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New UK e-government strategy

Posted on Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 12:47 PM by Andrew Chadwick

The British government has finally published its new e-government strategy, Transformational Government. This is the first big statement of where things are heading since the formation of the new Cabinet Office E-Government Unit and the appointment of Ian Watmore as CIO. This is from the section on 'Vision':

"The specific opportunities lie in improving transactional services (eg tax and benefits), in helping front line public servants to be more effective (eg doctors, nurses, police and teachers), in supporting effective policy outcomes (eg in joined-up, multi-agency approaches to offender management and domestic violence), in reforming the corporate services and infrastructure which government uses behind the scenes, and in taking swifter advantage of the latest technologies developed for the wider market."

and these are seen as the principal problems with the current state of e-government:

"Many systems are structured around the "product" or the underlying legislation rather than the customer (sometimes because, at the time, each system was big or difficult enough to do by itself). Often the customer experience is not joined up, especially when it crosses organisational boundaries.
Many systems were designed as islands, with their own data, infrastructure and security and identity procedures. This means that it is difficult to work with other parts of government or the voluntary and community sector to leverage each other's capabilities and delivery channels. It also leads to customer frustration, duplication of effort (for instance on customer change of address) and failure to make timely interventions, as the Bichard Inquiry showed. Choice requires services to be able to talk to each other."

Increasing co-ordination across government has been a core aim of e-government since the late 1990s, but once again we find fragmentation mentioned as one of the problems. And in this case it actually provides a context and rationale for the new strategy. The assumption for Watmore seems to be that the new public management fragmented government, e-government has so far reinforced it, but this now needs to be overcome. It's an interesting issue, because Patrick Dunleavy and Helen Margetts have argued [pdf] that the era of new public management is 'over', and has been replaced by a new era of co-ordination and coherence through e-government technologies. Reading the new strategy document, this seems like a contested interpretation.

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