Research Report On Value For Citizens

Research report on
Value for Citizens

A vision of public governance in 2020
Current eGovernment trends,

future drivers, and lessons from
earlier periods of technological change
Authors:
Jeremy Millard (Danish Technological Institute)
Edwin Horlings (Rathenau Institute)
Contributors:
Maarten Botterman and James Kahan (GNKS Consult)
Constantijn van Oranje-Nassau (RAND Europe)
Kristian Pedersen (Danish Technological Institute)
August 2008
ICT for Government

and Public Services
This report is part of a project carried out by GNKS Consult (Rotterdam, NL) in collaboration with the
Danish Technology Institute (Aarhus, DK), RAND Europe (Cambridge, UK), and Rathenau Institute (Den
Haag, NL). For more information send an email to info@3rdMGov.eu
The views and conclusions expressed in this report are those of the authors alone and do not
necessarily represent the views of the European Commission.
CONTENTS
Foreword ..................................................................................... 3
Executive summary........................................................................ 4
1 Introduction ...................................................................... 11
1.1 Background and purpose ...................................................................... 11
1.2 A note on definitions .............................................................................. 12
2 Identifying key current trends and future drivers ...................... 14

2.1 The step change from eServices to eGovernance ........................ 14
2.2 The evolving policy goals of eGovernment .................................... 16
2.3 Strategic transformations for eGovernance 2020 ....................... 17
3 Plural and partnership governance ......................................... 20

3.1 Integrated and joined-up governance............................................. 20
3.2 Centralisation versus de-centralisation .......................................... 22
3.3 Networked governance ......................................................................... 23
3.4 Open and porous governance ............................................................. 25
3.5 Business model and value chain innovation .................................. 28
3.6 ICT challenges of plural and partnership governance ............... 31
4 Performance governance ...................................................... 34

4.1 Leadership, skills and working practices ........................................ 34
4.2 Public sector innovation and transformation ................................ 36
4.3 Knowledge management and organisational learning .............. 37
4.4 Change management and capacity redeployment ...................... 38
4.5 Performance management and public value ................................. 40
4.6 ICT challenges of performance governance .................................. 45
5 Personalised service production ............................................. 47

5.1 Universal personalisation ..................................................................... 47
5.2 Self-directed services ............................................................................ 51
5.3 Personal relations ................................................................................... 57
5.4 Personalisation through intermediation ......................................... 58
5.5 Personalisation through inclusion..................................................... 59
5.6 ICT challenges of personalised service production..................... 60
6 Participative policy making ................................................... 65

6.1 Policy making initiated by government........................................... 65
6.2 Empowerment from the bottom ........................................................ 71
6.3 Empowering communities and localities ........................................ 73
6.4 Transparency and openness ................................................................ 77
6.5 Accountability, rights and responsibility ........................................ 78
6.6 ICT challenges of participative policy making .............................. 80
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7 Trust, privacy and protection ................................................. 83
7.1 Security, data protection and identity management.................. 83
7.2 Information assurance .......................................................................... 85
7.3 Resilient and robust infrastructures ................................................ 85
7.4 Privacy......................................................................................................... 86
7.5 Constituent needs, trust and risk ...................................................... 86
7.6 ICT challenges of trust, privacy and protection ........................... 88
8 Production of ICT and technology innovation ........................... 91

8.1 Current trends continuing .................................................................... 91
8.2 Key future developments ..................................................................... 95
8.3 Transformative and disruptive technologies ................................. 99
9 Public value governance ..................................................... 101

9.1 Public Value Management .................................................................. 101
9.2 Paradigm shifts in public value and governance ....................... 102
9.3 Changing definitions and drivers of eGovernance .................... 104
9.4 The plural society .................................................................................. 105
9.5 Citizenship ............................................................................................... 107
9.6 An eGovernance vision for the 21st Century ................................ 108
10 Historical case studies ....................................................... 113

10.1 The revolution in transport and communication: railways and
telegraph, 1840-1870 .......................................................................... 114
10.1.1 Technological change ............................................................... 114
10.1.2 Key characteristics of the development process ................... 114
10.1.3 Impacts on society at large...................................................... 115
10.1.4 Impacts on governance and government .............................. 116
10.1.5 Analogies to ICT ........................................................................ 117
10.2 Electrification, 1890-1940 ................................................................. 117
10.2.5 Analogies to ICT ........................................................................ 119
10.3 The rise of mass (broadcast) media, 1940-1970 ....................... 120
10.3.5 Analogies to ICT ........................................................................ 122
10.4 Cross-case analysis............................................................................... 123
10.5 Bottom-up versus top-down innovation ....................................... 124
11 References ...................................................................... 127
12 Annex 1: eGovernment experts interviewed ........................... 136
13 Annex 2: Main technology trends relevant to eGovernment ....... 137
2
Foreword
The European Commission has asked a team led by GNKS Consult to provide
the Commission and EU Member States with visionary insights for the future of public
e-service delivery. This Vision study will explicitly look at transformational
government beyond the 2010 time horizon of the current eGovernment Action Plan.
The 21st Century is heralding a decisive step-change in our expectations of
government and the public sector. In most other aspects of our lives, whether at
work, in our free-time, or as consumers, we are increasingly using sophisticated and
powerful ICT applications such as the Internet, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook,
LinkedIn, Second Life, Google, as well as many other empowering and collaborative
tools that change the way services can be delivered.
From governments, we demand highly efficient service delivery, top quality,
rapid response to our queries, and to have our highly personal wishes and needs
precisely catered for. But we are wary of giving governments our own personal data
or too much power. Whereas achieving some of these expectations was never an
option in the past, ICT may enable them in the future. In addition, we become more
aware that the electronic infrastructures created for or by governments for delivering
their services can form an important part of ‗national infrastructures‘ in the largest
sense of the word, i.e. infrastructures that do not only enable public sector
interaction, but also private sector interaction.
These are the new expectations that the public sector, through eGovernment,
has been attempting to meet, with many successes to date but also many failures. In
the right circumstances, we know eGovernment can organise its internal
collaboration and access to information better with the use of ICTs. But, to go beyond
the successes of the past ten years, we must adjust our governance structures,
processes and mindsets to cope with the full potential impact of the technology. This
is the next big challenge, and it is likely to require a step-change in technology,
institutions and thinking, both in terms of service orientation and in terms of
information assurance:
“A confluence of technological, demographic, social and economic forces is
enabling societies to fundamentally redesign how government operates, how
and what the public sector provides, and ultimately, how governments interact
and engage with their citizens” (Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, November
2007, authors of ―Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything‖).
With these expectations and challenges in mind, the European Commission has
asked an experienced team of experts to think the unthinkable and provide the
Commission and EU Member States with reasoned, pragmatic and visionary insights
for the future.
Building on historical analyses to better understand the impact of technology
innovation and social change on the role of government, as well as on an analysis of
today‘s key trends in technology and governance, leading thinkers and practitioners
will be consulted. They will be presented with explicit scenarios representing major
possible futures, and asked to help develop foresight to achieve further
improvements in efficient (cheaper), effective (fulfilling promises) and interactive
(between citizens and their governments) services through the transformational
application of information and communications technologies. And, whilst the focus is
on government, explicit attention will also be given to government‘s potential impact
on private sector activities.
This draft report is the result from the literature study and case studies, and is
input to developing the scenarios and gaming exercise. Its draft status reflects the
solicitation for feedback by the Advisory Committee of the European Commission
following a presentation by the team in Brussels on 24 April 2008, and through
interviews from a number of selected top experts during April, May and June 2008.
Main authors of this report are Jeremy Millard (Danish Technological Institute),
who has led the literature review, and Edwin Horlings (Rathenau Institute), who has
carried out the case studies. For more information about this report or about the
project, please send an email to info@3rdMGov.eu.
Maarten Botterman, Project Manager

GNKS Consult
3
Executive summary
In order to support the European Commission in its thinking and policy
eGovernment development concerning public eService delivery and eGovernance towards 2020,
trends and this report analyses trends and drivers which will be important over this time scale.
future drivers Building on an extensive review of the literature, it examines current eGovernment
trends which are likely to continue strongly into the future, as well as new drivers
which are not yet having much influence but seem poised to do so over the next ten
years. It is not an attempt to cover the whole landscape of eGovernment. In order to
better understand technology-society-governance interaction over the whole
transformation cycle, the report also looks at lessons from earlier periods of
technology led change.
The main authoritative sources (from the public sector itself, from researchers
Whole-of- and from industry) all agree that the future of eGovernment services can only be
government understood within a wider eGovernance context. This takes its starting point in a
approach whole-of-government approach with a focus on connected, networked and fully
joined-up government, as a development which has its own rationale and
momentum, as well as being strongly supported and enabled by ICT. Indeed, the two
are clearly linked and drive each other.
From a service Key in these developments is the transformation, which will become stronger in
delivery to a future, towards the ‗second generation eGovernment paradigm‘ (United Nations
service value 2008), characterised by a shift in focus from the provision of public eServices per se
and public to the use of ICT to increase the value for constituents of those services. The notion
value focus of how the public realm can generate different types of value has come to occupy
centre stage, and although ‗public value‘ is a contested concept, all agree that in
practical terms it is concerned with how the public realm, and governments in
particular, can balance the needs of individuals and groups in society with each other
and thus prioritise the overall collective good.
In order to understand how the production of public value can be improved in
st
the early 21 Century, we have identified seven key strategic transformations
required for eGovernance by 2020. Together, these form a coherent framework for
analysing and clustering the main trends and drivers identified in this report. (See
figure below). Each of these is explained in more detail in the following.
Seven key 7) Public value

strategic governance
transformations Creating public value
3) Personalised service 4) Participative policy

5)Trust, Outward
production making
privacy & facing 6)
protection Creating personal or Creating participative Production
The sine qua private value value & use of ICT
non of all For public
other sector
eGover- transforma-
nance tion &
transforma- 1) Plural & partnership innovation
2) Performance governance
tions governance Inward
facing Processes & practices used
Structures, roles & relation- by agents producing value
ships of agents producing value
4
1) The plural and partnership governance transformation focuses on how new
1) Plural and governance structures are needed to efficiently manage and govern a plurality of
partnership actors within the public realm in order to support the production of public value. The
governance public sector itself will normally, though not always, act as lead coordinator or major
player within diverse structures, roles and relationships amongst and between
multiple actors. The main trends and drivers are:
Integrated and joined-up governance internally within and across public sector
departments and agencies, as well as at different levels and with other actors
from the private and civil sectors. These structures and relationships are
changing and becoming more complex and flexible.
Centralisation versus de-centralisation, and how this balance is achieved and
adapted in future, both, on the one hand, to promote minimum standards,
simplicity and efficiency, and, on the other hand, to promote responsiveness,
subsidiarity and diversity. Choosing priorities which maximise the best of both,
whilst minimising trade-offs, is becoming a new governance imperative.
Networked governance, in order to fully exploit the simultaneous benefits of
centralisation and de-centralisation at different levels and jurisdictions (local,
regional, national and international), through open standards, collaboration and
pan-European interoperability. This needs to work with legacy technology,
systems and institutional structures, whilst building new solutions which do not
create future barriers to interoperability.
Open and porous governance, through cooperation and partnerships with all
other actors (private, civil and constituents) leading to a constantly changing mix
and blurring of roles and jurisdictions. The public sector is turning itself inside
out (services and civil servants move out of the office and into the community),
as well as outside-in (other actors take over many traditional functions). Future
governance of the public realm is thus not about the public sector or
government alone, but about an interacting society in which public, private and
civil sectors, as well as constituents, all contribute without clear boundaries.
Business model and value chain innovation is needed to fulfil the functions of
government, especially services, which draw in different actors, resources,
know-how and skills to create and deliver value precisely where it is needed. A
combined cost-efficiency-effectiveness view is required along the whole value
chain rather than just part of it, but this also questions the future mandate and
competence of the public sector.
2) The performance governance transformation concerns the requirement to
2) Performance develop highly efficient and innovative processes and practices within the public
governance realm to fulfil the demands and requirements of building public value. The main
trends and drivers are:
Leadership, skills and working practices all need to change to accommodate
flatter, more diverse plural governance arrangements. This involves new roles
for leaders and managers based on negotiation with and empowerment of staff,
new ICT-based multi-tasking skills, as well as flexible working practices.
Public sector innovation and transformation, through process innovations to
reduce costs (such as business process re-engineering), and service
innovations especially through CRM and the involvement of constituents to
increase the effectiveness of benefits. The third most challenging stage is
organisational innovation which sees eGovernment as a major tool for the
transformation of the whole public sector.
Knowledge management based on the intelligent handling and re-use of data,
especially of the intangible assets represented by skilled and experienced staff.
Better organisational learning and competencies are also needed to improve
evidence-based decision and policy making.
Change management and capacity redeployment, especially through re-
balancing the back and front-offices in favour of the latter in order to maximise
the adaptive capacity of the public sector. This should consider competition and
choice where this clearly increases overall public value, but also ensure that the
benefits of continuity and stability provided by the public sector are retained.
Performance management, moving from easier traditional approaches (based
on top-down targets and measurement of processes and outputs), to a
constituent-impact approach evaluated at the front-line. This will incorporate
5
more accountable local needs and feedback, as well as the evaluations of
constituents themselves, but becomes more risky because of greater diversity
and more difficult measurement.
3) Personalised 3) The personalised service production transformation focuses on creating
service personal or private value for constituents, defined as single entities such as citizens,
communities, groups, localities, companies, sectors, etc., which receive benefits from
production
the public sector. The main trends and drivers are:
Universal personalisation, as constituents increasingly demand services
designed for their precise individual needs rather than accepting one-size-fits-all
offers from an impersonal state. This can be through pro-active or automatic
services, self-service, pre-emptive services, or personal service pathways
delivered by any appropriate actor, including social entrepreneurs.
Self-directed services, in which constituents themselves play a direct role at one
or several points along the service value chain, perhaps also by putting together
a complete value chain to suit their specific need. Constituents may become
directly involved through their own or participative service design, new
constituent-determined delivery channels, or choice and control over their own
service consumption via personal budgets.
Personal relations, where these improve service targeting and quality, can be
developed through personal advisers and personal care assistants. This can
also involve exploiting the potential of ICT-empowered front-line staff out of the
town hall and on the streets, whilst more routine tasks are automated in the
back-office.
Personalisation through intermediation, by combining an individual‘s public,
private and civil services through new outlets, such as banks, supermarkets or
social clubs. Intermediation can also assist constituents who cannot or do not
wish to access services themselves, but can avail of them through these third
parties, whether on an informal, professional or commercial basis.
Personalisation through inclusion, which ensures that all groups and individuals,
particularly those disadvantaged in some way, can access combined and
flexible services using multi-channel systems and multi-modal interfaces. This
should also leverage the strengths and weaknesses of each type of channel or
interface without cutting off any that can still increase personal value for some.
4) The participative policy making transformation creates participative and
4) Participative collaborative value through open societal decision and policy-making, whether
policy making initiated top-down or bottom-up, and whether or not mediated by political
representatives. The main trends and drivers are:
Policy making initiated by government, building on the vast reserves of data the
public sector has available to develop, model, visualise and simulate decisions
and policies. Also by involving constituents through political representatives or
directly through processes of information, consultation, active participation and
elections.
Empowerment from the bottom, where ICT can help to leverage the voices and
expertise of huge numbers of individuals and groups, setting their own agendas
and developing their own policies. This often results in short term single issue
politics, and sometimes in instant street politics and forms of mob-rule, but can
potentially also build to more permanent countervailing power bases possibly at
odds with governments.
Empowering communities and localities, beyond formal politics and the ballot
box, by promoting subsidiarity at local and neighbourhood level. This leverages
local resources, know-how and skills for developing new forms of advocacy,
support and social capital, which can both strengthen diverse cultures and
interests as well as bridge between them.
Transparency and openness are needed, through freedom of information and
consultation, to reveal the purposes, processes and outcomes of government,
also through real-time tracking and tracing. This will help place responsibility,
reduce corruption and make decisions more responsive, although legitimate
privacy and the space for risk taking should be safeguarded.
Accountability, rights and responsibilities become blurred when decision and
policy-making are opened up and government shares the stage with other
6
actors. Important questions are raised about whose voices are heard and who
do they represent, with the ever present danger of trivialisation and short-
termism unless the right to participate in policy making is balanced with some
responsibility for their impact.
5) Trust:, including privacy and protection, is the sine qua non of all other
5) Trust: privacy eGovernance transformations, providing stable, predictable and confidence building
and protection frameworks for future development. In fact, these are key for any activity using ICT
across society, whether in the public, private or civil sectors, and thus should not be
seen in isolation. So, getting this right in the public sector will benefit all other
activities. The main trends and drivers are:
Security and data protection will rely on conformable security, adapted to
changing access needs and identities, and also building this for pan-European
and cross-border systems based on data structures and standards which are
interoperable. Data security will also be improved by giving constituents much
greater control over their own data and their own (often) multiple identities, for
example through trusted third parties.
Information assurance is needed as a holistic approach incorporating risk
management, given that no system can provide complete security. Long-term
data preservation and access are also important given the fast changing
technical formats and the huge increases in data generation expected.
Resilient and robust infrastructures are needed which can dependably support
the storage, transmission and management of huge amounts of data. They
must also be able to withstand electronic and physical attack, and only degrade
slowly if security is breached to allow back-up systems to be deployed without
downtime or service break.
Privacy needs to be upheld, for example, through the European Data Protection
Framework, including appropriate data ombudsmen or custodians. Care should
be taken to avoid ‗mission creep‘, when data are used for purposes not
originally intended, or the ‗race to the bottom‘ in inter-agency or cross-border
data sharing by a reversion to the standards of the weakest member.
Constituent needs and trust must be built on an understanding of real human
behaviour when using data, as well as on technical requirements. Trust is built
through information minimalisation (in using as little data as possible to perform
a task), informing users and/or obtaining user consent when accessing and
processing their data (by enabling users to trace, own and/or control their own
data), and by properly managing, explaining and minimising the risks of data
loss or leakage.
6) The production and use of ICT for public sector transformation and
6) Production innovation has both predictable and potentially unpredictable disruptive potential,
and use of ICT which again has impacts across society and the private and civil sectors. The main
ICT technology perspectives are:
The continuing high impact trends related to user-centred and user-friendly
services, delivered by multiple levels and jurisdictions relying on improved
interoperability, identity management and semantic systems, through multiple
channels and multi-modal interfaces. Also of continuing and growing importance
will be knowledge management, better exploitation of public sector information,
open standards and secure mobile and broadband roll-out.
High impact future drivers can be expected to include ambient intelligence
based on semantic and mobile systems, intelligent agents, and federated
systems for identity management and authentication. There will be a growing
pace of technology and device convergence (including with non-ICT
technologies), with intelligence embedded in both people and objects. This will
also prioritise greatly increased constituent autonomy, control and ownership,
including through technology and systems which can be easily personalised,
and will have impacts across public, private and civil sectors alike.
Additional future drivers will include artificially intelligent databases, search
engines and knowledge systems based on sophisticated semantic systems
covering behaviour and culture, as well as rules and structures. These will also
be used for highly specialised decision and policy support through modelling,
visualisation and simulation. The mass collaboration and ‗crowd-sourcing‘ tools
of Web 2.0 will become mature and finally find widespread use within the public
7
sector. The roll-out of Web 3.0 will begin, including governance webs and
ecosystems in the computing cloud, with large scale networking and GRID
based ubiquitous intelligence.
Maximising the production and use of ICT for public sector innovation is a key
strategic transformation needed to support and deliver all other transformations
for eGovernance to 2020. eGovernment has reached the stage where it is
inconceivable that any government or public sector project would not use ICT,
so that the technology is no longer seen as an add-on but is intrinsically bound
up with developments in any aspect of government.
7) Public value governance creates public goods and society-wide benefits, so
7) Public value
distinguishing the public realm from other realms, and is now being driven forward by
governance
visible value systems and innovative approaches to open source governance. The
main trends and drivers are:
Public Value Management is the new governance framework, superceding the
nostrums of New Public Management and illustrated by the strategic
transformation taking place from a focus on delivering eServices to a focus on
the value of those services to constituents. The notion of how the public realm
can generate different types of public value, normally expressed as economic,
social, environmental and democratic goals, has come to occupy centre stage.
Paradigm shifts in public value and governance show how our understanding
and priorities have changed over the last 250 years. This can be summarised
th
as 1) the foundation of the liberal state in the 18 Century which laid down the
rule of law, property rights and the protection of individuals from the state as
well as from each other; 2) the establishment of democratic principles as the
th
industrialists and entrepreneurs demanded their share of power in the19
th
Century, culminating in universal adult suffrage in the early 20 Century; and 3)
th
social solidarity in the 20 Century when government started in earnest for the
first time to support the socio-economic wellbeing of all citizens in relation to
health, education, employment, etc., as the welfare state become widely
st
established. Now, in the 21 Century, ‗empowerment‘ seems to be the next
great turning upside down – literally – in response to the massive increases in
information and communication permeating society, together with widening
competence, ability and incentive to participate.
Changing definitions and drivers of eGovernance itself over the shorter term of
the last twenty years show, initially, a strong technology-driven approach to
innovation, subsequently complemented by a cost-driven agenda in which it
was realised that ICT could provide the basis for doing existing things faster,
cheaper and better. As experience with the technology grew, so did a better
understanding of how to innovate new types of services delivered in new ways
through a greater role for constituent-driven innovation. This is where we
presently stand. The future challenge is a more fundamental organisational and
policy-driven innovation, which more consciously reflects European values .
The plural society is one of these critical European values which need to
balance personal/private and participative/group values with the overall good of
European society. Political developments, strongly supported by ICT, are
‗unbundling‘ the European territory by blurring boundaries and jurisdictions
between different governance layers, different governments and between
private and civil sectors. They are creating a landscape of plurality which needs
constant governance adjustments if it is to deliver internal coherence and
development, as well as successfully engage globally.
Citizenship, both national and European, is an important glue stitching together
Europe‘s plural landscape. It is increasingly being articulated as overlapping
identities which balance rights with responsibilities both in the public and
personal realms. ICT can be used to provide information on citizenship and
political institutions, as well as to strengthen relationships with political
representatives and increase democratic involvement.
st
An eGovernance vision for the 21 Century shows how the public realm is being
literally turned upside-down through the empowerment paradigm and new
balances between top-down and bottom-up are being forged, normally in favour
of the latter. This transformation will increasingly both draw upon and impact
eGovernance, so our approach to eGovernment and our understanding of it will
need to change quite significantly. This will require rethinking governance
8
structures, processes and mindsets to take account of Europe‘s plurality and
diversity, and to create an open democratic eSociety. This is essential as the
step change in technology we expect to see is potentially both empowering and
repressive, so we will need strong policies and values to navigate the choices
ahead.
There is much evidence presented in this report that ‗empowerment‘ is a
defining dimension of governance going forward to 2020. Empowerment is defined in
terms of how citizens, communities, groups and interests in society can themselves
be enabled bottom-up to further their own as well as collective benefits. Although,
empowerment is not the only theme going forward, it is a key underlying narrative
with its own momentum in society, and is strongly supported and enabled by ICT.
This report looks at how the new empowerment imperative is to be governed across
the seven key areas of future eGovernance presented. It also examines related and
parallel narratives, such as personalisation, participation, transparency,
accountability, rights and responsibilities, trust, privacy and protection, as well as the
governance of plural systems of values, actors, roles, relationships, jurisdictions and
identities.
Historical case Technological change is a complex phenomenon, and predicting the course of
studies such change is correspondingly difficult. Most of the literature attempting to
understand the technological changes that yield eGovernment and eServices is
inward-looking, predicting the future from within the system. This can be an overly
myopic view, missing change phenomena that are not immediately evident within
information and communicaton technology, even if these phenomena have been
germane in earlier technological changes. To attempt to overcome this potential bias
in vision, we reviewed three major technological innovations from the past to
determine the impact of ICT change on the public sector. The results of this review
are of interest in themselves, and also help us anticipate the issues, trends, and
drivers that we may face as the application of innovative information technology to
government matures.
The three historical cases that have been reviewed are:
1. The revolution in transport and communication, 1840-1870
2. Electrification, c. 1890-1940
3. The rise of mass (broadcast) media, 1940-1970
These three are all radical general-purpose technologies that had a momentous
impact on the economy and society of industrialised nations. In that way, they serve
as models for current developments in the information society, and demonstrate how
private, public and civil parties work together towards the creation of a new public
good. Each case illustrates a networked technology that transformed the life of all
households, citizens, firms, and governments, down to the lowest level. The pace of
technological development was high and, looking at ICT, is even increasing. The
geographical scope of the impacts is also increasing. Transport, communication, and
electricity were mainly national in nature; some broadcast media had an international
impact; and ICT is increasingly global in orientation.
Markets are also changing. The early network industries that arose from
technological development were seen and treated as natural monopolies. These
monopolies have since been broken down, mainly by decoupling services from the
underlying infrastructure. Mass broadcast media were initially subject to strong
regulation and, in Europe, publicly owned. Since the 1980s, they have increasingly
moved into private hands and have diversified. ICT (the Internet in particular) has
never been subject to a similar level of government control; although its origins lay in
the American military establishment, it transcended that original very quickly.
We examined the effects on society and government of each of the technologies
in comparison to those generated by ICT. First, they all imposed demands on
regulation proportional to their impact. The distributed, networked technologies
represented a significant break with preceding technologies, and government
intervention (especially through regulation and investment) was required to mitigate
the consequences. As a result, their development transformed the institutional and
legislative context in which they operated. The effectiveness of Internet regulation is
likely to be a major challenge that will influence the development of eGovernment
and eServices.
The three earlier technologies all had a strong impact on inclusion and
integration. They forged nations out of regions, help turn individuals into active
9
citizens, and provided access to good-quality services to individual households and
businesses. These impacts are directly relevant to the development of government
services – in the front-office and the back-office – and to the general perspective on
governance in society. Technologies such as these have been instrumental in the
transformation of government services and the growth of the modern and open
democracy during the last two centuries. Government has become far more efficient;
and ICT promises to increase this efficiency even further. Its outreach has extended
immensely, and ICT and the Internet appear set to revolutionise the workings of
government services and the principles of governance yet again.
10
1 Introduction
1.1 Background and purpose

