I find egovernment an exciting area to work in.
It offers benefits to citizens and businesses in reducing the time and cost of engaging with government
It offers benefits to taxpayers due to the cost savings achievable within the public sector and the ability to improve transparency in government.
It offers benefits to individuals and communities by providing new and effective ways to collaborate with community and advocacy groups, businesses, agencies from other jurisdictions, the community and individual citizens to deliver improved policy and service outcomes.
I find that many Australian public sector organisations are engaged in exciting experiments with digital web and mobile technologies to improve their engagement and service delivery. There are also many innovative individuals working in different areas to advocate the use of modern tools to improve the solutions to age-old issues.
However finding out about these initiatives and the lessons learnt in each case isn't easy.
There are limited forums for communication between public sector organisations and the means by which we share information is often limited by funding, time and bureaucratic overheads.
In the private sector competitors often keep secrets from each other as a may to build competitive advantage. In the public sector secrets are often necessary for customer privacy or state interest, however they can also reduce our ability to provide community benefit where they cross into restrictions on learning from mistakes or successes.
Lack of information sharing also results in duplication of work, very slow learning from mistakes and redundancy - which costs government and therefore taxpayers and service recipients time and money.
I'm working through approaches to improve communication across egovernment practitioners in Australia, drawing from New Zealand's excellent wikis, the online forums used in the UK and US and the European Union's fantastic community site.
Do others have any ideas they can suggest to me to help us share our information across all levels of Australian government in an appropriate way?
Hi Craig - The eGovernment Resource Centre (http://www.egov.vic.gov.au) is investigating starting up an online forum for egovernment practitioners to ask questions and share information. Another feature we are thinking of enabling is for members to add content - subject to editorial acceptance. These facilities would be available to all registered members. Might be some of the ways we could start sharing.
ReplyDeleteNew process or system is difficult adopt in the government organizations where only a very limited accountability and transparency exists. If the officers are not interested to gain productivity and increase efficiency though using ICT based system, it becomes quite impossible for any change agent to implement a system. In this research, the problems in rapid acceleration of demand for ICT enabled services was identified through questionnaire based survey and developed three interrelated models for formulating strategies in managing a sustainable change within a shortest period of time.
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Tanyaa
Internet Marketing
Hi Cheryl,
ReplyDeleteI'd welcome that!
Cheers,
Craig
Craig, do you know the epractice.eu platform launched by the Commission? it's a start.
ReplyDeleteBut it's a very difficult task. Knowledge management is done by people, not by organisations.
You might be interested in my recommendation to ePractice, http://egov20.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/the-future-of-epractice/ .
Entreprise2.0 tools, such as the intranet of Allen and Overy can be very useful in this. See the presentations by Headshift's Lee Bryant on Slideshare . Happy to continue discussing!