those new services benefit us.”
While it is true that a lot is being done to raise citizen satisfaction at a local level in China (workshops and training schemes on how to handle requests from the public and respond in a more open, collaborative way are increasingly common) local authorities need to do more for the hope to match the hype.
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During the FutureGov Forum India earlier this month, a government official, echoing the fears of several users new to cloud computing, mused: “How do I know what’s happening to my data in there? If I were to have saved a text document on my desktop twenty years ago, I would have felt safe in the knowledge that it would be inaccessible to anyone but me. With the advent of the internet, this was no longer as certain. But at least I had some assurance that I could protect my document against hackers. But now, if everything is in the cloud, I feel much more insecure!”
Most private enterprises and personal users are concerned by security issues concerning data protection and isolation in the cloud. It is doubly important for governments to ensure complete transparency in the security measures taken to protect sensitive data by the vendors implementing their virtualisation solutions.
In a lunch discussion with Raghu Raghuram, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Virtualization and Cloud Platforms at VMWare, the discussion touched on some of the most salient issues concerning integration of virtualisation and cloud computing, and the role of transparency (in terms of security and isolation guarantees) in the cloud model.
It is likely, it was mentioned, that the organisational structure of businesses and governments might change significantly in years to come as a direct result of migration to cloud computing. The behemoth infrastructure of the past will give way to streamlined, user-friendly applications. The finer points of implementation will be completely opaque to end users – as they should be. For example, end users will eventually no longer need to handle some of the tedious set-up and configuration specifics concerning their Content Resource Management system after it migrates to a cloud-based model.
As transparency and opacity within IT systems reposition themselves to take their rightful places - with transparency travelling away from infrastructure and towards security and opacity the other way -workflow and decision-making will be stripped down to their basic essentials: efficiency and agility. Organisations – especially the civil service – can then focus more on providing services to citizens rather than spend large amounts of time and effort in tinkering with the infrastructure that their services require.
The days of the stereotypically fat bureaucrat in a fat bureaucracy are on their way out. Civil servants these days are lean, mean, and not afraid to be accountable for public funds if it guarantees returns in efficiency and expedience. It seems that cloud computing has drifted in at just the right time.
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Last week, I visited the IT department of a hospital in Delhi. It is located in the lower ground level of the complex and you have to navigate through a maze of cables and pipelines to get into it.
But inside the Department Head’s office, it is another world. In addition to the things you would normally find on a CIO’s desk, there are around ten smart phones of different brands and models.
“Why do you need so many phones?” I asked.
“To test new technologies; it is always good to keep an eye on what is coming out for inspiration’s sake,” he responded. “You know, some of them might be useful for the hospital.”
His geeky habit is apparently paying off. Instead of buying dedicated machines, he uses Mac Pros with dual monitors to display images archived in the PACS. With comparable performance, if not better, the hospital has achieved total savings of Rs 24lakh (US$54,000).
“And the users are very happy about the look and feel of the machines,” he added. This reminds my of my life as an exchange student in Paris seven years ago, living with other international students in a cheap dormitory. Not able to afford a server for the network that we built ourselves, we chipped in money and simply bought an Xbox, re-formatted the system and used that instead. It was the cheapest option we could find at that time and the performance was very good.
Later that week, while visiting FutureGov’s old friend Bikash Bhattacharyya, the Hon’ble Mayor of Kolkata, I bumped into a group of Shenzhen-based mobile phone manufacturers who were looking to invest in India. The mobile phones they produce are not top-notch. But they managed to build them at very reasonable cost and able to customise them for their enterprise customers, also at a very competitive price.
They see big opportunities in developing countries across South Asia and Southeast Asia where big organisations are starting to use more mobile applications, but are not able to afford top-notch systems.
Intellectual property issues aside, what a select bunch of organisations are doing to take existing technologies and customising them according to the specific needs of their customers is, I have to say, truly innovative.
Are you inspired?
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