The European Commission has asked an experienced team of experts to
provide itself and EU Member States with reasoned, pragmatic and visionary insights
for the future of public eService delivery and of eGovernance. This will help inform
discussions and decisions about future European policies and practices in this area
beyond the 2010 time horizon of the current eGovernment Action Plan.
This report is the first major step towards meeting this goal, and examines the
current key eGovernment trends, future drivers, and lessons from earlier periods of
technological change. It is based mainly on existing sources, many of which are listed
in Section 11, but is also supplemented by participation in numerous consultations,
workshops and conferences, as well as by focused interviews with a number of top
eGovernment experts (see Section 12) based on earlier versions of this report.
The present report does not attempt an overview of the current status of the
whole of eGovernment, but focuses on those key trends which already characterise
forward looking eGovernance systems and which also seem likely to have a strong
influence in the years to come. In addition, we also examine new drivers which have
not yet had real impact, but which, in our view, seem poised to exert major influence.
In presenting these trends and drivers, available evidence will be provided where
possible. In addition, the work presented here will also be further validated over the
coming months, not least by top ranking eGovernment experts and by the European
Commission‘s own reading group.
Although we are mainly looking from the present to the future, the second part
of this report instead looks to the past by presenting a number of key historical case
analyses which can help us understand how technology innovation and social
change have previously impacted the role of government. This will inform our work as
it moves forward to the scenario building stage in June and July 2008, by giving
some historical basis for trying to grapple with the longer term changes we are
currently facing.
The focus is on Europe, but the scope is global, both because Europe is
naturally part of the global system also in terms of governance and the use of ICT,
but also because Europe is learning from and, in turn, providing a source of
experience for other world regions.
The visions which this study will provide are keyed to the notional year of 2020.
‗Twenty-twenty vision‘ means standard visual acuity over distance. In the
eGovernment context, the distance referred to is time, not metres. Our objective is to
provide, through evidence and analysis, decision aids that enable policymakers to
move beyond short-term myopia towards longer term clarity that permits planning for
possible futures. Indeed, one could argue that this is especially vital for eGovernment
because the rapid pace of change in information technology means, in essence, that
we are travelling in time faster than our earlier standards of acuity have given us
guidance for, and that if we do not plan for the future appropriately, we will shortly be
faced with being consumed by present-day planning crises.
There is also evidence that, without a route map to guide and measure progress
against a long series of relatively small and seemingly insignificant evolutionary
steps, we can be led unwittingly into revolutionary or transformational change, often
1
in unpredictable circumstances. Without some form of guiding vision, such
transformatory change may not be the change we want or need.
So the challenge is real, the task urgent, and the need for systematic decision
aids palpable.
1
According to Jochen Scholl‘s keynote speech at the 2005 Dexa eGovernment Conference
(eGov‘05, Copenhagen), based upon Hegel‘s premise that many changes in quantity lead to
transformational changes in quality, and vice versa. We can also refer to the tenet of historical
institutionalism that once systems/institutions are in place they become locked in and difficult to
change (path dependence). See also European Commission (2004) p. 3.
11
1.2 A note on definitions
In order to assist reading, some conceptual definitions are given in the
following. Others may be added in later versions of this document.
Constituent: Instead of the more common term ‗user‘, the descriptor
‗constituent‘ is used in most of this report to cover both citizens and businesses, as
well as civil and other groups in society who are served or supported by the functions
of the public sector. The use of this descriptor also serves to emphasise that the
focus is not simply on the direct use of services by individuals (like health, education,
care, income-support, libraries, as well as the requirement to pay tax, duties and
fees, etc.), but also the enjoyment of other facilities which may not be consumed
directly by an individual constituent but which are nevertheless essential to the well-
being of constituents and the functioning of society as a whole. These include
transport and communication networks, public utilities, police, justice and defence
services, leisure and amenity services, information, democratic institutions, etc.
Efficiency: The search for savings based upon a dynamic, productivity-driven,
innovative and value for money set of institutions, where the constituent is seen as a
tax-payer, and the policy dilemma is how to provide ‗more for less‘.
Effectiveness: The search for quality services by producing and delivering
inter-active, user-centred, innovative, personalisable, inclusive services, maximising
fulfilment and security, where the constituent is seen as a consumer, but where
services are provided to all on the basis of need instead of (or as well as) demand,
and the policy dilemma is how to pursue both need and demand and how to balance
the two.
Empowerment: In the present context empowerment can cover how citizens,
communities, groups and interests in society can themselves be enabled bottom-up
to further their own as well as collective (public) benefits. A paradigm shift with an
underlying empowerment narrative may now be taking place, which is seeing a new
balance between top-down and bottom-up in favour of the latter but which still
requires strong, albeit different, top-down functions, such as new open, looser, more
cooperative and pluralistic governance structures, processes and mindsets.
Governance: The role of government in managing and regulating both the
public realm (where statutory services and functions take place), as well as society at
large, in order to promote to advance the public good by engaging the creative efforts
of all segments of society, thus creating public value. Governance incorporates the
‗government-as-a-whole‘ approach, which focuses on the provision of services at the
front-end supported by integration, consolidation and innovation in back-end
processes and systems to achieve maximum cost savings and improved service
delivery. It also covers the concepts of ‗connected or networked‘ government, arising
from the whole-of-government approach, where the aim is to achieve a balance
between the ‗goods‘ and ‗bads‘ of centralisation and de-centralisation, based on open
standards and interoperability
eGovernance: Governance which increasingly looks to technology as a
strategic tool and as an enabler for public service innovation and productivity growth.
Within the concept of eGovernance, the ‗second generation eGovernment paradigm‘
has shifted from the provision of services to the use of ICT to increase the value of
services.
Good governance: Efficient, effective, open, transparent, accountable, flexible,
participatory and democratic governance, where the constituent is seen as a citizen
and voter, and where there are two policy dilemmas. First, how to balance openness
with legitimate privacy (of civil servants as well as of constituents). Second how to
balance the ultimately irreconcilable interests of society‘s different stakeholders (the
latter is, of course, the realm of politics, but it also impacts the sphere of government
operation at an apolitical level).
Open source governance: The notion that the resources, expertise, data,
knowledge and legitimacy of the governance system is widely sourced, even in
situations where the government has ultimate responsibility. Sources can include any
part of the public sector (including non-profit agencies and institutions), the private
and civil sectors, as well as various constellations of constituents, operating as part of
a governance ecosystem.
12
Paradigm shifts: These are transformations in society‘s underlying values,
mindsets, structures and relationships, which directly influence and change how we
understand governance and the roles that the government specifically, and the public
sector more generally, should play.
Public value: This remains a contested concept, both politically and
operationally, but is needed to distinguish the public realm from other realms
(whether private, civil or constituent), and to justify the creation of public goods and
society-wide benefits. Public value is seen as the ‗ends‘ (the overall purpose) of
governance, in contrast to considerations only of efficiency and effectiveness which
should be seen as the ‗means‘ of achieving this. Thus, as far as the ‗means‘ are
concerned, we are not interested in public sector management, transformation and
innovation for their own sake, but we are interested in such management,
transformation and innovation which maximise public value. Definitions of public
value itself need to be negotiated across society, and are likely to include a strong
focus on the economy, social life, environmental sustainability, democracy and
participation, liberty, justice and security.
Social capital: This comprises the trust and networks of friendship,
neighbourhood and organisations which determine much of our individual, social,
cultural, economic and political lives.
13
2 Identifying key current trends and future
drivers
2.1 The step change from eServices to eGovernance
In looking at present and future eGovernment trends, particularly in Europe, it is
2
evident that a major turning-point and refocus is currently taking place. This is seen
both in terms of understanding how ICT is used in the public sector as well as in the
role the European Commission, through its policies and initiatives, might play.
This step change is being increasingly recognised by researchers and
practitioners alike. In its 2003 report, the OECD reported that ―governments around
the world are realising that continued expansion in eServices is not possible without
some kind of integration of back-end government systems.‖ (OECD, 2003a). This
back-office refocus has been seen in terms of how governments need to collaborate
more effectively to address complex intra-government and shared problems within
and between agencies if they are to provide better services efficiently and effectively.
The OECD saw this debate about eServices as part of the move towards an
eGovernment-as-a-whole approach, which focuses on the provision of services at
the front-end supported by integration, consolidation and innovation in back-end
processes and systems to achieve maximum cost savings and improved service
delivery. The distinguishing characteristic of this whole-of-government concept is that
government agencies and organisations share objectives across organisational
boundaries, as opposed to working solely within single organisational ‗silos‘, often
termed ‗joined-up‘ government. This concept has itself recently been taken further
forward by Gartner‘s claim that we could be moving from joined-up to ‗mashed-up‘
government driven by the less visible aspects of Web 2.0 which could enable a new
process of intermediation whereby public information and services are mashed up by
third parties that are better capable of responding to constituent needs. (Di Maio
2007b).
The United Nations 2008 eGovernment survey (which is sub-titled ―from
eGovernment to connected governance‖) charts how the debate has developed from
a mainly back-office focus towards the notion of the re-balancing of back- and front-
ends as part of the same transformation: ―What is important is to think about
connected governance with a view towards the re-engineering of technology,
processes, skills and the mindsets of public officials within a holistic framework.‖
Quoting Millard (2003) it concludes: ―An effective connected government is about a
„bigger and better‟ front-end with a „smaller and smarter‟ back-end.” (p. 6)
This United Nations report also shows that the notions of the ‗public good‘ and
‗public value‘ are now centre stage for understanding how eGovernment services will
develop in future: ―The concept of connected or networked government is derived
from the whole-of-government approach which is increasingly looking towards
technology as a strategic tool and as an enabler for public service innovation and
productivity growth…. [and] revolves around governmental collective action to
advance the public good by engaging the creative efforts of all segments of society.‖
(2008, p. xiv)
―Within the ambit of the whole-of-government approach, the focus of the
second generation eGovernment paradigm has shifted from the provision of
services to the use of ICT to increase the value of services. As [Figure 1] indicates
the approach to public sector service delivery has evolved over time from the
traditional model of government dispensing services via traditional modes to an
emphasis on eGovernment and eServices per se, to an integrated approach for
enhancing the value of services to the citizen. In many countries around the world,
public sector development strategies are being revisited to address the question: how
can the value of public services be enhanced?” (United Nations 2008, p. 3).
2
Additional evidence for a turning point in the ICT-driven techno-economic paradigm heralding
a step change to 21st Century eGovernance will be expanded in later reports. This will inter alia
take into account the Perez thesis on the diffusion of technology revolutions (Perez, 2002) as
well as our own historical case studies, presented here in section 10.
14
Figure 1: Evolving approach to public service delivery
Source: United Nations, 2008, p. 4.
The key message of connected governance is thus ―The promise and the
excitement of connected government should not obscure a key principle, namely,
that: the end-goal of all e-government and connected governance efforts must
remain better public service delivery. Improvements in the quality of governance and
the responsiveness and effectiveness of government should still serve to empower
the citizen. In that sense, citizens must be given the chance to play a role in
influencing these e-government solutions.― (United Nations, 2008, p. 10) And, ―It is for
such reasons that it is impossible to separate out service-delivery capacities of
eGovernment from broader institutional reforms shaping the setting of democratic
governance within which such processes occur.‖ (United Nations, 2008, p. 93)
One of the spurs behind the recent prominence of public value in the eServices
and eGovernance debate is the growing acceptance that governments are not just
bureaucracies or managers of public affairs. Increasingly the role of eGovernment is
being actively evaluated in terms of the positive benefits it can bestow on society:
growth, jobs, quality of life, inclusion, empowerment, democracy, etc. Or conversely,
the damage it can do. In the words of the latest 2008 Economist report ―efficient
government can be repressive government ….. George Orwell‟s „1984‟ is an example
of malign e-government: a screen in every dwelling monitors the inhabitants‟ doings
with an efficiency that would thrill today‟s operators of CCTV systems.‖ (p. 7). The
Economist also warns against seeing the application of ICT to back-office
government efficiency as any sort of panacea, and sees eGovernment as a
―dangerous enthusiasm‖ if it is only approached as a technical quick fix that distracts
from the real tasks – hard and slow – of reforming government and running public
services properly. (p.7)
Indeed, the same source also quotes Edwin Lau of the OECD as remarking that
―e-government works best by stealth‖ (p.10), and that it tends to shudder and fail
when driven by loud political fanfares rather than carefully thought through plans with
non-technology goals ultimately in mind. ―In short, badly managed organisations with
computers will stay badly managed. That has been the lesson from private business,
and it equally applies to the public sector, where e-government has barely begun to
scratch the surface of what is possible. That is reason for disappointment, but also for
hope.‖(p16)
These debates are not just taking place in governments and agencies, however,
but are also prominent in the private sector and ICT industry, as the recent statement
from Cisco makes clear: ―At this point, e-government would cease to be exclusively
about technology-enabled public services reform and would start to play a central
role in larger conversations about national economic and social transformation.‖
(Cisco, 2007, p. 15). Gartner is developing its New Hype Cycle for government
transformation in terms of ―how rapidly these technologies can contribute to creating
public value‖ (Gartner, 2007b, 27 April 2007), and in the context of Web 2.0:
―constituents will choose what services they want to access and through which
intermediary, depending on their convenience and the ability of service aggregators
(banks, telecom companies, virtual communities and associations) to create value for
them.‖ (Gartner, 2007c). The global consultant Accenture has for a number of years
focused on developing a value model for the public sector. (2004)
At the present time, however, only a few governments have made the
necessary investment to move from eGovernment applications per se to a more
integrated connected governance stage directly supporting innovation,
transformation, empowerment and public value. In other words, how we think of
public ‗eServices‘ is likely to face a quite dramatic step-change in the near future.
15
Current notions of eGovernment services, such as the basket of twenty services
benchmarked by the European Commission since 2001, will be radically rethought,
especially in relation to these new forms of governance. Some of this is currently
starting to happen as evidenced by the extension of European eGovernment service
benchmarking to cover take-up, satisfaction, use by disadvantaged groups, the
information burden and user centricity. But, as the evidence presented in this report
will show, this is just the very first next step in the turning point towards the strategic
transformations required for eGovernance 2020.
It should be evident from the discussion above that there will be change, and for
the change to be beneficial, there needs to be careful thought and planning. That
thought and planning transcends the capability of any single national governmental
sector — even acknowledging that no two national back offices or citizenry are the
same. Thus, this refocus is best seen in terms of how governments need to
collaborate more effectively to address complex intra-government and shared
problems within and between agencies if they are — individually and collectively — to
provide better services efficiently and effectively.
2.2 The evolving policy goals of eGovernment

In September 2003 The European Commission (2003) published a
Communication on ―the role of eGovernment for Europe's future‖, that outlined the
importance of eGovernment for achieving world-class public administrations,
delivering new and better services for all citizens and businesses, and providing a
major economic boost in Europe. In that paper eGovernment was defined as the use
of ICT in public administrations combined with organisational change and new skills
in order to improve public services and democratic processes and strengthen support
to public policies. eGovernment was recognised as an enabler to realise a better and
more efficient administration by improving the development and implementation of
public policies and helping the public sector to cope with the conflicting demands of
delivering more and better services with fewer resources.
This source further articulated the definition of eGovernment as one which
enables the public sector to maintain and strengthen good governance in the
knowledge society. Its overall objective is modernisation and innovation in the public
sector. This involves developing:
i) A public sector that is open and transparent – governments that are
understandable and accountable to the citizens, open to democratic
involvement and scrutiny.
ii) A public sector that is at the service of all – a user-centred public sector
will be inclusive, that is, will exclude no one from its services and respect
everyone as individuals by providing personalised services.
iii) A productive public sector that delivers maximum value for taxpayers‘
money – it implies that less time is wasted standing in queues, errors are
drastically reduced, more time is available for professional face-to-face
service, and the jobs of civil servants can become more rewarding.
In policy terms, the above can be translated into three major policy goals of
government / eGovernment, as illustrated in Figure 2. Each has a distinctive view of
whom the constituent is, and thereby government‘s relation to the constituent, and
each faces specific policy contradictions or dilemmas (Millard & Shahin, 2006).
1 Efficiency: the search for savings: a dynamic, productivity-driven,
innovative and value for money set of institutions, where:
the constituent is seen as a tax-payer
the policy dilemma is how to provide ‗more for less‘.
2 Effectiveness: the search for quality services: producing and delivering
inter-active, user-centred, innovative, personalisable, inclusive services,
maximising fulfilment and security, where:
the constituent is seen as a consumer, but where services are
provided to all on the basis of need instead of (or as well as) demand
the policy dilemma is how to pursue both need and demand and how
to balance the two.
16
3 Governance: the search for good governance: open, transparent,
accountable, flexible, participatory, democratic, where:
the constituent is seen as a citizen and voter
there are two policy dilemmas, how to balance openness with
legitimate privacy (of civil servants as well as of constituents), and
how to balance the ultimately irreconcilable interests of society‘s
different stakeholders (the latter is, of course, the realm of politics,
but it also impacts the sphere of government operation at an
apolitical level).
Figure 2: The evolving policy goals of eGovernment

Source: Millard & Shahin et al (2006)
Governance
Constituent as citizen, voter and participant
Dilemma: how to balance openness and transparency,
and the interests of different stakeholders
Effectiveness
Constituent as consumer
Dilemma: governments cannot choose their
’customers’
Efficiency
Constituent as tax-payer
Dilemma: how to provide ’more for
less’
It is the three constituent roles in Figure 2 that distinguish government from the
private sector, which generally only sees the constituent as a consumer. Government
is, thus, complex, confronts a range of complex dilemmas, and needs to fulfil
complex tasks in a myriad of complex circumstances. It has to steer towards complex
and often contradictory public value policy goals, such as simultaneously promoting
economic growth, jobs, competitiveness, sustainable development, inclusion,
democracy, quality of life, citizenship, trust, continuity, stability, and universal human
rights. It will be noted, that these are some of the components of ‗public value‘,
discussed above.
2.3 Strategic transformations for eGovernance 2020

Based on the three constituent roles and the three corresponding policy goals of
eGovernment, illustrated in Figure 2, our work has identified seven key strategic
transformations required for eGovernance by 2020, which together form a coherent
framework for understanding and clustering the main trends and drivers identified in
the work undertaken so far. These are depicted in Figure 3, which shows the bottom
two transformations (numbered 1 and 2) representing government efficiency, the
middle two transformations (numbered 3 and 4) representing effectiveness, and the
top transformation (numbered 7) representing governance. The two horizontal
supporting transformations (numbered 5 and 6 respectively) represent inputs mainly
of ICT technology necessary for all the other transformations.
The main trends identified in Figure 3 are derived both from those which already
characterise forward looking eGovernance systems and which also seem likely to
have a strong influence in the years to come, as well as new drivers which have not
17
yet had real impact, but which in our view seem poised to exert major influence in the
future.
Figure 3: Key strategic transformations for eGovernance 2020
7) Public value
governance
Creating public value
3) Personalised service 4) Participative policy

5) Trust, Outward
production making
privacy and facilng 6)
protection Creating personal or Creating participative Production
The sine qua private value value & use of ICT
non of all For public
other sector
eGover- transforma-
nance tion &
transforma- 1) Plural & partnership innovation
2) Performance governance
tions governance Inward
facing Processes & practices used
Structures, roles & relation- by agents producing value
ships of agents producing value
In summary, these seven eGovernance 2020 strategic transformations can be

described as follows:
1. Plural and partnership governance: the structures, roles and
relationships amongst the public, private and civil sectors, as well as
constituents, in forming new business models and value chains within the
public realm in order to produce value.
2. Performance governance: innovative processes and practices being
adopted in the public realm to prioritise adaptive capacity, manage risks,
minimise costs, and maximise benefits realisation, in order to produce
value.
3. Personalised service production: creating personal or private value
through universal personalisation, self-directed services, and fully inclusive
constituent empowerment in services.
4. Participative policy making: creating participative or collaborative value
through open societal decision- and policy-making, whether initiated top-
down or bottom-up, and whether or not mediated by political
representatives.
5. Trust, privacy and protection: the sine qua non of all other eGovernance
transformations, via conformable and negotiable security, greater control
by constituents over their own data and own (often) multiple identities, and
a focus on trust, resilience and risk management.
6. Production and use of ICT: for public sector transformation and
innovation, for example through ambient intelligence based on semantic
and mobile systems, intelligent agents, the mass collaboration and
‗crowdsourcing‘ tools of Web 2.0, and the roll out of Web 3.0, governance
webs in the computing cloud, large scale ubiquitous networking and
GRIDS, as well as increasing technology and device convergence and
constituent autonomy and control.
7. Public value governance: creating public goods and society-wide
benefits, so distinguishing the public realm from other realms, driven
forward by visible value systems and innovative approaches to open
source governance.
18
As described in section 2.1, ‗value‘ is likely to be the overarching driver and
raison d‘être for governance systems by 2020, all of which will inevitably be
supported by ICT tools. For the present purpose, Figure 3 shows that we have
identified three different types of eGovernance value creation in this context.
i) personal or private value – created for individuals (defined as single
entities such as citizens, communities, groups, localities, companies,
sectors, etc.)
ii) participative value – created collaboratively and interactively between
two or more individuals who themselves attempt to balance or reconcile
any conflicts with their own personal value
iii) public value – created by the overarching governance structure for
balancing and reconciling the other two types of value where these are
contradictory, as well as proactively promoting collective benefits; public
value also specifically looks for longer term benefits which can overall be
larger than the sum of more short term and restricted benefits provided by
personal and participative value, thus requiring a trade-off which normally
only the public sector can arbitrate.
Figure 3 also shows that these seven eGovernance strategic transformations
can be divided into three complementary types.
i) inward-facing (back-office) trends and drivers designed to maximise
efficiency in creating value: plural and partnership governance and
performance governance
ii) outward-facing (front-office) trends and drivers designed to maximise
effectiveness in creating value: personalised service production,
participative policy making and public value governance
iii) horizontal trends and drivers needed by all other transformations to
create value: privacy, protection and trust, and the production and use of
ICT.
In sections 3 to 6 which follow, each of these seven eGovernance strategic
transformation is described and analysed in turn, focusing on the trends and drivers
we think are necessary for understanding the future development of the public sector
and its use of ICT, and the consequences this may have.
19
3 Plural and partnership governance
The plural and partnership governance transformation focuses on how new governance structures are
needed to efficiently manage and govern a plurality of agents within the public realm. The public sector
itself will normally, though not always, act as lead, coordinator or major player within diverse structures,
roles and relationships amongst and between multiple agents. These include the public, private and civil
sectors, as well as constituents (citizens and businesses) necessary to build connected or networked
governance by forming new business models and value chains in order to support the production of
public value.
3.1 Integrated and joined-up governance

Governance in Europe is not only confronting radical internal changes but is
also grappling with the need to re-examine the whole structure of the public realm.
Apart from the macro issues of EU enlargement and the need to specify more clearly
the respective roles of European, national and regional/local institutions (for example,
through the proposed new European Treaty), is the need to look again at how
governance at the meso and micro levels is organised. eGovernance cannot reap the
potentially huge benefits it promises without sharing tasks and information amongst
the various agents at different levels of government – and this demands also a
reconsideration of respective responsibilities and powers. Constituents tend only to
want an effective, rapid and high quality set of services and frameworks, and are
generally not interested in back-office questions about how or who provides these.
In order to achieve these objectives, eGovernance implies that government
agencies need to both re-engineer themselves internally as well as externally with
other agencies and actors. In Figure 4, the typical stages of internal agency re-
engineering are shown.
Figure 4: Internal agency re-engineering

Source: Millard (2003)
2) Front office re-engineering
1) Before re-engineering Citizens and businesses
Citizens and businesses

GOVERNMENT
Front office, one-stop-shop – -- relations with customers

GOVERNMENT
Office A Office B Office C Office D
Office A Office B Office C Office D
4) Total re-engineering
3) Back office re-engineering
FRONT
Front office –
relations with customers Back
GOVERNMENT
Office
Back office(s) – OFFICE

internal relations and Function C
relations with suppliers
Function
Function A
D
Function B
20
. Stage 1 shows the traditional structure of government before re-engineering.
The first structural re-engineering tends to take place by the creation of a front-office
in stage 2. (Note that a ‗front office‘ is not necessarily only a physical office – it can
also be, and often is, a portal. The point is that a ‗front office‘ is designed to cater fully
for customer interface and service). This creates a one-stop shop enabling citizens
and business to access government services through one point, regardless of their
purpose, rather than through a multitude of points depending upon the organisational
structure of government. Stage still represents the state of art in many local and
regional government agencies in Europe today.
In stage 3, as the front-office logic (customer interface and service) takes hold
and starts to drive the development of internal structures and processes, it is
necessary for the back office to re-organise in order to reflect the needs of the front
office and the constituent. Traditional back-office departments, relationships and
processes thus give way more and more to ones determined by constituent service
through a front office.
Finally, in stage 4, as demonstrated by only a few European leaders, there is a
decisive shift from back-office administration to front-office multi-channel services,
where human-mediated services are also supported by ICT. Small, or ‗lean‘ (both in
terms of personnel and other resources) ICT-automated back offices can serve and
support very large front offices with more frontline ICT-supported human services
based upon the improved cost-efficiency of administrative back office procedures.
Internal agency re-engineering is typically driven by the adoption of
eGovernment, but also tends to lag a long way behind its full implications. This is
both because of the inertia embedded in historical, cultural and organisational
structures, but also because re-engineering is far from straightforward or easy, and
could lead to less rather then greater efficiency if not undertaken with care in relation
to all the consequences arising. Experience shows that it can be a ten year project.
As far as external relationships are concerned, government agencies need to
cooperate and where desirable integrate with each other and other actors, thus re-
engineering their structures and processes across organisational boundaries.
Because this can, though probably should not, leave internal agencies structures
unchanged, inter-agency cooperation can take place quite quickly through
contractual relationships. Inter-agency integration, of course, will take longer. The
further down the path between informal cooperation, then contractual cooperation to
more formal integration, the more likely it is that legal and structural changes will be
required and the more difficult the process can become. Whatever the mode of
relationship, however, government needs to appear ‘joined-up’ when interfacing with
citizens and businesses. These relationship can be considered both horizontally and
vertically, as shown in Figure 5. The strategic transformation needed is to move to
the upper right quadrant where both horizontal and vertical cooperation and
integration are achieved.
Figure 5: Inter-agency cooperation and integration

Source: Millard (2003)
Vertical cooperation
and integration
between government levels: national/
federal, regional, local, community
high
Fully ‟joined-up‟ government, for

Integration of single example around citizen and business
govern-ment functions life events, integration across borders,
between levels, e.g. etc. Full vertical and horizontal
administration, education, integration. Here the ‗content‘
health, employment processes (such as services and
services, etc. democracy) are more important than, Horizontal cooperation
and shape, the ‗control‘ processes
(administration).
and integration
low high
Traditional, compartment- between different government
talised, ‗bureaucratic‟ Integration of multiple departments or agencies, including with
government, where the government functions within non-government actors, such as the
‗control‘ processes (admini- a geographic entity and private sector (in PPPs) and the civil
stration) are more important between geographic entities sector such as NGOs.
than, and shape, the (cross border).
‗content‘ processes (such as
services and democracy).
low
21
Joined-up governance (or governance-as-a-whole) has the strategic task of
balancing tasks, responsibilities and powers between all the agents. An emerging
principle seems to be that tasks which tend to be routine, standardisable and data-
heavy, requiring information collected from and coordinated with many agencies
need to be interoperable, and that responsibility if not delivery for these can become
more centralised. On the other hand, the front-end delivery of tasks such as services
(which must take account of specific and local needs) should not be centralised or
standardised, precisely because they must be tailored to specific needs of specific
people in specific places at specific times. Thus, individual local and regional
authorities or other specific agents need to be responsible for the tailoring and
delivery of tasks and services, whereas it is both more efficient to standardise those
services (or service elements) which need to be the same regardless of level or
location across a wide area for which the central government, or local/regional
authorities acting collectively, would be responsible. This is part of the joined-up
government approach, taking a whole-of-government perspective but retaining
specific constituent focus and delivery.
3.2 Centralisation versus de-centralisation

The real challenge here for local authorities and other actors within regional or
national systems is to find the appropriate balance between centralisation and de-
centralisation, not just of services and other tasks but also of power and decision-
making. On the one hand, local agencies have the necessary on-the-ground or
specific knowledge, and can tap into local resources, know-how and commitment, to
develop and roll-out eGovernment services appropriate to their needs, much better
than central governments can. And this can be extremely important especially in
weaker or more peripheral regions where the role of the public sector in societal
development is often critical. On the other hand, if this is not coordinated and
rationalised across agencies, there is a strong danger of resource duplication, lack of
interoperable and joined-up services and massive postcode lottery problems resulting
in highly variable service standards from place to place. See Figure 6.
Figure 6: ‘Goods’ and ‘bads’ of centralised and de-centralised (e)government

systems
Source: Zálišová, Millard, van Lerberghe (2007)
‘GOODS’ balance ‘BADS’
Ensures minimum standards

Level playing field
Framework of laws, norms and appeals
Democracy on large scale, more inclusive Bureaucratic, standardised,
Ensures cohesion and inclusion across large scale homogeneous
CENTRALISED / Promotes linkages and positive externalities Remote and difficult to reach
‗Joined-up‘
LARGE SCALE Provides simplicity and certainty
Unresponsive and insensitive
One size fits all
Command analogy / Promotes continuity and stability Too rigidity and inflexible
top-down / order Provides coordination Excludes small scale and local needs
Provides efficiency and sharing Too simplistic and generic to be
Long term planning, strategic, broad impact effective
Reciprocity
Equity and equality of service
Promotes auditability and due-process
balance Low coordination costs
Mitigates against ‗chaos‘
Local fiefdoms
Takes account of local needs and choices Variable minimum standards and levels
Promotes autonomy and empowerment of service
DECENTRALISED / Diversity and pluralism Can produce negative externalities
Promotes innovation and creativity adversely affecting other areas or
DISTRIBUTED / Democracy at a community scale groups
SMALL SCALE Ensures cohesion and inclusion at local level Isolationist
Short term planning, tactical, focused impact Tending to chaotic
Market analogy / Can be complex and create uncertainty
Subsidiarity
bottom-up / chaos Flexible, high reactivity Can be excluding because of variable
Accountable standards
Responsible Power-biased
Opaque
22
On the other hand, it may be more important that public services reach real
people and respond precisely to what they need at the very local level, than (the strict
maintenance of) wider standards. In many Member States, local authorities enjoy
considerable fiscal discretion. The postcode lottery of areas setting their own
priorities can be overcome at a national level through redistributive grants to maintain
minimum service levels and equalise resources between rich and poor areas, though
this system may be difficult to extend to the civil and community sector. The issue for
individual agencies then becomes one of choosing priorities above that minimum,
and of tolerating diversity. Without devolved power and the money that drives it,
however, such choice is meaningless.
Effective governance requires adequate centralised decision making power, to
decide on issues like infrastructures, standards, best practice exchange and
implementation. But it also should be inclusive and allow local autonomy where it is
possible and desirable. But in the end a problem can only be solved if it has an
owner with a formal legal mandate (power combined with appropriate accountability).
Shared/decentralised responsibilities on their own are unlikely to deliver the required
decision making authority.3 Taking local government in the Netherlands as an
example, there are 250-300 ‗products/services‘ on offer. Each municipality has taken
some actions and has brought a few of these services online. An eSolution has
probably been developed for each service somewhere. Each municipality is doing its
own thing, instead of easily replicating what was developed elsewhere. There needs
to be some centralised orchestration of this wasteful process. The biggest obstacle in
this case is local level administrators and party politicians, who are averse to any
change and fear loss of autonomy. The ‗not invented here‘ syndrome is very strong.
Another view is that, the real innovators in eGovernment are in local
government, and all the centre should do is unleash this potential by providing
suitable frameworks and tools. This is because transformational government is driven
by ‗better customer experience‘ and this mainly takes place at the grass roots level,
where ‗better‘ is determined in a mix between normative measures and opinions. 4
Similarly, in France, the local eGovernment service platform is now known as the
th
‗27 Region‘ and this is demonstrating a real revolution not just in technology but in
grass-roots user relationships as well. France has undergone a massive
decentralisation and devolution of powers in recent years, from being one of the most
centralised states in Europe, and it has been realised that it is not sufficient only to
decentralise institutions but that there is also a need to decentralise the means and
decision-making competence as well.5
Clearly, these issues can be argued from both a centralised and a de-
centralised perspective. There is, therefore, a need for the public sector to balance
(to find the ‗sweet spot‘) between, the ‗goods‘ and ‗bads‘ of centralised and de-
centralised systems (which are both enabled by ICT), and to find agreement on such
balances and use ICT to deliver this balance, which will, of course, itself change over
space and time. Centralisation promotes minimum standards, simplicity and
efficiency, whilst de-centralisation promotes responsiveness, subsidiarity and
diversity.
3.3 Networked governance

The purpose of networked governance is to achieve a balance between the
‗goods‘ and ‗bads‘ of centralisation and de-centralisation in specific times, places and
contexts, as shown in Figure 7. Cisco (2007) describes this as a the ‗connected
republic‘, a distributed network of small pieces loosely joined. The evidence strongly
points to the need for local and regional integration and interoperability (i.e. sharing
data, resources, services and control but with local adaptation) through networking
before fully joined-up services can be rolled out. (OECD 2005, Scholl 2005, Millard &
Kubieck 2004) One of the critical factors in this are open standards as specification
frameworks for interoperability, particularly in terms of functionality.
3
Interview with Robin Linschoten (13 June 2008), Chairman of ACTAL, the Netherlands.
4
Interview with William Perrin and colleagues (5 June 2008),Transformational Government Unit,
UK Cabinet Office.
5
Interview with Catherine Fieschi (5 June 2008), Demos Think Tank.
23
Different coordinating mechanisms need to be used depending on which level
actually has responsibility for eGovernment development, whether the centre,
amongst different departments, at regional level, etc. At the lowest local or regional
level, networking between tasks and services can usually be achieved by cooperation
and agreements between the parties involved. Another situation arises when the
networking of services is to be achieved which are offered nationwide by different
agencies with different geographical jurisdictions. Frequently, there is already some
coordination for legal and organisational issues which the technology needs to
support.
Figure 7: Networked governance

Source: Herbert Kubicek, Institut für Informationsmanagement GmbH, University of Bremen,
2004.
It is clear that jurisdictional issues across the public sector within each
Member State as well as at EU level are critical. These issues involve the various
institutional and organisational structures, the distribution of competencies, the actual
legal framework, and relative power and decision-making. In practice, coordination
and networking tend to start through the sharing of services and applications
between agencies and regions, for example organised through middle offices, service
centres and localised front-end services built on shared back-end architectures.
According to Wang (2008) of the OECD, resource sharing has traditionally
been a challenging issue in public administrations, as this involves agreeing
responsibilities and competencies, so that in practice sub-optimal solutions are often
found as a compromise between different power centres. Sharing of digital resources
is no exception and has become an important driving force behind public sector
transformation in the OECD countries. To harvest the second wave of benefits of
eGovernment investments, OECD countries are moving toward sharing more and
more costly digital resources including ICT applications, eGovernment building
blocks, information and data, and common business processes. Lessons learned
among governments are that eGovernment has become a powerful generic tool for
policy implementation, has been driving improvements of efficiency and effectiveness
of government functions, and has forced an unprecedented standardisation process
throughout the public sector. Another aspect of these trends is the increasing
importance of service cross-selling, i.e. the selling and sharing of services between
different public agencies, and with and between private and civil actors, in order to
increase economies of scale and efficiency, and to simplify service design and
delivery, also for the constituent user. (See also the ecosystem of resources and
actors in section 3.5).
24
The expectation is that ICT will thus have a profound and transforming impact
on plural governance. ICT is, in essence, a networking technology, which both
enables decentralised governance activities as well as facilitates coordination and
adaptation to the specific needs of constituents, localities and interests. However, to
date, rather limited progress has been made, although there are some areas, such as
service outsourcing, which are becoming quite significant. This leaves open the
question as to how ICT should best be used in the future to maximise plural
governance, using all relevant agencies and resources wherever these are found,
whilst ensuring that the goal of maximising public value is upheld. One way to do this
could be through developing networked semantic eGovernment spaces, which
link different government levels and agencies, in what Tapscott , Williams & Hermann
(2007) have called ‗governance webs‘.
A Pan-European Semantic eGovernment Space is needed for two main
reasons. First, citizens or businesses who wish to live, work, trade, travel, or retire
away from their country of origin need to access largely similar sets of services
regardless of where they are, but who instead are confronted by immense differences
in access conditions, requirements, quality standards and outcomes from place to
place. Second, the EU Member States have agreed a set of mutually beneficial
policies and strategies for enhancing their collective and individual socio-economic
development, and which when implemented in common add value for all (such as
economic trade and growth or social cohesion), whilst some can only effectively be
implemented in common (such as combating climate change, crime and terrorism). A
large number of differences across the EU today exist purely for historical or legacy
reasons, tend to have no other public value purpose and often, in fact, act as barriers
against these wider European benefits. There is wide acceptance that they need to
be overcome, but also that this is a difficult process which can only take place over a
period of years. It is also necessary, however, to ensure that those differences which
are necessary for public value purposes are maintained, but that they are also made
compatible with, and not disruptive of other, benefits. This is the indeed the business
of European-wide eGovernance.
A strong, vibrant, efficient and effective pan-European eGovernment Space is
necessary to fully meet these needs, but one which lies on top of, and complements,
the corresponding eGovernment spaces at national, regional and local levels, and of
course fully interworks with individual constituent eGovernment spaces. Only the
public sector has this triple function and responsibility, i.e. facilitating Europe-wide
services and benefits (as described above), enabling local and personalised services
for local and individual needs, and simultaneously linking effectively across all the
different functions and agencies involved in the public realm at each of these levels.
An effective Pan-European eGovernment Space would both cater for existing
differences and provide a framework for ensuring that future developments build-in
compatibility at their design stage. It would include elements like pan-European
identity management and uphold information assurance standards across the board,
thus ensuring that the information space would also be a dependable space. In
addition to benefiting pan-European public services and collaboration, it would also
facilitate pan-European business.
3.4 Open and porous governance

As well as coordination and integration within the public sector itself, there is an
increasing trend towards cooperation with other actors, from both private and civil
sectors, as well as with constituents themselves. Although the private sector has for
many years acted as an important partner to government, the civil sector is now also
starting to become a significant and, often new, source of resources and expertise for
undertaking public sector tasks and delivering services. So, in addition to PPPs
(public-private-partnerships) the trend is also towards PCPs (public-civil-
partnerships). For example, the voluntary sector and social entrepreneurs,
especially when they function as intermediaries between the government provider
and the constituent user, can contribute grass-roots resources, knowledge,
innovation and even useful competition.
Government is thus becoming collaborative, open and porous, in ways and to
an extent not seen in other sectors, and this could lead to beneficial disruption of
the way in which the public sector operates and the responsibilities it has. First, in
order to delivery better services and better governance, technology is helping to turn
25
the public sector inside-out, by exposing the way it works and pushing its activities
out into society. For example, eGovernment enables civil servants and politicians to
roam free of the confines of the town hall and engage directly with citizens on the
streets or in their homes and with businesses on their own premises, whilst always
being in touch with the intelligence and knowledge they need in the back-office.
Second, the technology is helping to turn the public sector outside-in by inviting
commercial, civil and constituent actors inside to participate in designing and
delivering services as well as providing them with tools to join in the making of public
policy and decisions.
Gartner is now indeed talking about a move from joined-up to ‗mashed-up‘
government, driven by the less visible aspects of Web 2.0 which could enable a new
process of intermediation whereby public information and services are mashed up by
third parties that are better capable of responding to constituent needs. (Di Maio
2007b). The more visible aspects of Web 2.0 are communities and social computing
(wikis, blogs, etc.), whilst the less visible are related to the architectural approach that
Web 2.0 promotes implying a shift from service-oriented architecture (SOA) to web-
oriented architecture (WOA). Much of the information and many of the services
governments put online could be available for use and re-use using such an
approach, enabling greater composability of services in a variety of different contexts.
In other words both services and information should be designed for ‗mashability‘,
i.e. mash-ups leveraging content and logic from many web sites and web
applications. The content created, owned and administered by the public sector could
thus be re-used and made available to constituents and third parties for use as they
wish. (Di Maio 2007b, Osimo 2008)
Another view is that governments are essentially vertically integrated
monopolistic organisations which need breaking up.6 This can be depicted in Figure
8, which shows government (above the horizontal stippled line) as an actor
responsible for setting policy, rules and regulation and perhaps much of the funding.
The critical question is how do we strengthen government‘s leadership abilities to
manage this successfully and the plurality of other actors involved below the line in
these different situations?
Figure 8: The government value chain

Source: Andrew Pinder, former eEnvoy to the UK Prime Minister, 2008.
Generic model Model 1 Model 2
Policy, regulation
level – i.e.
government
(centralised)
The line dividing

government
from other actors in
service delivery
Well Poorly
Service delivery & endowed
consumption (de- Endowed
constituents, constituents
centralised)
including business
6
Interview with Andrew Pinder (7 May 2008), former eEnvoy to the UK Prime Minister, 1998-
2003, responsible for eGovernment.
26
Below the line is the whole array of different actors designing, producing and
delivering services (and other forms of public value). This could include other parts of
the public sector (for example civil servants and professional service personnel at
local level), the private sector, the civil and voluntary sector, constituent groups, and
intermediaries of all types. It is also below the line that public services may get mixed
into private services – e.g. through banks, supermarkets, voluntary groups, etc. In
model 1, actors below the line are likely to be private sector and commercially
orientated, whereas in model 2 actors may be more civil sector, social entrepreneur
and (local) public sector orientated. The point is to open up governance and enable
different actors to be involved in performing governance functions, including
designing and delivering services, even for poorly endowed groups.
This could involve forms of choice and even competition, and is essentially a
de-centralised approach which is, of course, just a form of service personalisation.
The dividing line in essence shows the balancing point between centralisation and
de-centralisation, and between top-down and bottom-up. The different models 1 and
2 in Figure 8 are simply a form of (crude) constituent segmentation, and can also be
seen as specific examples of business models (or value chains) to meet the specific
needs of the different groups. (See also section 3.5 and section 5.1) With the
founding of the welfare state, many EU countries started with government doing
everything (i.e. the line was very low down), but this is changing now as government
becomes more open and porous. Future governance of the public realm is thus not
about the public sector or government alone, but about an interacting society in
which public, private and civil sectors, as well as constituents, all contribute without
clear boundaries.
A second horizontal stippled line could be added to Figure 8 at the
‗government‘ end in order to separate out the politicians from the professionals,
7
the dividing line between whom is often not sufficiently clear in practice. In this
context, there are increasing moves towards constitutions and charters, for example
for the UK National Health Service, perhaps as a renewed form of ‗social contract‘.
This would set out the distinctive and complementary rights and responsibilities of
politicians, professionals and citizens, so that politicians determine the framework but
the professionals (from any sector) determine the details in different situations and at
the frontline, and manage service tailoring and delivery with a large degree of
freedom.8 (See also section 4.5 in relation to target setting and measurement.)
All this leads to the blurring of roles and jurisdictions of many actors, for
example through increasingly borderless eGovernance, who are now becoming
involved in areas of competence previously the preserve of the public sector or
specific agencies alone. Broster (2008) sees the blurring of relationships and roles
between administrations, businesses and citizens as one of the main trends in
eGovernment towards 2015.
Government‘s roles, relationships and responsibilities are thus blurring and
intertwining, both internally but also in relation to other agencies. The public sector is
becoming, instead of always the sole actor, just one player in a new form of ‗open-
source governance‘ in which it may only play the role of arbiter, coordinator, funder,
and regulator for the activities of others in delivering public value. This can also be
seen as a move to ‘arms-length’ governance, in which (semi) autonomous
agencies are governed by constitutions and charters rather than directly by
government decisions. For example, many public agencies in the UK already have
day-to-day autonomy in order to fulfil their charter as best they can, and active
consideration is currently being given to provide the UK‘s National Health Service
with a similar arms-length constitution, together with its many private and civil sector
partners. This would allow the longer-term policy and funding framework to be set
and controlled centrally by government (perhaps also including standards and
targets) but devolve operational independence to the front-line. These sorts of
governance arrangements can also be useful politically for governments by removing
direct responsibility for delivering services.
7
Interview with Graham Colclough (7 May 2008), CapGemini.
8
Interview with William Perrin and colleagues (5 June 2008),Transformational Government Unit,
UK Cabinet Office
27
3.5 Business model and value chain innovation
Some of the main sources of innovation in the knowledge-based economy are
new business models and value chains (Economist, 2007), and this is likely also
to apply increasingly to the public sector in the future. Public sector innovation should
seek to develop new and better ways to fulfil the functions of government, especially
delivering services, where the main focus will be to provide both cost-efficient
services from the government perspective, but which are also highly effective as far
as constituents are concerned. This means finding new ways to link together the
skills, know-how, resources and competencies of the different actors (public, private,
civil, as well as constituents themselves) to provide joined-up and combined
services. This often also implies joined-up processes, tasks and structures between
these actors.
This can be related to the trend towards networked governance and the sharing
of data, resources, services and control but with local adaptation (see section 3.3). In
this model, central governments or agencies provide overall frameworks of policy,
regulation, standards and perhaps finance, and let those delivering services at the
front-line determine precise configurations to meet actual need, including innovative
ways to organise and develop new business models. Here the trend tends to be
strong universal standards but open devolved structures. (See, however,
sections 4.5 and 5.1 where how we think of standards and targets is changing from
process and output-related to the more ‗open standards‘ based on impact and
constituent value.)
This so-called ‗localised modularisation‘ has been very successful in the
private sector at delivering big cost reductions and quality improvements, and is an
example of business model innovation which is far more successful than
conventional product/service or process innovation. (Economist, 2007, p.6). An
analogy is also given from the automobile industry which used to be large and
hierarchically organised. Paul Horn, ex head of research at IBM reports on: ―the
decomposition of the vertically integrated business model: car firms were once very
integrated but now they don‟t make anything – they‟re integrators in a „value net‟.‖
(Economist, 2007, p.10). These new business models also link directly to the idea of
open innovation (or open source innovation), particularly when constituents and the
civil sector are brought into the design and production of services (see also section
5.2). Here, an even more important factor than money is the culture within which
innovation takes place, both in terms of the culture of collaboration (cf. the Linux and
similar phenomena in the software industry), as well as the social culture within which
services are used and which often seems to defy top-down business logic (for
example, the very unexpected explosion of SMS services).
An important aspect of business model innovation in the public and civil sectors
(which may not always apply to the private sector) is an analysis of costs and
benefits along the whole value chain, rather than just one part of it. This is
because, although some actors may incur greater costs than benefits, the reverse
may be the case for others, and that overall there is likely to be a clear net benefit for
the constituent in the form of increased personal or private value. One issue then
becomes how the different players share the costs and benefits along the value
chain, and how they negotiate this contractually and legally, for example through
service agreements. This is now increasingly seen as an ‘ecosystem’ of actors and
resources, combining and re-combining for different and changing tasks, for
example by using Web 2.0 mash-ups to create highly specific and targeted services.
(Economist, 2007, United Nations, 2008).
Although the concept and roll-out of digital business ecosystems is beginning
to get underway in the private sector, their application to the public sector is not yet
on the agenda. A digital business ecosystems model sees a business or economic
landscape (whether or not spatially defined) like a biological ecosystem which is self-
organising, evolutionary and adaptive, and where the survival of the system as a
whole is more important than individual entities. These ideas draw upon the notion of
‗complex adaptive systems‘, which like the ecosystem model also derives from the
natural selection metaphors of survival of the fittest and diversity. In addition,
however, they allow for a public sector role if it too can be creative, self-organising
and innovative and thus provide a conducive milieu to help find the ‗sweet-spot‘
balance between too much bottom-up chaos and too much top-down control and
order. Finding the sweet spot means enjoying the advantages of both a centralised
controlled approach and decentralised uncontrolled approach, while avoiding the
28
disadvantages of each. For example, although this is ultimately a political question,
minimum standards must be guaranteed while avoiding bureaucratic homogeneity
and unresponsiveness; local needs must be taken into account while avoiding
parochial and isolationist tendencies. Standardised centrally-agreed structures
ensure overall efficiency, a minimisation of negative externalities and transparency,
whilst local adaptation delivers on the ground impact and subsidiarity. (See also
section 3.2)
The digital business ecosystem approach is, in essence, one step on from the
networked approach which in this context can be described as two dimensional and
characterised by fairly routine, or (semi) rigid and pre-determined, relationships and
task execution. (As would be the case, for example, when service level agreements
are entered into as part of networked governance arrangements between different
public sector levels, as described in section 3.3.) A digital business ecosystem, on
the other hand, is described as three dimensional and operating through 360
degrees, for example in merging processes across back-offices in ways which may
be invisible to formal analysis. This creates an ecosystem as an ‗organism‘, flexibly
composed of different formal units (such as firms), able to carry out processes and
functions by temporarily and automatically linking between and disengaging from
electronic ‗hooks‘ within the ICT system of each unit, in order to respond in real time
to unpredictable tasks as they arise. Very often middleware is at the core of such an
ecosystem, for example using a peer-to-peer (P2P) platform specially designed to
enable businesses to create, integrate and operate with both real-world and software
services for SMEs. This takes place on an Internet-based intelligent distributed
infrastructure as a free common platform, using open source software and open
standards, in which no one firm can dominate, thus offering equal status between
companies.
A future vision of a digital business ecosystem is one where it is able to evolve
into a distributed cognitive system, engineered to embed mechanisms of evolution
and adaptation to local needs and cultures, whose content is democratically and
socially constructed, and that enables the participation of small producers of
knowledge and services. Seen from this perspective, the digital business ecosystem
clearly offers a new type of business model which could become an important
approach for the public sector in the future in creating and delivering both content
and services. (European Commission 2007b). The major barrier to this, however,
seems to be Europe‘s long administrative history and administrative inertia. For
example, in the Netherlands there are six official layers of administration dating back
to Napoleon, and since then a trend has arisen to include new informal layers. The
big challenge therefore is how these informal layers, which could be multiplied,
mashed-up and made almost invisible by a digital business ecosystem approach,
interact with formal administrative law and institutions in the public sector. 9 (See also
resource and service sharing and cross-selling in section 3.3)
Networking between public, private and civil sector actors, results in the
outsourcing of many public sector functions and services along specific value
chains. The massive reduction in transaction costs enabled by ICT allows functions
to be shared and centralised (or insourced) within the public sector itself (such as
payroll and personnel functions, IT services, etc.) or outsourced to a private
company, often in another part of the country or even across international borders.
Thus, agencies (whether public pr private) which specialise in certain functions, can
offer these at much greater cost-efficiencies, and in principle at a higher quality, than
retaining all functions in house. This enables a given public sector agency to focus on
its core competence of delivering public value. One challenge arising from this,
however, could be that the public sector will be confronted with the simultaneous loss
of knowledge and control over basic processes and over the competencies, decisions
and policies needed to support these and which lie at the basis of all public services.
We need to better understand which aspects of the public sector‘s activities can
and/or should be codified and commoditised (for example through ICT) and
outsourced or ‗networked‘ with other actors, and which should be retained in-house
under public (democratic) control for the purpose of increasing overall personal and
public value.
These are issues which, in a fundamental way, address the future mandate
and competence of the public sector. For example, it may be that aspects such as
9
Interview with John Kootstra and colleagues (9 May 2008), the Netherlands.
29
high level (tacit) knowledge, intelligence, management, policy-, decision- and rule-
making and control should be retained in-house and subject to the democratic
process. These are assets which cannot themselves be codified by ICT, though can
be powerfully supported by ICT systems. The role of the public sector may be to
retain competence and control over these high-level issues in the public interest and
with the public good and public value in mind. The danger of not doing so could be
that the public sector, as we understand it today, could disappear or shrink to a rump
of only doing things which the market is not interested in, whilst everything is
commoditised, outsourced and privatised, or passed to the whim and partiality of
charitable organisations. Such developments are already apparent in the USA. This
could be one of the biggest challenges to public service and to the public
service ethic as we know it in Europe today.
Arising from this is the challenge of who in the future will take account of the
collective public value interest? It should be noted that using these technologies to
support the optimisation and interoperability of ICT and information resources
amongst and between all actors could also impact the overall governance and
service strategy, in terms of actor partnerships, financing, the use or otherwise of
market principles and offering constituents choice of channels and services. Different
actors come with different expertise and strategic interests. For example, the private
sector is likely to be strong in the effective use of ICT for driving forward efficiency
and raising standards, as well as in cutting costs and increasing output values. The
civil and community sector is likely to be less capable in using ICT but often couples
a social service ethos with local knowledge and resources. The public sector itself
has the responsibility to develop services not just to serve immediate constituent
need but also to implement wider societal policies (i.e. to deliver public value), to set
and maintain service standards regardless of location or group, and to ensure that no
one is excluded, particularly the weakest and poorest members of society, which the
private sector need not address.
The question is thus raised as to whether the public sector should have a
‗monopoly‘ over ‗public‘ services and governance? What is a ‘public’ service? What
is it, indeed, about the notion of ‗public‘ which makes such services different from
other services? One conventional response would be that ‗public‘, or government,
services are all those services which ‗need‘ to be provided but which the private
sector either cannot or will not provide because, for example, of market failure.
Another response would include the contention that, even if the private sector would
provide such services, the public sector is better at doing so, or can more readily
promote public value. As can be seen, however, even though such a discussion is
useful it is also likely to raise more questions than it answers. According to Vibert
(2001), government should only exercise authority when it has a ‗comparative
advantage‘ (over the private sector) in doing do.
Such debates may, however, be overshadowed if not overtaken by
technological and market developments. There is some evidence that we are on the
edge of a major move towards the commoditisation of business processes
(Davenport, 2005), and that this will also profoundly affect the public sector in the
next five to ten years. All types of business processes, not just in relation to services,
but also from developing software, to hiring personnel, even to policy-making, are
being analysed, standardised and routinised, and this knowledge is being codified
and facilitated by ICT. This could lead to process commoditisation and outsourcing
on a massive scale.
There are important issues to do with accountability, transparency and
simplicity surrounding plural governance. Whilst engaging with other actors, the
public sector must maximise transparency and openness for promoting trust,
accountability and democracy. Accountability needs to be inbuilt, so that if things go
wrong it is clear who is responsible and how the situation is resolved. Simplicity is
also essential both because governments, unlike the private sector, must serve all
citizens regardless of ability or resources, but also because, even where back-end
systems are complex as they often are, this maximises understanding and
awareness as part of the democratic process.
30
3.6 ICT challenges of plural and partnership
governance
Existing or new ICT technology, which could be adapted or developed to enable
plural and partnership governance, is described below. For each of these, Table 1
attempts to map their likely relevance for the major trends and transformations
identified in this section. This is an indicative assessment only and shows that most
of the technologies could have wide relevance.
Table 1: Technology matrix for plural and partnership governance
Integrated Centralisa- Open & Business

Networked
& joined-up tion vs. de- porous model & value
gover-
gover- centrallisa- gover- chain
nance
nance tion nance innovation
Pan-European
eGovernment
ontology     
components
Exchangeable &
modular building     
blocks
Alignment of law,
regulations,
organisational     
structures, etc.
Technological
models of legislation     
& regulation
Resilience &
security     
Common data
models     
Government
Interoperability     
Frameworks
Single window
interface     
Social software &
networking   
Open source &
open standards   
Semantic web   
One-stop-shop
interfaces   
There is a need to identify and provide the components for an appropriate

pan-European eGovernment ontology, based on semantic web
functionalities, which can work with and across existing ontologies and form the
standard (or set of standards) for existing and future pan-European services
and functions which are also compatible with existing and future national and
regional/local services.
There is a need to develop technological, ontological/semantic, organisational,
legal, and cultural building blocks of an appropriate European eGovernment
enterprise architecture, also compatible with service oriented architecture
(SOA) approaches This should enable the different agencies to build new
applications and services for their own specific needs, but which are also
interoperable with those of other agencies, without compromising future
interoperability. This set of building blocks should be exchangeable and
modular, so as to be future compliant and enable the architecture and
ontologies to be reusable. The modules need to be capable of further
development without reinventing existing objects, services and terminologies.
31
To enhance flexibility, a set of modules could provide an agreed core or base
layer which could then be extended with layers for adaptations to national, local
or sectoral needs. Interoperability and compatibility by design needs to be built-
in from the start.
Sets of compatible ontologies should take account of all relevant organisational
structures and roles, procedures, information sharing requirements, etc., in the
different EU languages and public sector traditions. Whilst the paramount value
in the front-office constituent view is simplicity as well as functionality, in the
back-office it is efficiency. This will involve the alignment of law, regulations,
organisational structures, technology, socio-economic outcomes, etc. One
example, is the need for interoperable electronic documents and their mutual
recognition at a pan-European level, such as ensuring that a birth certificate
electronically produced in Austria and sent to a citizen in Belgium is authentic
and thus legally recognised and acted upon in Belgium. A second example
would be whenever a law or regulation is altered, or when user expectations
and obligations change, the other parameters need to change automatically
and the ICT system needs to be automatically aligned. An automatic change
propagation process is required, embedded in the technology and built on a
repository of generic models and templates, but also one which is capable of
being transparent and overridden.
Legislation is often crafted without consideration as to how it is to be
implemented and/or supported by ICT, and this can lead to high profile
‗technology‘ failure, but in reality is more often associated with legislation /
regulations that do not readily lend themselves to implementation in current
technologies. (This is as much a lesson for the ICT industry - which must not
over-promise - as it is for government - which must work within the art of the
feasible.) The need, therefore, is to research tools and technologies that can
automatically build a technological models of current legislation and
regulation (recognising that different administrations will have different sets of
laws and rules), and can offer information about the impact that changes /
additions / deletions to the legislative environment will have on the technological
environment that will be needed to support the implementation and enforcement
of new laws. (For example, the UK's Child Support Act - designed to ensure that
‗absent‘ parents contributed to the support of their children - set out to be
scrupulously ‗fair‘ by recognising every small change of personal circumstance
and then changing the payments due accordingly. The result was chaos. The
law was changed to ‗simplify‘ the situation, but that only made things worse as
there were now two sets of rules.)
The resilience and security of eGovernment systems across and between
levels and Member States is a major issue for eGovernment and requires
robust ICT systems capable of handling, for example, extremely high demand
peaks or intensive cyber attack (as in Estonia in early 2007).
A common data model approach is needed which is independent of services
and this can be achieved within an SOA context to tackle back-office
fragmentation. The internal and external data vision needs to be distinct in order
to preserve service independence and the freedom of services to move to
another architecture, for example using intentional programming and
semantically-rich software.
Interoperability and standards need to evolve from a national level Government
Interoperability Frameworks (GIF) to a European Interoperability Framework
(EIF), such as the EIF2 current being put in place, but also to a Global
Interoperability Framework. Gartner (2007) indeed calls for such a GIF which
should be developed and implemented in cooperation with other sectors,
including the private sector in order to make eServices from both private and
public sectors interoperable.
Because the constituent (citizen or business) is not interested in who fulfils a
function or delivers a service, the public sector needs to both appear and
function though a fully joined-up and unified, ‗single-window’ interface. A
citizen should be able to simply express a wish from any place and at any time,
and the appropriate service should be composed and delivered automatically.
Semantic technologies need to take account of user controlled social software
and networking applications, such as Web 2.0, for example in the context of a
32
shared semantic space (SSS). These include, first, socially-built ontologies
which can be effective and feasible in building shared ontologies from the
bottom-up. Second, the discussion on semantic web and metadata questions
the feasibility of a heavy top-down approach to building metadata. In other
words, semantic applications should include socially-based bottom-up ontology
building processes (such as tagging and folksonomies) and automatic metadata
building.
Appropriate open source and open standards will be essential ingredients of
a pan-European eGovernment space, so that technology should be created
which is independent of a particular application or context. Open standards are
likely to be the way forward for multiple actor involvement in service design
which is characteristic of the public sector in Europe.
Semantic web has been a relative failure to date because of the need for high
data throughput and clear ontologies which do not yet exist. This is due to the
multitudinous nature of European public sector traditions, cultures and
administrations which requires significant ‗wriggle room‘ in meanings and
semantics to accommodate these differences. There is a clear and ambitious
research challenge in looking at the cross-agency and cross-border issues and
how semantic web can overcome this problem, for example in relation to
(selected) information, data, business processes and services, where legally
possible and necessary for identified needs.
In maximising simplicity, simple interfaces to constituents are required. For
example, the ‗one-stop-shop‘ philosophy may evolve to a ‗one-click-shop‘ or
‗one-touch-shop‘ philosophy through highly adaptable and intuitive interfaces
which are driven by the user or his/her agent Thus, simplicity, flexibility and
choice are key concepts, with any complex systems related to different
agencies hidden to users, although still capable of being invoked for
transparency purposes. The aim is to hide the technology and focus on the
user‘s interaction with and benefit from the service whoever provides, but where
the hidden technology can facilitate the fine tuning of services and provide
natural interfaces to meet fully individualised needs.
33
4 Performance governance
The performance governance transformation concerns the requirement to develop highly efficient and
innovative processes and practices within the public realm to prioritise adaptive capacity, minimise
costs, and maximise benefits realisation, in order to support the production of public value. Important
here are leadership, skills and ways of working, organisational change, and the management of change,
knowledge and risk. New ways of managing and measuring performance are also important.
4.1 Leadership, skills and working practices

An innovative public sector performance strategy implies that government
must be highly efficient and effective, and able to rapidly respond to new situations
and needs as they arise. This implies significant public sector transformation, but for
many reasons related to institutional history, national and regional cultures, political
realities, civil servant working practices and culture, etc., this is often the most difficult
to reform in order to achieve real efficiency benefits. (Millard & Kubieck, 2004) The
pressure to achieve budget reductions, or at least budget consolidation, is often a
driving force behind the introduction of new technologies coupled with new
management philosophies and techniques in public administration. In the short term,
budget restrictions may often prove to be an obstacle since considerable sums have
to be invested in technical infrastructure, in the reorganisation of business processes
and in staff training. Thus, the introduction of new systems and processes is often
initially linked with additional costs, without any clear cost-cutting potential emerging
at the same time. In such cases, Return on Investment (ROI) can appear to be low or
non-existent, but there are now many examples where cost reductions have been
experienced quite quickly, thereby showing significant ROI benefits. (European
Commission 2005, Cap Gemini 2004, Millard 2003)
Leadership in the public sector tends to be of three main types: political,
strategic and administrative leadership, and all three are necessary. The leadership
practices of a society are embedded in the practices of institutions and evolve with
them. This is why changes in how the institutions of business, education, government
and social services operate matter, and why leadership, the energy that enables
such change, is so important. Champions of change can be decisive, especially if
they are administratively or politically powerful, in order to drive forward agendas,
galvanise support, bang heads together (particularly when it comes to breaking down
silos) and inspire colleagues and subordinates.
Public sector staff, being in the frontline of public sector modernisation and
transformation, need to adopt flexible working in a manner which also improves the
quality of their work and their working lives. Both services and civil servant tasks are
becoming more ‘routinised’, as well as at the same time more specialised and
differentiated. Services and tasks which manipulate, match and mine data, and which
require access to information and systematised intelligence, are likely to become
codified and automated by technology, resulting in the squeezing out of many human
service contacts and human tasks. Those that remain can be very flexibly
undertaken, in different locations and at different times (for example, as telework or
eWork), and can result in increasing pressures on staff to work anyplace and
anytime, so that appropriate work-life balance policies may need to be instigated.
The automation of routine tasks, however, could also lead to the remaining
customer-facing service components and jobs to focus on activities which humans
are innately better equipped to do than machines. Fortunately, such tasks still appear
to encompass a large potential area of growth in terms of numbers and quality,
revolving around the use and creation of implicit and tacit knowledge. These
areas include care, teaching, consulting, counselling, advising, controlling and
coordinating, decision- and policy-making, creating, innovating, brainstorming,
empathising, socialising, etc. In each case, of course, such human-based services
and work will increasingly be strongly supported and facilitated, but not taken over, by
powerful technology systems. The uncertainty is, of course, that the boundary
between what can be codified and captured by technology and what cannot is
constantly moving. What we think of today as ‗routine‘ is part of a dynamic cycle in
which new knowledge, services and tasks are created whilst older ones are
34
‗routinised‘. Thus, the boundary between what machines do best and what people
do best is constantly shifting, as both change, also in response to each other.
Although the challenges of innovation and change in the public sector are
daunting, given the resilience of government institutions and their historical legacies,
the new potential and opportunities are even more profound and urgent. This is not
least because of the drive to ‗do more for less‘ and do it better, or to become ‗twice
as good for half as much‘10, and the tremendous pressures building for greater quality
and greater service personalisation. Governments‘ adaptive and innovative
capacities need to be vastly improved, and the new governance models will requite
new strategies for institutional transformation and a much better understanding of
how to create an innovation culture in public administration.
While eGovernment represents a vehicle for improved performance and service
delivery, this can also be seen as just the most recent step in a more evolutionary
process of public sector reforms. Pressures for government-wide action and
responses also partially build on previous reforms in the public sector dating back to
the 1980s, particularly those associated with the movement known as New Public
Management (NPM). Indeed, today‘s focus on customer and citizen-centric service
and governance is partly owed to NPM and its business-inspired management
flexibility and wherever possible market and competitive forces. (United Nations
2008, Dunleavy 2005)
In this context, the role of government staff is critical to new governance,
especially the skills, mindsets and ways of working of civil servants, and some
predict we will see the rise of the ‘wiki‘ workplace in the future as the ‗Net-Generation‘
comes of age. ((Tapscott, Williams & Herman 2007)) It will also be important to
transform the middle and upper levels of the civil services to become sophisticated
knowledge managers. All this implies more purposive change management at all
levels, so that the collective psychology, the organisational culture, steering and
management methodologies, all require proactive management to meet the 2020
challenges. This also relates to the participation of non-government actors from the
private and civil sectors, as well as constituents themselves.
New types of flexible skills and competencies (including ICT basic, advanced
and use skills) are required when the new forms of work and work organisation are
introduced within the public administration in the context of modern management
techniques. Much work undertaken by civil servants is increasingly being organised
on a ‗project‘ basis, i.e. individuals or teams are given a specific task or project, some
resources, quality requirements and a deadline. How, where and when the work is
carried out in detail, as long as these requirements are met, is left to the workers
themselves, although within standard frameworks depending on the precise context.
All this requires new skills in self management, resource use, etc. Coping with the
extra responsibility, and perhaps stress, this can cause needs to be acquired as a
skill in its own right. Although many work processes remain routine, most workers are
being exposed to these new demands on their abilities.
ICT often has a somewhat paradoxical effect on work skills and competencies,
requiring simultaneously both more and less independence on the part of the
individual worker. On the one hand, ICT contributes to placing more responsibility on
individuals to enhance their own skill profiles, especially in contexts where there is
more independent working (including at a geographical distance through telework or
eWork), and where each employee has specific responsibility to complete her or his
work successfully. On the other hand, the complex nature of new types of work, and
the knowledge needed to successful complete it, often requires greater inter-working,
cooperation and team work, i.e. more reliance on others both within and outside the
organisation.
Modern working conditions, including those in the public sector, therefore
require mixes of generalised and more advanced skills and competencies. In a fast
changing work environment, with a wide variety of work forms and contractual
arrangements, there is an increasing need for individuals to take greater
responsibility for their own work and skills development. This includes fostering
abilities like self-organisation and management, inter-personal skills, dealing with
unexpected rather than routine situations, greater initiative and self reliance, etc.
10
Interview with Graham Colclough (7 May 2008), CapGemini.
35
Related to this are issues of learning and training, and of career and personnel
development.
4.2 Public sector innovation and transformation

Together with ICT, new types of leadership, working and skills are necessary to
support process innovation in the public sector. As in the private sector, innovation
can be seen to go through at least three life-cycle stages: early stage (process
innovation), medium stage (product and service innovation), and late stage
(organisational innovation). (Millard 2006a) In the first and earliest stages of adoption
of new technologies and techniques, the innovation focus tends to be very much on
process innovation during which existing things are done cheaper, faster and better,
typically through so-called BPR (business process re-engineering), resulting in
increased efficiency and productivity. Process innovation tends to reduce
employment by increasing productivity. This is a type of ‗cost-driven‘ innovation, and
can be seen in the public sector, although often lagging behind their private sector
counterparts, in which BPR tends to be seen through back-office reorganisation,
workflow automation using new technology, and improved cost-benefit ratios where
benefits may also include intangible public value goods.
The second (medium) stage is product and service innovation. Once some
experience of the impact and usability of new technologies and techniques has been
gained, innovation starts to focus more on doing new things rather than just doing
existing things better. Product innovation (both new tangible products and new
services) can typically lead to supply leadership, and, in the case of truly radical
product/service innovations, can even create totally new types of supply chain. This
is a type of ‗user-driven‘ innovation informed by constant inputs of user intelligence
and knowledge (rather than R&D), partially derived from constituent behaviour data in
which case it can be codified and automated within data warehouse and data mining
systems, though it also needs to be interpreted in the context of strategic decision-
making. In the public sector, constituent input to service design is becoming
increasingly important in both service design and use stages, as when based on
citizen-relationship-management (CRM) in which services are tailored to individual
citizens and/or new services are designed on the basis of strong user demand or
input. (See section 5) Also important here is the significant burgeoning of new public
information and knowledge derived from constituents (citizens and businesses), as
well as from within the public sector itself, leading to the creation of new knowledge
and new valuable content which has both economic and public value.
The third stage is organisational innovation and transformation. In this late
and most mature stage, in addition to doing new things, the new technologies and
techniques have penetrated sufficiently deeply into organisational structures and
cultures that innovation results in new organisational arrangements and forms, both
internally within given organisations as well as between organisations. This can result
not just in new service environments but in completely new business models and
value chains, as well as new governance arrangements involving public, private and
civil sector entities. (See section 3.5)
When the public sector innovates and changes in this way, modernisation and,
indeed, transformation need to impact organisational and institutional arrangements,
often resulting in much flatter structures and looser relationships held together by
ICT and knowledge sharing. This includes appropriate constitutional and political
frameworks, legal and regulatory conditions, and mindsets and cultures which give
rise to appropriate behaviour (including ethically) in the context of open and
transparent government. Transformation is also needed at the management and
administrative level, for example in terms of coordination, decision-making, managing
change, personnel management, the management of ICT and other resources, and
risk management.
In its seminal review of eGovernment as a tool for transformation, the OECD
(2007, p.12) defines public sector transformation as ―the set of processes leading to a
change in the features of the public sector from a static organisation-driven model to
a dynamic user-driven model. It is about creating the environment and the basic
conditions for continuous adaptation to changing demands and contexts.―
The next challenge to public sector modernisation, according to the OECD,
is to move beyond improving the functioning of individual silos of government to
improving the performance of government as a whole. Users, whether they are
36
citizens or businesses, do not care about the structure of and division of labour within
the public sector. They want appropriate help when needed. Transformation of the
public sector is also about creating a coherent system of public services that best
meets the needs of users. An increasing number of OECD countries are therefore
looking at ways to deliver networked, joined-up, or seamless government by
transforming traditional administrations into collective multi-facetted bodies which act
as single entities towards citizens and businesses. In order to achieve this vision,
eGovernment tools, along with more traditional change levers, are needed to enable
governments to innovate, to better allocate internal resources, and change working
methods and cultures in order to work more efficiently and effectively.
To do this, governments need to focus on a ‘seamless’ government approach
based on the sharing of services, processes and information/data within
government to avoid duplication and error, and to increase coherency, efficiency and
innovation of services. Such sharing remains, for many, a sensitive topic given fears
of ‗Big Brother‘ government. While in the past information and data sharing were
seen as purely technical or ‗machinery‘ issues, they now takes on major governance
implications with strategic and political impact (OECD, 2007a, pp 7-8):
Who owns the information and data, and therefore who dictates what
information and data are collected, how long they are held, and who has
access to them?
Who benefits from information and data sharing? And who pays for it?
How is access, consent and recourse (in cases of abuse) managed?
Who defines information and data standards in order to practically enable
the sharing of information and data?
Only by answering these questions can governments and citizens make
informed choices about if and when information and data should be shared, what
data should be shared, and what are the limits of information and data sharing.
4.3 Knowledge management and organisational

learning
Although public administrations, like private sector companies, are increasingly
pressured to provide continuous learning for individual employees in order match the
fast changes taking place in a more competitive environment, they also need to
enhance organisational learning, i.e. the management of knowledge in an
organisation and between complementary organisations. (OECD 2001) Only if
organisations are able to systematically preserve and exploit the collective and
interchangeable know-how of their workforce, thereby reducing the threat posed by
departing employees as well as ensuring that the efficiency and effectiveness
potential of the organisation is fully exploited, will they be inclined to invest in training
activities.
The public sector is also facing a ‗talent crunch‘ with large numbers of existing
civil servants expected to retire in the next ten years, so there will be a real challenge
in not only recruiting skilled workers but also preserving and enhancing
organisational wisdom. The new ‗Net-Generation‘ of workers expected by Tapscott et
al (2007) will both demand new ways of working and provide some of this talent, but
will probably be insufficient in numbers to meet demands. In the private sector, some
innovative companies are already experimenting with ‗reverse mentoring‘ where
younger net-savvy employees are paired with senior (often older) executives in order
both to improve top level awareness and decision making but also to help flatten
organisational structures and disseminate new attitudes to work. In the public sector,
middle management is likely to resist such changes and any attempts to by-pass
traditional career paths and hierarchical lines of command, so they remain a
significant barrier.11
In addition to tackling the talent crunch, the public sector will be expected at the
same time to solve ever more complex societal problems, often of a cross border
nature (environment, security, trade, migration, etc.). A strong trend in future is thus
likely to be growing pressure on the public sector to think not only of its talent inside
the organisation but also of the potential talent outside. In the private sector this is
11
Interview with Anthony Williams and colleagues (28-29 May 2008), nGenera.
37
increasingly happening, for example Proctor and Gamble‘s outsourcing of R&D so
that now some 50% is done by external experts who get paid cash awards for solving
problems. The outside talent consists of people who are not needed full time but
whose activities with other organisations and in other environments provide them with
a wider range of experience and knowledge than they would get if they were
employed full time, making them even more valuable. It is a win-win situation for all.
An example from government, is the ‗Intellipedia‘ approach to US intelligence work
across cooperating agencies.12
A network of government experts across Europe both from complementary
agencies as well as from the private and civil sectors could be used to create teams
to tackle common problems. The public sector talent market could be Europe-wide (if
not global-wide) as it is now becoming in many parts of the private sector. The use of
‗rich user profiles‘ online will facilitate this, as an online interrogable and interactive
CV, including customer, peer and employer ratings for specific tasks or positions. 13
Intelligent data handling and knowledge management will increasingly be
needed to exploit the collective data and knowledge resources of the public sector.
These represent a unique potential, held in trust from society and not available to
other actors, both for their intelligent re-use within the public sector and as products
to be made available to other users. This potentially massive resource of public
sector information could also provide commercial services as business intelligence
for the private sector (for example spatially differentiated demographic data -- see
also section 6.1), and thus become a revenue stream for government, as well as
being shared within the public sector (for example for traffic management).
Knowledge management is closely related to the continuous learning of the
workforce. (Millard, 2006a), and this could be envisaged as a fourth stage innovation,
i.e. changing mindsets and socio-economic norms (cultural and socio-economic
transformation) within high quality and dynamic knowledge and learning
environments. Such innovation is often associated with highly tacit knowledge
activities, i.e. experiential and highly social, often requiring a large degree of inter-
personal contact. It is typically attained through a knowledge transfer process
enabled through the use of learnt norms and conventions among people,
researchers, companies and government. The ‗intangible assets’ involved in such
tacit knowledge generation range from know-how and knowledge (managerial,
scientific, technical, logistical, etc) to networks, trust and goodwill that are valuable
but difficult to measure. This type of innovation is typically also closely linked to the
organisational innovation stage, which is extremely hard to implement, given the long
and entrenched history of the public sector, the large number of often contradictory
interests involved, as well of course of its specific and complex character.
Government needs a well functioning and efficient internal decision-making
process built upon knowledge management, and, in particular, initiatives centred on
new approaches to communication and knowledge sharing, both within individual
agencies and across jurisdictional boundaries. Improving decision-making often
develops in tandem with public sector innovations (as above). New forms of decision-
making are also linked to evidence-based policy making which uses new
knowledge management tools and techniques to design and test policies before they
are implemented based systematically on all relevant information. (See also section
6.1)
4.4 Change management and capacity redeployment

The intelligent use of ICT should be able to support the management of
change and, through this, the re-deployment of capacities and resources in the
public sector, thereby making it more dynamic, efficient and effective. The strategic
goal should be the transformation of government to prioritise the production and
distribution of public value (‗content‘) rather than public administration (‗control‘). This,
in turn implies two transformations (Millard 2003):
A down-sizing (often centralisation) of back-office functions, even up
to national and international levels, exploiting open technical platforms,
12
13
38
comprehensive security systems, interoperability, standardisation based
on knowledge management principles, integrated processes, shared
databases, economies of scale and scope, etc. Steps towards the
centralisation of the back-office function include the ‗middle-office‘ and
‗shared service centres‘. Thus, the back-office becomes smaller and
smarter.
An up-sizing (often de-centralisation) of front-office functions to
provide high quality but relatively simple customised public services,
based on both CRM and data protection principles, related to the
appropriate regional or community level, grounded in local situations,
responding to the large variety of individual needs citizens and businesses
have, and respecting and promoting democracy at all levels – the
subsidiarity principle writ large. Thus, the front-office becomes bigger and
better.
It can be seen that it is not an issue of down-sizing government, as this is firmly
a political decision. But it is a question of a re-balancing government, i.e. from back
to front office, from administration to services, from control to value (content) --
preferably on a planned, continuous and relatively long-term basis. Thus, it may not
be a question of an overall saving of resources, but one of freeing up and re-
deploying resources to areas of government which can better create public value.
(see also Gershon 2004)
The ‗front-office‘ / ‗back-office‘ dichotomy can, however, only take the debate so
far, as many public sector issues cannot be reduced to one or other of these two
categories. For example, is CRM a back-office or front-office function? Clearly it is
both, and there are many such examples. In the sense that the debate is about the
control (back-office) function versus the value/content (front-office) function, there
has of course been a clear separation historically, but as in the future we move
towards ‗intelligent content‘, it will no longer be possible to distinguish between the
two (the content will itself be in control), and the dichotomy will become redundant.
Even though this is probably still ten years or more away, governance will have, to
all intents and purposes, outgrown ‘bureaucracy’, as part of the trend towards
‗post bureaucratic‘ government.
In such re-balances and changes, to what extent is there is a place for market
mechanisms, competition and choice in the public sector? In addressing this
question we need to understand, first, the strong need for driving forward efficiency
and raising standards in the public sector (not least to minimise wasting tax-payers‘
money and to maximise service quality), and the lessons which the private sector can
provide in this context. Second, we need to understand the real and important
differences between the public and private sectors, not least that the public sector
cannot choose its constituents (unlike the private sector), that it has a responsibility to
serve everyone, and the fact that the weakest and poorest members of society
(which the private sector need not address) tend to be those most in need of public
sector services. Although competition and choice can have an important role (Le
Grand 2007), for example in public sector ‗internal markets‘ to improve efficiency and
the quality of inputs and internal services (such as in the UK health service), this is an
extremely contested political area, often dependent on cultural and historical
traditions in a given governance context.
An important challenge is therefore to harness the adaptive capacity of the
enabling state (Bentley & Wilsdon 2003), the capacity to mange change
(Leadbeater, Bartlett Gallagher 2008), and the potential of public organisations to
thereby more directly create public value through flexibility, agility and ‗sense and
respond‘ abilities (Cisco 2007) . The way to do this is by linking processes of
organisational change, within and beyond the formal boundaries of the public sector,
more closely to positive outcomes for constituents. Government must absorb new
capabilities to achieve this. But it must also turn itself inside out, becoming more
responsive and connected to the distributed processes through which social
outcomes produce public value. (Bentley & Wilsdon, 2003).
Although, the need for the public sector to transform and change, as well as be
flexible, innovative, dynamic and adaptable, is clear, government also has a critical
role as the main formal institution which can provide much needed continuity and
stability. This is absolutely necessary for individuals, families and communities to
lead meaningful and peaceful lives. It is also necessary for business in order to give
them a level playing field, and some longer-term certainty about investment and
39
future developments. The stabilising and continuity functions of government need to
be retained and further developed, even within a strategy of a dynamic and
transforming public sector.
4.5 Performance management and public value

Performance governance involves the measurement of performance as a
critical task in order to ensure that objectives and targets set are properly monitored
and realised, or, if not realised, the deviations and reasons are known and can be
tackled. For example, the OECD (2007b) is focusing on collecting core data on
revenue, inputs, processes, institutional arrangements, outputs and outcomes, as
well as measuring productivity and efficiency.
A common and widespread approach to measuring the business case of
eGovernment, as well as of benefits realisation and impacts more generally in
organisations, is the use of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These are high-
level snapshots of a business or organisation based on specific predefined
measures. KPIs typically consist of any combination of reports, spreadsheets, or
charts. They may include national or regional turnove figures and trends over time,
personnel statistics and trends, real-time supply chain information, or anything else
that is deemed critical to the organisation's success. A KPI application such as an
executive portal can give a decision-maker a high-level, real-time view of the health
of the organisation by visually displaying vital statistical information about it.
However, new approaches to measuring eGovernment are being developed
and will become more important in future. A good example is Accenture‘s
performance management approach (Accenture 2007) based on six components:
1. Strategic goals that are aligned with clearly articulated measures of
performance, including improved social and economic outcomes.
2. Ability to reflect evolving stakeholder expectations, political context and
organisational capabilities in goals and objectives.
3. Performance objectives that are linked directly to budgets and plans.
4. Individual employees‘ objectives and incentives that are explicitly
connected to organisational goals.
5. Regular evaluation and reporting of performance results.
6. Feedback into strategic planning with an ability to change course mid-
cycle when performance gaps are revealed.
While these six components of performance management are critical, they
seem not to be sufficient in and of themselves. Thus Accenture recommends
cultivating five enabling organisational practices to improve current performance and
create future public value:
i) Secure active political support and a firm commitment from senior
executives to implement the performance management system and see it
through to the point where continuing improvement is realised.
ii) Establish and maintain a dedicated professional team or unit to plan,
coordinate the implementation of, manage and sustain the performance
management process.
iii) Foster and enable integration and collaboration between departments or
agencies wherever this is needed to deliver intended outcomes.
iv) Encourage open dialogue about organisational results with all
stakeholders by reporting performance management findings as
transparently as local laws and regulations allow.
v) Use the findings of performance management to develop organisational
capability and capacity, continually learn, and drive future performance
improvement.
Up to the mid-2000s, most eGovernment performance benchmarking, including
that sponsored by the European Commission (EC), was focused on measuring the
supply side roll-out of eGovernment services. This is exemplified by the EC‘s
benchmarking of online availability of 20 standard services across EU25 and their
online sophistication, i.e. whether the service permits one-way or two-way interaction
and/or transaction, including for example digital signatures and financial payments.
(CapGemini 2006)
40
However, the focus of attention has shifted dramatically over the last year to
one of service use and take-up and impact rather than only availability. The EC‘s
2003 eGovernment Communication underlined ―the need for further research into the
economics of eGovernment, for a better understanding of costs and assessment of
benefits and performances‖, and commissioned the eGEP study (2006) to develop a
measurement model based on existing impact measurement approaches and as a
tool for performance measurement on a programme and organisational level. This
study has proposed an eGovernment Measurement Framework Model built around
the three value drivers of efficiency, democracy, and effectiveness (Figure 2), and
elaborated in such a way to produce a multidimensional assessment of the public
value potentially generated by eGovernment, not limited only to the strictly
quantitative financial impact, but fully including also more qualitative impacts. See
Figure 9.
Based on this work, a new i2010 eGovernment measurement framework,
endorsed by the EC and Member States in April 2006, was developed for piloting in
2007 and roll-out in 2008, consisting of three main types of indicator:
1. availability and sophistication indicators (existing supply-side indicators
supplemented with qualitative supply indicators focusing on user-centricity)
2. take-up indicators from the Eurostat Household and Enterprises surveys
monitor (for example, Eurostat 2005)
3. impact indicators in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and democracy.
Figure 9: eGEP measurement framework analytical model

Source: eGEP, 2006
There are at present two major trends in target setting and measurement in
eGovernment, both of which can be expected to become much more important in the
future. First, there is increasing emphasis on target setting and measurement higher
up the policy value chain, i.e. moving from a focus on inputs, outputs and
processes to greater concern with outcomes and impacts. This implies a movement
from efficiency to effectiveness and thence to governance in Figure 2, although this
does not necessarily mean than the first two are being discarded, rather that all three
policy goals are now being linked and measured more explicitly together as one
system. For example, the European Commission has recently started to measure
eGovernment take-up and citizen centricity (as outcomes) in addition to
eGovernment roll-out (as outputs) which has been the main focus until 2006.
(CapGemini 2007) Similarly, in 2005 the European Commission started for the first
41
time to take initial steps to articulate and measure the broader policy impacts of
eGovernment on competitiveness, growth and jobs. (European Commission 2005,
and see also below).
Second, there is a trend which is not yet widely established but is now being
seriously discussed and piloted in some parts of the public sector. This is to move
both target setting and measurement from centre to local and down the hierarchy:
from central government to local government / local practitioners
from the back-office to the front-office
to front-line staff, whether care or medical professionals, police,
community workers, teachers, etc.
to constituents themselves: individual citizens, families, communities,
localities, businesses and their organisations, etc.
This type of target setting and measurement is using, for example, staff and
user panels to design standards and outcomes, such as person-centric measures of
success in education, health and social care, to complement the top-down and macro
measures of targets and standards provided by central government. (Leadbeater &
Cottam 2008). If public services are to be accountable to constituents, they no longer
need to be accountable only to central government, meaning fewer targets imposed
from the centre, and less emphasis on command and control through centralised
measurement systems. Thus, as control and accountability move from the centre to
the service front-line, and even include the participation of constituents, responsibility
for target setting and measurement also need to be decentralised and devolved.
At face value this implies greater risks through loss of control by central
government, but this is mitigated by a spread of risk to other actors including front-
line staff and constituents themselves. Thus, politicians will share both control and
risk and will not be solely accountable for failure. This will also enable greater risk
taking and better risk management in the public sector which often requires
completely new thinking and much less reliance on centrally imposed standard
targets.
The new approach will be to measure local and specific targets through, for
example, constituent (user) surveys, for which mass collaboration Web 2.0 tools
could probably be used. One of the benefits of such a local, small scale approach is
that it is also more immediate and real time, and reduces the need to ‗wait forever
for the decisive evidence‘. Such an approach is needed as decisions on spending are
devolved down to local front-line level, as well as in many cases to private and civil
sector partners, or even to constituents themselves. This does not mean the end of
central targets or measurement, but attempts to apply targets and measurement to
things that truly matter, i.e. different types of value including the personal and private
value of constituents.
These trends are also likely to see a strong move away from sole reliance on
process targets (such as number of cases handled) towards a focus on
constituent targets, like satisfaction and service fulfilment. This will be a decisive
move away from Weberian bureaucracy, where due process within strict rules was all
important, to allowing detailed front-line adaptation and decision-making within an
overall framework of policy, legal and financial rules. This reflects wider performance
management trends away from process measurement, so that, rather than seeking
results in better processes for their own sake, ensuring that public sector
performance directly and overtly serves public value will become the main focus
of target setting and measurement.
What is likely to happen in practice is a new mix of types of targets and
measures, so, for example, in the health system there could be three sources of data.
First, the administrative hospital data as cold, hard statistics such as discharge dates
and mortality rates. Second, data on clinical judgement, for instance whether the
operation was carried out as planned and successfully. Finally, and most importantly,
the patients‘ point of view on how they were treated (see also section 5.2) , how long
it was before they were able to go home or resume work, and whether the operation
improved their quality of life. To give due weight to each of these subjective and
objective sources of measurement and present the information in a simple, visible but
also accurate manner will be a big challenge. ICT tools will need to be developed not
just to assist in such measurement but also to analyse and present the data. (See
also policy modelling in sections 6.6 and 8.2) Outcome and impact measurement
42
must achieve the dual goal of enabling constituents to make meaningful choices
about the services they access, and professionals to draw conclusions and improve
practice and performance. A third goal is, of course, for governments to develop
better policies to increase public value.
The need for an efficient and effective governance system to support and
enable the wider economy to function successfully is clearly an important component
of public value and thus a main function of government, but the positive impact of
eGovernance on the economy as a whole has only been shown over the last five
years or so. For example, the use of ICT to reduce administrative burdens and
compliance costs for economic actors and to increase the quality of government
services, leads to clear positive impacts on wider economic competitiveness,
growth and jobs. (European Commission 2005, Measure Project 2005, CGEY 2004,
Millard & Kubicek 2004). Perhaps even more important is the improvement of
government performance as an economic actor in its own right facilitated by the
impact of ICT on coordination, funding, resource allocation, policy making, etc. The
economic impact of this is potentially huge, given:
the size of government spending and investment, e.g. on infrastructures
(including ICT), education, health, etc. Government, when seen as a
single entity, is by far Europe‘s biggest economic sector -- overall
government spending across EU15 amounted to 49% of GDP in 2003
that government performance as an employer can be improved by better
coordination with labour markets, wages setting, training, etc. In 2003,
government employment represented 16.7% of total employment in the
EU15
government performance as a purchaser, e.g. through eProcurement, etc..
All of these can produce multiplier effects throughout the economy as a whole
and both directly and indirectly promote competitiveness, growth and jobs. (European
Commission 2005)
A new strong performance driver for public value is likely to be how future
eGovernance can contribute to ‗green ICT‘ and environmental sustainability. As
yet, there has been little focus in this area, although this is set to change. For
example, a very recent UK study showed how eGovernment can lead to significant
cuts in CO2 emissions because people who use the Internet to contact their local
authority do not need to write or drive to council offices. The study provides the
world‘s first quantification of the carbon benefits of online public service delivery, and
debunks the received wisdom that increases in ICT server capacity negate any CO2
savings arising from the Internet economy. (Department for Communities and Local
Government 2008).
In addition, eGovernance can in principle provide four other types of
environmentally sustainable benefits. First, the greater internal efficiency of the back-
office will, in itself, decrease environmental impacts through better resource
allocation, utilisation and re-use. Second, the public sector‘s role as the biggest
economic player in the external economy will become more efficient through such
developments as eProcurement, eInvoicing, etc., and the ability to select ‗green‘
products and services. Third, the public sector‘s role as a provider of societal
services and utilities (including energy, waste disposal and re-cycling, and amenity
provision and management) puts it in the forefront of being able to lead by example.
Fourth, of course, its responsibility for society-wide policy making and regulation
makes government the prime mover in setting sustainability targets, providing
frameworks and means, as well as a whole host of specific incentives (like support
for eco-friendly housing, greater tax on vehicles with low fuel economy and high
emissions, traffic management, road pricing and congestion charging, research into
smart vehicles to reduce accidents and improve traffic flow, etc.). In all these areas,
the use of ICT is highly significant, either as part of the technical solution, or in order
to assist in better planning, policy and decision-making.
st
Further, two major types of sustainability challenge face 21 Century society in
relation to climate change, with governments in the prime position to tackle them.
First, the need to reduce carbon emissions through mitigation schemes that reduce
on carbon production, in line with Kyoto and follow-up agreements. Second, the need
to adapt to climate warming which is and will take place even if we are successful in
reducing carbon emissions over the next thirty years, for example in terms of threats
43
to coastlines and river estuaries, to health and agriculture, as well as to bio-diversity
and landscape.
Public value goals related to social life, quality of life, inclusion, democracy and
participation which arise from the better performance of the governance system are
directly addressed in sections 5 and 6.
In serving public value, there are also other performance challenges which need
to be addressed. For example, governments‘ access to and use of vast data
resources, particularly concerning individual constituents, can pose a ‗big brother‘
threat of an overbearing, intrusive and interfering government. ICT technologies,
instead of or addition to providing higher quality and more responsive services, could
also be used for greater control. CCTV, ambient intelligence, sensors, RFID
technologies and data mining techniques, can enable the government to monitor and
exercise control over the behaviour of citizens. This may be justifiable in order to
prevent risk and crisis (whether crime, terrorism, environmental disaster or even
traffic problems and delays), but too much control could also increase the dis-
empowerment and hence vulnerability of citizens and deprive them of essential
privacy.
Another aspect of vulnerability is the potential for abuse of information. As
more information is stored, there are more possibilities for abuse by government
itself, as well as by criminals and others who obtain illegal access to information. This
threat of improper use of data, and the need to protect privacy where warranted and
agreed (often by legislation or standards) is becoming one of the major issues for
future governance.
Promoting a public service ethic can help reduce such possible abuses.
Relations between moral and political systems are not straightforward, so it is
incumbent on the public sector to maintain and enhance such a moral code amongst
its staff. We should further develop and re-vitalise the existing European public
service ethic of impartial and fair service based on notions of the public good and
public value, into one suitable for the information society and knowledge economy.
This would include recognising that government is not the same as business, even
though it may be able to learn a lot from business (in fact, the learning should work
both ways), and that there is a unique European way of governance which combines
both economic efficiency as well as social cohesion and access for all. Can we
balance a necessary modern public service management approach (behaving like a
business) with a public service ethic in the best sense of that term? This will include
treating constituents not just like customers (where customer relations management
systems are appropriate) but also as citizens and individual human beings, so also
seeing them as tax-payers, voters, recipients of assistance, societal stakeholders,
etc.
New forms of accountability, related to better placement of both rights and
responsibilities as well as from openness and transparency, are also important
public value benefits resulting from better governance performance. (See section 6.5)
This is also related to ethical considerations, which are, both in theory and practice,
highly important in the public realm. In order to cope with these challenges,
government must be negotiable and flexible. It must be possible to trace and track
processes and decisions, even when these have taken place ‗invisibly‘. If things go
wrong, the boundary or balance of power, accountability and responsibility between
government and constituent becomes important, so there also needs to be an open
and fair appeals procedure.
Formal agreements can help and may in fact be legal requirements, such as a
Service Level Agreement (SLA), Local Area Agreement (LAA) or citizen codes
and charters. Many countries are now issuing these in order to specify and
summarise what constituents can expect from government, what their rights and
responsibilities are, what standards they should expect, how to complain and seek
redress, etc. Such codes and charters can relate both to the public sector generally
as well as specifically to eGovernment. A good example is the Netherlands which has
14
published a ten-point eCitizen service code. The basic question addressed in such
codes is what can citizens expect when eGovernment is implemented? Issues
14
The Dutch eCitizen service code, by Matt Poelmanns, Director of the Netherlands eCitizen
Programme, at the European Institute of Public Administration (2005) Workshop ―The
digitisation of European public administrations: what‘s the political dimension of electronic
governance?‖, Maastricht, 1 April 2005.
44
covered range from choice of communication channel, the transparency of the public
sector, personalised, up-to-date and accurate information, as well as citizen access
to all the data the government possesses about them.
4.6 ICT challenges of performance governance

performance governance, is described below. For each of these, Table 2 attempts to
map their likely relevance for the major trends and transformations identified in this
section. This is an indicative assessment only and shows that most of the
technologies could have wide relevance.
Table 2: Technology matrix for performance governance

Leader- Public Knowledge Change Performance
ship, skills sector manage- manage management
& work innovation ment ment & public value
Enterprise 2.0 tools     
Codification of
functions     
Semantic
technologies     
Tools for exploiting
knowledge     
resources
Protecting privacy     
Remote working   
Evidence based
policy making    
Citizen access to
information   
Enterprise 2.0 tools for the sophisticated handling of tacit as well as other
knowledge are not yet fully developed, but could be applied to the large
scale and unique requirements of government. This should enable better
sharing of both codified and informal/tacit knowledge, within and across
organisations
The codification and commoditisation of public sector functions and
services which can be shared or outsourced to other actors (other public
agencies, private, civil or constituent based) through service level or local
area agreements. This will involve innovative new business models for the
design and implementation of public functions and services which can
maximise both efficiency and effectiveness, and provide joined-up and
combined solutions
Managing knowledge assets in government has proven to be a critical
factor in reinventing public administration and facilitating improved service
provision. An enabler of knowledge management in eGovernment is the
use of semantic technologies, which would allow information access and
use based on machine-processable semantics of data. Semantic
technologies can be used to facilitate two critical issues in eGovernment:
(a) supporting change management and agility within the back-office
processes of public administrations; and (b) facilitating the development of
adaptive front-office processes. (Mentzas, 2007)
Tools for exploiting knowledge resources could include tools for
machine translation, process modelling, data mining, pattern recognition
and visualisation and other gaming, simulation and forecasting techniques
for measuring and forecasting socio-demographic changes. The public
sector can act as an innovation actor in its own right, for example by
running large scale societal simulations, such as the movement of people,
commuters, goods and services, and exploiting the GEANT network,
serious game modules and Second Life type approaches.
45
Tools for protecting privacy, for example through automatic authority
checks, authorisation of the right of access to information, monitoring of
how data are used and who is using them, technical measures to separate
data, automatic anonymisation after lapse of time, encryption tools, etc..
There needs to be constant assessment of risks, checks and balances in
this area and, for example, the establishment of trusted third parties.
Providing civil servants or government agents with remote working ICT
tools to access and interrogate knowledge, upload data, and run
prognoses or simulations, using the resources of all relevant public
agencies in order to supply services direct to civil or business communities
in their own environments. Many of the beneficiaries of this approach
would be dis-advantaged citizens and businesses.
Tools for evidence based policy making like social networking Web 2.0
applications and mash-ups can be applied within the public sector to build
powerful and shared visualisation tools, semantic web-based tools for
machine translation, process modelling, data mining, pattern recognition
and visualisation and other gaming, simulation and forecasting techniques,
where the contribution of many individuals in the organisation makes it
possible to address complex and multidimensional policy issues. Also, the
development of future Web 3.0 tools like open and large scale databases,
GRID applications and artificial intelligence, should also be examined.
Citizens and businesses need to gain access to and validate the
information held about them by each government agency and ‗trusted
third party‘ which manages separate fragments of the data relating to
them. Thus, ‗information assurance‘, i.e. which data are held about whom,
shown to whom, and how they are collected, validated, stored, used, and
deleted, needs to be addressed in a public sector context.
46
5 Personalised service production
The strategic transformation needed to maximise the effectiveness of public services focuses on
personalised service production to create personal or private value enjoyed by individual constituents
(defined as single entities such as citizens, communities, groups, localities, companies, sectors, etc.).
The major strategies needed are universal personalisation, self-directed services, and fully inclusive
constituent empowerment over services. Constituent users become full partners with the agencies in
designing, producing and delivering services for their consumption, including through the use of
intermediaries.
5.1 Universal personalisation

How we understand public services and use them, is likely to change
dramatically over the next five to ten years, as society becomes more diverse and
personal aspirations change. As users of services, we are becoming more reluctant
to submit to standardised relationships with large, impersonal organisations. The
more we learn about the factors shaping well-being, life styles and quality of life in the
st
21 Century, the clearer it will be that current services do not always meet these
requirements nor genuinely engage with the particular needs of individual
constituents in providing the personal value they need. (Leadbeater, Bartlett &
Gallagher 2008).
Undheim (2008) has called this ‗user-gap‘ Europe‘s biggest eGovernment
challenge, given that online services are still used by a minority of adults (about 22%)
with so-called ‗user-centricity‘ scores even lower, and Broster (2008) sees the need
for adopting user input and designing user-centric services as one of the main trends
in eGovernment towards 2015.
Demands for public services are increasingly diverse in their expression. Not
only are there new demands but also existing demands require more sophisticated
responses. And, new demands often feed off existing demands – the more access to
knowledge and learning we have, for example, the more likely we are to seek more of
it. To use resources effectively, therefore, services must be personalised. But for
personalised public services to promote public value as well as personal value, they
must also be genuinely universal.
Hence the move to universal personalisation. This needs a new form of
standardisation that moves away from one based on delivery processes and outputs
(such as waiting time for the delivery of a service is one week for all, or that the level
of service quality is homogeneous regardless of who uses it), to one based on public
value outcomes which directly reflect the personal values and needs of the individual
(related, for example, to his or her socio-economic profile, specific situation, context
of service request, role in the service, behaviour, etc.). The move will thus be from
process and output-related standards to more ‗open standards‘ (see also section
3.3) based upon impact and constituent value related standards This also means that
in future public service audits need to be based on outcomes/impacts and not just (as
now) on processes/outputs, which also implies that audits are set in their operational
context and incorporate non-public sector actors, especially constituents and their
intermediaries in service design and measurement. (See section 4.5).
Personalised services represent a step on from user segmentation, in which a
constituent‘s membership of a group determines the service offered, given that an
individual could be a member of many groups requiring services from many agencies
simultaneously. Membership of a group does not capture the precise individual
service need. Personalised services are also a more focused expression of citizen-
centric services (for the latter see cc:eGov 2007) in which the end user‘s interests
and needs are in principle the guiding criteria for designing and delivering services
rather than those of the service provider.
User segmentation, citizen centricity and personalisation can, however, be
extremely costly for the public sector to develop highly nuanced personal welfare
systems. This may be mitigated, however, by increased personal and public value
benefits, as well as closer adherence to statutory and other responsibilities placed on
the public administration. Such strategies may also mean reducing the dis-benefits of
the standardised approach which often result in simply shunting problems from one
47
agency to another, and thereby even compounding future problems through
increased social dysfunction, more anti-social behaviour, etc..
As back offices become more and more integrated by ICT and able to share
data and resources, a growing trend at the front-office is the ability to offer a
personalised service through self-service where the constituent is the initiator of a
service and fully in control of navigation, choice and termination. This could include
facilities for real-time ePayment of fees for permits and licences which the
constituent then receives immediately, or fees for other types of service (like home-
help contributions or refundable deposits for equipment where necessary), thereby
requiring no further action by the constituent.
The same back-office integration also enables the public sector to personalise
services through pro-active services where the government itself initiates actions to
deliver or enhance services. For example, when a constituent is warned that action
could be required, the government can pre-fill data in an application form that it
already possesses to the extent permitted by law, etc. There may be personal
privacy and trust issues arising from such services, of course. A recent car tax
advertisement in the UK from the transport authorities included the statement ―If you
haven‘t paid, we know where you are.‖ Balancing the power of information against
other social and cultural values is becoming a critical issue.15 (See also section 7.5.)
A further possibility is complete automatic service delivery in which the
agency takes full responsibility to initiate, deliver and terminate a service. In this
case, the input and responsibility of the constituent is minimised and may even
disappear altogether, such as the birth of a child automatically triggering regular child
benefit payments, or the automatic allocation of a new tax code because of a tax-
payer‘s new family dependent. Such services are therefore sometimes termed
‗disappearing services‘. (Millard & Kubieck 2004, Cap Gemini 2007).
Pro-active and automatic services are reflections of the increasing recognition
that citizens’ time is not free, although the way services have traditionally been
delivered often assumes it is. Thus, public services should get it right first time, which
implies both that services should be joined-up and also that government needs to
engage with constituents to learn what really matters to them and then act on what
they have learnt. (HM Treasury 2007) However, proactive and automatic services are
clearly not relevant for all types of service, but tend to be restricted to services for
which most if not all necessary data already exist within the public sector, or to which
the public sector has legal access, and often tend to be more routine though not
necessarily simple, services. The responsible agency is thereby able to shift much
responsibility and immediate control away from the constituent, by offering a more or
less complete personalised service without the need for initiation or action by the
constituent. In such a task, the public sector will also face the challenge that some
users do not wish to receive the service, or cannot use it, despite it being offered, or
‗pushed onto‘ the user, so that intelligence should also be used to cater for this. The
implication is also that the service must, in certain situations, as determined either by
civil servants or the constituent or by the system itself, be capable of being invoked,
opened-up, closed-down, and being moved from invisible to visible mode, or vice
versa.
Another approach to personalised services, of which there are as yet few real
life examples, are pre-emptive or early-intervention services. Some new
initiativess (such as in Colorado in the USA and Nottingham in the UK) are
experimenting with early-intervention schemes to prevent potential future problems.
These are seen as long-term programmes, imposing up-front costs but eventually
much larger savings, although this inevitably involves some risk as no immediate
results are visible. This means they typically require political consensus in which the
major political parties are in agreement (also given the typically short-term nature of
politics). The aim is to circumvent future problems, which can be predicted using ICT-
enabled simulation and decision-support tools through analysing longitudinal socio-
economic data on social deprivation, anti-social behaviour, crime, health, educational
needs, etc. The lessons are then applied to high risk individual community, family or
personal situations before the problems themselves actually appear.
Thus, in Colorado, at-risk children are being given anger management classes
and behaviour modification programmes to prevent juvenile delinquency, whilst in the
15
48
UK there has even been talk of targeting babies due to be born in at-risk families by
providing parents-to-be with special ante-natal parenting classes, and additional child
visitor and family support services once babies are born. Also, in the UK, some early
intervention services have been provided over the last five years through the ‗Sure-
Start‘ programme, particularly aimed at deprived areas and families, with significant
success. Both in Colorado and now in Nottingham, the public sector is planning to
collaborate with local companies and civil sector partners to cover some of the up-
front costs, but also to exploit resources and expertise they cannot deliver on their
own. Similarly, in the health sector there is a longer tradition of preventive medicine,
but now some of these ideas and approaches are being tailored to social and other
public sector services. The downside of this approach is that it may be seen as an
attempt at social engineering or manipulation, as well as be open to accusations of
fostering a ‗nanny-state‘. It is, however, an attempt at intelligent intervention, which,
overall, is a significant change in how we think of the welfare state and a
considerable extension of the type of services and the role of the public sector not
seen before and largely enabled by ICT.
Leadbeater, Bartlett & Gallagher (2008) and the present authors suggest a
st
number of core dimensions of wellbeing for the early 21 Century which public
(e)services should address (similar to the steps in Maslow‘s needs hierarchy16):
Protection and public safety
Shelter and housing
Nurture (social care and nurture)
health
work and livelihood
learning and education
culture and leisure
participation and democracy
inclusion
empowerment
For example, personalised health care requires treatment pathways that apply
the best available knowledge about clinical effectiveness to the profile of the
individual patient. But it also means making medical, care and other public sector
support available in a way that complements home and community care, thus
recognising the importance of addressing the environmental and behavioural factors
that impact on health and wellbeing, as well as exploiting multiple-channels which
include traditional in-person engagement. Undheim (2008) reminds us that face-to-
face remains the most intimate and communicative channel there is, and that ICT
should adapt to this. Further, Millard (2006) has shown that, in fact, most
eGovernment users recognise this and already use the full range of channels (ICT,
face-to-face, telephone, post) , much more so than non-users, and often seem adept
at choosing the appropriate channel to suit their specific need and situation at a given
point in time.
The public sector thus needs to open up a new kind of dialogue with
constituents about what public services mean, how they are secured and what to
expect from other actors (including the family, the community, voluntary
organisations, social entrepreneurs, intermediaries, etc.), as well as the public
agency itself. This will enable the development of a wider understanding that a given
service is not necessarily something we only get from an agency, but a resource that
constituents must themselves own, nurture and protect.
Thus, services should enable the construction of personalised pathways, or
individual ‗story-lines‘. For example, the UK is implementing ‘customer journey
16
Abraham Maslow (1954) viewed human needs as occurring in a hierarchy, such that the
lower needs had to be met before the higher ones become salient for the individual. His original
scheme included, in order, physiological needs, safety needs, belongingness and love needs,
esteem needs, and the need for self-actualisation. The first four dimensions of wellbeing
presented here correspond to the first two of Maslow‘s needs. The next three have to do with
belongingness. Participation and democracy, as well as inclusion, are measures of esteem,
and empowerment is self-actualisation.
49
mapping‘17 as a tool of customer insight which can be applied to help organisations
understand how constituents define and experience services from their own point of
view. Journey mapping can be used to reduce duplication and shorten the length of
processes, thereby both improving constituent experience and driving efficiency – it‘s
not an either-or situation. It can help design a seamless, streamlined experience that
cuts across silos by recognising when and where it makes sense to join things up for
the constituent, thereby helping to drive change in government. It can also help to
inform performance indicators and standards so that progress can be tracked and
measured over time.
An earlier and similar approach is the Dutch method of mapping service user
journeys.18 This is part of the reduction in administrative burden for citizens
programme in the Netherlands designed to eliminate unnecessary activities and
consolidate both supply and demand sides, for example focusing on the following
citizen target groups and profiles:
Benefit claimant (single mother on benefit)
Volunteer
Disabled child
Senile older person (elderly invalid)
Average family
Healthy older person
Chronically ill person
Pensioner (disability benefit claimant)
Unemployed
Personalisation means far more than being able to choose different options or
service suppliers. It requires services to be actively shaped in response to individual
profiles. This does not mean separate, isolated pathways; many of the activities
involved in being healthy, learning effectively or using any public service are
collaborative and intensively social. But it does mean that provider organisations
must be capable of adapting and reconfiguring what they offer to ensure that it fits
the profile of individual needs. This in turn requires structures of governance,
resourcing and accountability that reward improved outcomes and support the
flexibility required to offer personalisation on a mass scale. The intelligent use of ICT
is clearly essential here. Also implicit is that the system has to know things about the
individual with whom it is interacting, and that immediately raises issues of privacy
and security. (See section 7)
The need for flexibility and diversity in universal personalisation adds to the
complexity of the system, which can make it more difficult for the agency to
comprehend, much less, govern, its services through hierarchical coordination. Yet
this is still the basic method at the heart of most structures and concepts of
government, and conditions the behaviour of politicians, regulators, managers and
professionals. Instead, the public sector should treat public services as complex
adaptive systems and not according to the mechanistic models that have
traditionally dominated government thinking.
Seen from the perspective of the individual constituent user, however,
personalising services is equivalent to making them simple in the sense that the
constituent does not have to wade through the 99% of the regulations that are not
germane, but sees only what is a precise fit to his or her needs or wishes. A classic
case is the recent announcement in the UK that poor families are missing out on
council tax rebates worth £1.8bn a year because the rules for claiming relief are
complex and poorly advertised, and this is one of the main reasons why the
government is on course to miss its target for halving child poverty by 2010. 19 What is
probably needed is to make such services, especially to disadvantaged groups as
here, pro-active entitlements which the back-office system itself should implement.
However, this clearly requires highly robust data protection, and, more difficult,
changing regulations about the data to which governments have legitimate access
17
Presentation by William Perrin, UK Cabinet Office, at the OECD eGovernment Leaders
Conference, the Hague, Netherlands 6-7 March 2008.
18
Imke Vrijling of the Dutch Government, 8 November 2006.
19
The Guardian newspaper, 7 March 2008.
50
(for example to personal bank accounts). The latter is unlikely to happen in the UK,
although it is standard practice in most Scandinavian countries where tax and
benefits have been pro-active services for many years.
This does not mean that the problem is not recognised, however. The UK‘s
National Audit Office (2005) reported that a private software firm had developed a
way to navigate all of the rules and regulations of the benefits system, which was
superior to anything the government had. This firm saw its market not in the
Department for Work and Pensions, which administered the benefits, but rather for
welfare assistance agencies. One can speculate on why the government did not avail
itself of the software, but one possible reason is that the horizontal complexity of the
welfare system, where one arm did not adequately communicate with another, meant
that the software in essence provided too much for the agency to deal with.
Personalised services will often need to be enabled through new types of
innovative business models and value chains (see also section 3.5), involving a
host of different actors: the constituent her- or himself, family, the community,
voluntary organisations, social entrepreneurs, intermediaries, the private sector, etc.
Social entrepreneurs are becoming heavily involved in some countries in
experimenting with new types of pubic service delivery, typically at grass-roots level
and working closely with constituents. Although they use entrepreneurial or business
approaches these are applied to social problems often by non-profit organisations
and citizen groups, although some also work in the private and governmental sectors.
Social entrepreneurs typically work in a local or community context which is
the scale best placed to reach people below the radar of many statutory services, win
their trust, and tailor services to their needs, aspirations and circumstances. A
community as a social enterprise can identify untapped needs, harness under-
utilised local resources and deliver innovative and value for money services. These
can be funded either by sales to citizens direct, by local fund-raising, or by contracts
with government and business. Communities can complement universality with
innovation, and public funding with local roots. The challenge of the community
and voluntary sector is to create the 'disruptive innovations' that change our
whole models and perspectives on delivering services, and to find ways of scaling up
and rolling out new models of delivery, in a genuine culture of social enterprise, that
anticipates needs rather than just reacts to them.
Because of its voluntary ethos and its roots in communities, social enterprise
and social entrepreneurs can generate trust, cooperation and voluntary action by
citizens and communities. In an age where we are recognising that better health and
education, lower crime, and environmental sustainability, cannot be achieved without
citizens' participation – in healthier living, in learning beyond the classroom, in
recycling – the ability of the voluntary and community sector to stimulate voluntary
action and generate trust is a critical asset. Such trust and initiative provides the
‗glue‘ of community, and at the right scale. However, at the same time, it is imperative
that the community sector still takes efficiency as seriously as quality and innovation.
Resources must not be wasted, though the measurement of efficiency will probably
be just as much by social factors as economic ones, and judged in relation to the
positive impacts it provides rather than as an end in itself. (See also section 6.3)
5.2 Self-directed services

As technologies like social software and social networking tools become more
ubiquitous and are deployed on a larger scale, existing public value chains will
change and can now also include constituents in new user-producer relationships,
providing new definitions of personal as well as public value. The production and
distribution of relevant content and information is now incorporating a move from
formal organisations to decentralised networks, often with an ad hoc character.
Constituent consumers become ‗prosumers‘ and users become ‗pro-ams‘, and thus
take up new roles in the value chain, leading to what has been called the
‗democratisation of innovation‘ (Von Hippel, 2005).
Web 2.0 tools are starting to ‗democratise‘ the means of production, of
distribution and of supply, i.e. the whole value chain. Add to these the widespread
availability of other tools, like cameras, recording equipment, sensors, etc. which
used to be the preserve of professionals but can now be purchased in any shopping
centre, and the portfolio of tools widely available becomes a potentially potent mix. If
public services are seen from a purely supply and demand perspective (which is
51
important, but by no means the main determinant), the technology can help to move
production and use towards an almost ‗perfect market‘, as is already starting to take
place in the commercial sector in areas like news, media, music and publishing.
(Anderson, 2006) These technologies enable bottom-up and personalised
communication and information sharing, and have immense potential for user-driven
innovation, systems and services, where users or user groups are themselves
involved in designing and delivering services, thus further blurring the roles and tasks
of suppliers and constituents. (Leadbeater, 2005)
These new networking and other tools are starting to make it possible to
combine and exploit the interests and expertise of huge numbers of people, so that
potential designers and suppliers of goods and services can identify each other, work
together, and deliver. This was hardly possible in the world of purely physical
products and services. This is also seen on the demand side, given that the
technology enables demand pooling, for what would otherwise remain dispersed and
largely unknown minority needs, which can create markets which are commercially
viable and/or are sufficient to warrant public sector service supply.
ICT changes the nature of the market for many products and services in at
least four ways. First, the need to have physical stock is abolished, but even when
the product remains physical (as with wheel chairs or medicine), stock does not have
to be concentrated in one place to which the customer has access but can be
dispersed to many low cost warehouses. Supply can even be subject to ICT-
controlled production only when an order is received. In this sense, physical products
are starting to behave more like services which have typically been distinct from
physical goods by being created only at the point of demand, and thus tailored
precisely to the specific needs of the individual customer. When warehousing is no
longer necessary, because all goods and services are only created when the
customer wants them, then one of the main differences between goods and services
starts to vanish, as well exemplified in Dell Computer‘s business model. This has
huge potential implications for public sector services in terms of individualising the
product.
Second, distribution is not a problem for eServices, but even when the product
remains physical, distribution becomes easier if customers can select and purchase
online. Third, searching for precisely the right product or service, even for minority
needs, becomes possible for the first time. Fourth, and perhaps most important, the
technology enables suppliers and users to identify and leverage expertise and
knowledge which was previously dispersed, not known about or inaccessible. It could
thus enable, also for public services, an explosion of new offerings which are highly
differentiated according to both large scale and small scale demands, thereby also
blurring the distinction between the roles of supplier and user, and between the
different but multifarious stakeholders. For example by ‗mashing-up‘ services and
content to create highly individualised service environments (see section 3.4).
A shifting of tasks from the governmental level to constituents is already visible,
especially in terms of information gathering for different kinds of (public) tasks. Police
departments are increasingly using pictures taken by citizens (who use the cameras
in their mobile phones) of offences such as violence or hooliganism. Public
broadcasters use citizen weblogs as sources for their reportage, and urban planning
practitioners use SMS messages from citizens reporting on infrastructural defects in
order to plan repair schedules.
Leadbeater, Bartlett & Gallagher (2008) talk of self-directed services which
can ―mobilise the intelligence of thousands of people to get better outcomes for
themselves and more value for public money...‘‘. Cisco (2007) describes the
―changed relationship with citizens….in which citizens need to be given a much
greater role in shaping public services. „Black box‟ government, where dedicated civil
servants try to work out which services will suit people best, need to give way to
transparent government where citizens themselves can see and intervene in debates
about how services can be made more citizen-centric.”
This is the key to unlocking the potential of universal personalisation, i.e. the
recognition that personal value (the value for the individual constituent) is created
when a service is used, rather than when it is delivered. Thus the creation of
value for the individual user of a service is, at least in part, dependent on the user
him- or herself. The challenge is how to define more systematically the processes of
‗co-production‘ through which personal and public value are created, and then to
52
connect different co-production activities to generate economies of scale and wider
systems of support.
Many, though of course not all, constituents (citizens, businesses and civil
servants) are no longer prepared just to be passive recipients of government and
eGovernment services, however personalised these may be, as this is still essentially
top-down. Some experiments in the UK have been applying a much more bottom-up
approach to the public sector for several years (Leadbeater, 2006), especially in
health, education and crime where few designers have traditionally worked. One
example reveals how the UK government is dealing with diabetes which costs the UK
National Health Service £5 million per day and is one of the main causes of
premature death. The average diabetic spends just three hours a year with doctors,
but thousands of hours a year managing their own condition themselves. The biggest
gains will come from enabling diabetics to become more effective at self-diagnosis
and self-management, for example by equipping them with appropriate ICT tools,
techniques and peer support. Similarly, 90% of health care is delivered in the home.
People want more home-based solutions that they feel they control. The health
information available to patients on the Internet is transforming their role – no longer
passive, they can question and participate.
Google has recently announced its move into the health market, which makes
less use of ICT than other sectors of comparable size, by offering secure repositories
for all an individual‘s health related data: ―health information should be easier to
access and organise, especially in ways that make it as simple as possible to find the
information that is most relevant to a specific patient‟s needs.‖.20 Microsoft is entering
the same market as part of a concerted move to provide commercial services for
patients to manage their own care. The idea is first to put the patient in control by
choosing which professionals see your data, and second to enable better remote
monitoring to cut down on the number of office visits and hospital emergencies. The
two companies reckon that because of mobility and longer lives, people‘s medical
records may be left behind when they move. It is entirely possible to discover, when
in your 50s, that you have no accessible medical history and, for example, no idea
when you were vaccinated or against what.
More recent thinking in the UK and elsewhere includes trials in the management
of personal budgets for social services. For example, as part of the ‗Putting People
First‘ programme, 2,000 disabled persons across the UK have been given a financial
allocation, in cash form if they wish but in most cases this is held by the local
authority to be spent in line with the person‘s own wishes once their care plan is
approved. This can be spent on their own choice of care assistants, to join clubs
rather than day centres, and go to hotels or on package breaks rather than to
residential homes for respite care. Although the pilots have not yet been fully
assessed, the emerging results are so positive that ministers have decided to push
ahead and make the approach the basis of all adult social care services. Ivan Lewis,
the care services minister said: ―There is absolutely no doubt that people who use
21
individual budgets say it has transformed their lives.‖ ICT has been the enabling
tool in linking the six government departments whose efforts and resources needed
to be integrated to implement these trials, and has also been used by some of the
disabled people and their carers to access necessary information and make their
choices. This is an example of the top-down initiation of bottom-up inputs and control.
Some of the thinking behind empowering the end-users of public services
through choice and the devolution of resources has been developed by Julian Le
Grand, former adviser to ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair, although many aspects of
choice and competition in the public sector remain highly controversial. (Le Grand,
2007).
Another example shows how bottom-up seizure of the initiative and the by-
passing of top-down systems and control can take place, in this case using a
combination of ICT and consumer electronics, like high resolution recording
equipment, sensors and cameras. These are increasingly available in the high street
and show that many new technologies are no longer restricted to governments or the
private sector but can also be used by citizens to create their own services. In the
Netherlands, a protest group of people who live near Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam
has developed a measurement system based on sensor technology for noise
20
The Guardian newspaper, 28 February 2008.
21
The Guardian newspaper, 10 December 2007.
53
pollution caused by aircraft. The system has been installed in the gardens of the
protesters and records the level of noise experienced by residents, and is captured
22
electronically, collected and published on a website. This citizens‘ initiative resulted
originally from dissatisfaction with the measurement methods used by the Dutch
government which they considered not to be objective or reliable, and later and more
importantly in the interpretation of the results, and resulted in their intervention having
a substantial impact on the Schiphol expansion debate. This illustrates an increasing
trend whereby professional hardware and software are becoming commodities
available to everyone to design and implement their own ‗user-driven‘ services, in this
case showing how public agencies can have their competence and reliability both
23
questioned and usurped.
Self-directed services are pivotal to maximising the effectiveness of public
services because they offer constituents the chance to shape the course and
outcome of their public service experience. Only by sharing the power to allocate and
sequence organisational resources will public services be able to legitimise the
investment they represent. This will often mean choice by constituents between
different suppliers and delivery channels. But, more importantly, it means letting the
voice and behaviour of everyday service users drive the reform efforts of local public
institutions. Public services thus need to be developed through interactive processes
that give both practitioners and constituents a direct role in shaping the end result
through a process of design by participation.
Some models are likely to be drawn from the private sector, for example
brainstorming with customer communities as in Dells‘ Idea Storm where
customers are encouraged not just to complain and criticise but to suggest ideas for
new products, services and business models. This both provides a massive injection
of innovative thinking into Dell, but also builds customer loyalty and engagement. The
customers are the real experts in this relationship and they basically provide this
expertise for free, although prizes and special offers can also be used as incentives.
Models need to be developed as to how this could work in the public sector, for
example constituents discussing services and ranking ideas to give governments
ideas and feedback about what they want. This could be a form of ‗crowdsourcing
government‘, for example in Estonia recently 50,000 citizens were organised using
the Internet, mobile phones and SMS over a short period of time to identify and map
all the toxic dumps in the country left over from the Soviet era, and then help in the
clean-up. Similar, but this time bottom-up driven, examples are the self help networks
using SMS, mobile phones and Internet of citizens hit by recent natural disasters
such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the Niigata earthquake in Japan,
although the public authorities quickly channelled the real-time on-the-ground
intelligence they were providing to improve their own handling of the disasters.24
In the self-directed service context, technology itself tends not to be the
main issue, as there are already very mature technologies not yet adequately
exploited, such as personalisable Internet and the telephone (both fixed line and
mobile, for example through call centres) where services are delivered by talking.25 In
the UK‘s ‗power of information‘ programme, shortly to be launched, constituents will
be able to make their own personal web pages which link to all types of service
(public, private, civil), all types of content and all types of information. It will also be
re-active and inter-active, for example everyday language messages can be sent to
or by a citizen: ―the tax office owes you £500, click here‖, ―Don‘t forget your wife‘s
birthday next week‖, ―Happy birthday from Auntie Doris‖ or ―Don‘t forget you
promised the doctor your weight would be down to 100kg by Easter‖. In many ways,
it is amazing that such approaches have not yet been rolled-out on a large scale, but
the problem tends to lie in lack of back-office cooperation rather than the technology,
at least now that broadband access is widely available. Clearly, in addition, most
citizens, if not businesses, would need at least initial support in creating such a
combined personalised service one-stop-shop, perhaps with the help of an
intermediary.
22
http://www.geluidsnet.nl/en/geluidsnet/ (accessed 20-1-08).
23
See also the examples and analysis provided by the European Commission‘s Institute of
Prospective Technological Studies tutorial on the impact of web 2.0 on eGovernment, 20
September 2007: http://www.jrc.es/newsandevents/new.cfm?new=60 (accessed 20-1-08).
24
25
Interview with William Perrin and colleagues (5 June 2008),Transformational Government
Unit, UK Cabinet Office.
54
The ‗power of information‘ also applies very much in face-to-face situations,
so that all channels need to be complementary. (See also section 5.5). Many citizen
groups, like mothers of young children or patients with heart disease, are increasingly
forming both off-line and online social networks, where they not only provide mutual
social support but also increasingly exchange and build real knowledge and value
about child rearing or heart disease. What is the role of government and the
professional in this context? Perhaps facilitating, providing legal or other professional
advice, some finance, etc. For example, civil servants who are expert in a particular
area could be mandated to service such groups, with the usual caveats which are
already in place concerning the quality of that advice and who is responsible if
something goes wrong. (See also section 6.5) Such social networks could also
themselves become a source of expertise, and government could assist in mediated
this to other groups or individuals who may need it. Clearly the role of the
professional changes to include a more facilitating and advisory function for the
purpose of enabling constituents determine their own services, but also ensuring that
the collective experience and opinions of the constituents can be acted upon and re-
used.26 These approaches mix and strengthen both peer support and professional
support. The ‗power of information‘ thus has two benefits, i.e. citizen empowerment
but also the creation and re-use of data and knowledge.27
The UK now sees transformational government as citizen-led, with a focus
on what is ‗better for the customer‘, where ‗better‘ is determined by a mix between
normative measures and opinions. Up until the 1990s the focus was on ‗public
service‘, whereas today, in the health service for example, what is important is not
only about being treated, but much more about how you are treated (e.g. with
smiles, courtesy, a cup of tea, etc.), so that bad service is no longer acceptable. It is
noteworthy that, as the technology advances bringing with it increasing efficiency and
effective delivery outcomes (a clinically successful operation, more home help for the
elderly or better job placement for the unemployed) that these achievements become
readily accepted and even taken for granted by constituents, so what really counts is
high quality human interaction and being treated with respect and dignity.28 In fact,
having such a customer service approach does seem to work out cheaper, quicker
and more effective. Cost and cost effectiveness will continue to be highly important.29
The opportunity now exists for systems using advanced but already available
ICT tools to become flexible enough to personalise everything they offer, and
responsive to the individual constituents they serve. To get the public services we
deserve, ‗New Public Management‘ must acquire a new meaning. In the long run,
adaptability matters more than back-office performance within rigid boundaries,
so long as it can be shaped towards better life outcomes (improved personal value)
for everybody. The challenge is to give practical momentum to this agenda amid the
noise and pressure of everyday demands. (Leadbeater, Bartlett & Gallagher 2008)
Leadbeater and Cottam (2008) sum up this approach as follows: ―It is often
assumed that the public have to rely on professionals to deliver public services
because in the economic jargon there is an information asymmetry: the doctor or
teacher knows more than the patient or pupil. Yet the families of these children
[needing care] have fine grained knowledge about what they really need: when they
need two carers to support them and when only one will do; what risks to take on a
trip out to the zoo and so on. The „In Control‟ initiative30 draws out this latent, tacit
knowledge of users that is largely kept dormant and suppressed by the traditional
delivery approach to services in which professionals are largely in control, assumed
to have all the knowledge and so consumers are largely passive because they are
assumed to lack the capability of taking charge of their own care, health, learning or
tax.‖
Clearly, there are issues here to do with, first, can individuals and their families
know what is needed and what they want, and, second, can they be relied upon to be
truthful, or at least not exploit the system. Individual control and choice does not
26
27
28
This can also be related to progression up Maslow‘s needs hierarchy – see footnote 16.
29
30
The ‗In Control‘ initiative is run by a social enterprise for the Department of Health in the UK to
help young people with learning disabilities take control of their own care.
55
always work, of course. When it doesn‘t, we should see if power could be better
exercised at neighbourhood level, and then community, council, city or region, so that
national governments would be left with the responsibilities only it can manage.
The limited experience we already have (such as the ‗Putting People First‘
programme described above) shows that there needs to be probably quite strict
frameworks and guidelines, plus some vetting and approval by personal advisers.
This could, if done badly, reintroduce bureaucracy, so it should be implemented
through well-trained front-line staff who wield considerable discretion within flexible
rules but ones designed not to permit obvious cheating. It is also a question of
learning by doing, on both sides, so that the constituent will also need to demonstrate
responsibility in return for being offered additional rights. This is, at base, what
empowerment is all about, i.e. the empowerment contract. (See also section 6.5 on
accountability, rights and responsibilities.) An important trend therefore is that of the
‗responsible citizen‘, i.e. where the citizen has much more control and power over
their own data but also needs to exercise this responsibly.31
Leadbeater and Cottam (2008) also suggest identifying and working with ‗lead
users‘ who tend to have more extreme and intensely felt needs than most, which
puts them at the leading edge of change in a field. Lead users often have greater
knowledge, they use products more intensively and they have skills that allow them
to adapt products. What they want now, other constituents are likely to want in the
future. Many technology and computer games companies are well versed in working
with their most demanding and innovative lead users to work out ideas for future
products and applications. A similar approach may be useful for public services,
perhaps by setting up constituent interest groups partially composed of lead users.
For the past decade most of the debate about public service reform has
focussed on delivery, making the public sector value chain work more efficiently, to
resemble reliable private service delivery. But (according to Leadbeater and Cottam
2008) you cannot deliver complex public goods the way that Fed Ex delivers a parcel.
They need to be co-created. Thus, the new innovation business models for public
services should include constituents at least some of the time, for example by using
Web 2.0 tools for mass collaboration, service mash-ups, etc., in a form of ‗open
innovation’. (See also sections 3.4 and 3.5)
A basic principle of new public personalised service production is thus that
constituents are not consumers but participants, and this is now becoming
possible using Web 2.0 tools. This also means that traditional ways of measuring
the effectiveness of public services, such as take-up, satisfaction, etc, need to be
augmented by measures of personalisation and participation directly in cooperation
with the constituents themselves. (See also section 4.5)
As described by (Leadbeater and Cottam (2008): ―We need a new way to
create public goods that take their lead from the culture of self-organisation and
participation emerging from the Web that forms a central part of modern culture,
especially for young consumers and future citizens. Increasingly the state cannot
deliver collective solutions from on high: it is too cumbersome and distant. The state
can help to create public goods - like better education and health - by encouraging
them to emerge from within society. The tax system increasingly depends on mass
involvement in self-assessment and reporting. Welfare to work and active labour
market programmes depend on the user as a participant, who takes responsibility for
building up their skills and contacts. Neighbourhood renewal has to come from within
localities, it cannot be delivered top down from the state. Public goods are rarely
created by the state alone but by cumulative changes in private behaviour.‖
The OECD (2008a and 2008b) has reached similar conclusions having recently
identified four main future themes for the next decade, one of which is putting users
at the steering wheel of the public sector: ―Focusing on users and putting them at
the centre of public sector activities diminishes silo-thinking and increases civil
service providers ‟awareness of user needs and demands. E-Government will enable
governments to hand over major parts of public sector development and operations,
to be managed more directly by users. Collaborative involvement of users in service
design and operation could allow them to build their own set of public services
adapted to their personal needs at different stages of their lives.‖
31
Interview with Graham Colclough (7 May 2008), CapGemini
56
Shifting responsibility and control to the individual constituent can provide
significant advantages, both because doing so enables constituents to determine
when, where and how the service should be used, and also because they can
determine the precise features of the service they wish to exploit. It also enables
individual constituents themselves to follow the progress of service implementation
from initiation to fulfilment, for example by using transparent tracing and tracking
functions. Further advantages include the ability to check for data inaccuracies or
inappropriate information, faster updating of constituent data, and checking that the
public sector possesses only data it is entitled to, and/or which the constituent wishes
it to have. This also means that issues surrounding the invasion of individual
constituent privacy and data protection tend to be less significant. Further, and
perhaps of most significance in a modern democracy, shifting some responsibility
and control for appropriate services to individual constituents can be seen as part of
the ethos of open, transparent and empowering government, particularly if this helps
to ensure that the legislation, rules and regulation governing a given service are
sufficiently simple and understandable for most constituents to understand and
exploit.
5.3 Personal relations

Building closer relations between constituents and the public sector is already
taking place through the segmentation of constituents, for example where each
segment is looked after by a ‗group customer director’ focused on improving
services and their delivery to the segment (Cisco 2007). Even more personalised
relationships between a constituent and the public sector could be achieved through
individual civil servants acting as personal advisers wielding considerable discretion
to tailor services precisely to need, thereby enabling valuable tacit knowledge,
including trust, to develop. This is what local family doctors have been doing for many
years in some countries, providing professional expertise, integrity and confidentiality
based on the ‗Hippocratic Oath‘ which perhaps should find equivalent expression in
future for other types of public service in the context of new forms of public service
ethic and codes or charters (see section 4.5). Of course, intimate personal relations
like these would probably only be appropriate for constituents with some type of
special need, and there would be important budgetary constraints, but this could be
an example of the front-office becoming ‗bigger and better‘, whilst the back-office
becomes ‗smaller and smarter‘. (See section 4.4) Similarly, a constituent must be
able to opt out and/or change her/his personal adviser, including falling back on a
team approach to a similar relationship,
EDS (2005) sees the concept of the information or ‗ICT-empowered front-line
staff‘ as more important as an organising principle than 'helping outside my patch',
since the latter will not be practical in some public service areas, such as in child
care, where a high degree of training and skill may be required to perform the service
with confidence. ICT-empowered front-line staff will reinforce delivery of the 'no
wrong door' policy and will also allow much practical help to be given beyond a civil
servant‘s own area of service delivery. This concept could also contribute sharply to
increasing the skills and job quality for many public service workers.
Some moves in some countries have already been made towards some
aspects of the ICT-empowered frontline staff strategy. For example, the use of
human civil servant ‗intermediaries‘ operating out of small citizen offices located in
the more deprived areas of Berlin, and using a digital suitcase to visit old people‘s
homes, hospitals and the like. Such beneficial mixing of technical, human and other
channels is being increasingly used to target groups with special needs. Also, in
Seattle in the USA a system of mobile civil servants visiting citizens, rather than
citizens travelling to the town hall, is being established based on the capabilities of
the city ICT backbone.
Another benefit is more civil servant time ‘on the beat’, i.e. in the front-line,
and also implies eliminating back-office work which is unnecessary, being duplicated
or done inefficiently. The key issue is how to down-size (and perhaps centralise) the
back-office and up-size (and perhaps de-centralise) the front-office. (Millard &
Kubieck 2004) The aim here is not to have civil servants on the front line delivering
the same old service in the same old way, but to also empower them to do more,
across more areas of service for more people. When changes in back-office and
front-office are connected, this also points to the need for a new wave of 'mobile
57
government' projects, with empowered front line workers staying in the field rather
than returning to an office to undertake ‗administrative‘ functions. Many civil servants
could thus be enabled to access information on a wide range of issues for citizens
while out in the community, taking on the role of personal care assistant, ‗care
navigator‘ and delivering ‗personalised care packages‘..
Many non-technology issues are important in building up such personal
relationships between constituents and the public sector, including a clear
understanding of the ethics involved, the rights and responsibilities required from all
parties, and the need for trusting, two-way obligations, based on dialogue and mutual
learning. This also applies to intermediation.
5.4 Personalisation through intermediation

Gartner (2007) points to the trend whereby public and private sector services
are becoming integrated and seamless. eGovernment services should no longer be
seen as unique, but as part of a broad ecosystem of services used by constituents,
which include financial, retail, travel and telecoms services. This also includes the
fact that many of the new business models being developed for public services are
going through a process of (re)intermediation through service aggregators such as
banks, telecom companies, virtual communities and associations. Thus, there could
be a retreat from the ‗one-stop-shop‘ approach of the purely government portal, but
one which is personalised by the individual ‗mashing-up‘ a range of public, private
and civil services, also with the constituent‘s other online activities. There are also
clear implications here in a mobile and trans-European/global service context, which
are however far from being solved.
Public services can also be personalised through intermediation through
private, social and other public partners in designing, producing and delivering
services, by standing between the public sector (where ultimate responsibility for a
service lies) and the ultimate end user. (Centeno, van Bavel, Burgelman 2004) Such
intermediaries already play diverse roles as key partners in the provision of
government services or democratic processes, but are also seen as crucial for a
more dynamic and knowledge based public sector implementation in the future.
There are different functional models of intermediary including formal, informal, paid,
voluntary, professional, untrained, etc., and different types of stakeholder can be
involved, i.e.:
Private sector actors and organisations are already playing an important
supporting role in the implementation and delivery of government services,
for example private professionals such as architects, lawyers,
accountants, as well as private sector networks like banks, post offices,
garages and shops. The private sector is also playing a significant role in
the delivery of public services (education, health care, intermediary
agents), following the increasing trend for outsourcing and privatisation.
Civil Service Organisations (CSOs) and Non-Government Organisations
(NGOs), such as leisure and sports clubs, churches, charities, housing
associations, pressure and interest groups, etc., are playing an increasing
role in designing, producing and delivering services, as well as defending
citizen‘s interests and shaping and communicating citizens‘ needs, as well
as supporting the implementation process with education and guidance.
Many of the so-called ‗social entrepreneurs‘ are prime actors in such
activity.
Government civil servants who are either specialised (such as planners,
medical practitioners), or more general (e.g. one stop shop, ‗street level
bureaucrats‘, ‗citizen-account-managers‘, personal advisers, etc.).
Other public sector agencies, like post offices, transport agencies, health
centres and hospitals, etc.
Family or friends, for example on behalf of an aged family member, child
or housebound friend, have long existed as ‗social intermediaries‘ and are
likely to continue to do so in the future.
It may also be expected that new types of intermediaries, such as virtual
(eAgents or eBrokers) and physical (social actors, trainers, or citizens
themselves) will emerge as the new technologies become available. Even
if usability is improved, it is expected that not everyone will have access to,
58
or indeed wish to use, electronic public services. In such cases,
intermediaries could be needed.
The importance of intermediaries in delivering public sector services may
have been significantly under-estimated. Recent research shows that the same
amount of eGovernment use is undertaken on behalf of constituents‘ employers (i.e.
as part of their job) as on their own behalf. In addition, almost as much eGovernment
use is informally on behalf of family or friends as for own use, and such ‗social
intermediaries‘ assist, on average, 2.6 other constituents. When looking at the
profiles of those receiving support from social intermediaries it is clear they tend to be
constituents who otherwise are highly likely to be beyond the digital divide and
excluded from eGovernment. Typically they are over 35 years old (with many over
65), have no or lower secondary education, are female, unemployed, not working or
retired, low income or in poverty, and reside countries or regions which are tending to
lag in terms of eGovernment services. (Millard 2006b)
5.5 Personalisation through inclusion

However, there are important challenges to the undoubtedly significant move to
a personalised and bottom-up services approach, particularly in relation to inclusion
and disadvantage. Many individuals and groups, due to economic inequalities,
cognitive disparities and regional imbalances, will require special treatment or
support, because even by 2020 there is a danger that the less educated will be left
behind even further as information becomes more central and digitised. It already
seems highly likely that up to 30% of European adults will not be online by 2010, let
along using eGovernment services. (Broster, 2008) The digital divide is not easily
going to disappear, although it is likely to change in nature. This threatens greater
social bifurcation, given that 2020 is also likely to see the rise of the younger ‗Net
Generation‘. (Tapscott, Williams & Herman 2007)
To meet all these diverse demands, services must be personalised with a
flexible balance between both bottom-up and top-down steering, and, in the
public sector context, services must also meet and reinforce shared expectations and
principles of social justice as well as personal and public value, so they must also be
genuinely universal and available to all whoever they are. A good example here is
that the World Health Organisation is now categorising the disabled on the basis of
what the individual disabled person can do and wants to do, rather than the
traditional approach of categorisation by type of disablement and assuming that all in
that category will have the same needs and wishes.32
In the future, therefore, a continuing task for governments will be to ensure
inclusion of all. Multi-channel systems will thus be important, especially where
technology may be hidden but still supports the service, as will technologies which
can facilitate the fine tuning of services and natural interfaces to meet the needs of
specific individuals or groups, including those who are disadvantaged in any way.
This is likely to also include multi-modal interfaces, such as voice, gesture, touch
and even thought. This will involve eServices complementing face-to-face and other
contacts where control can be exercised, shared and passed between users and civil
servants and other agents, requiring both technical and non-technical channels to be
available, inter-changeable and mutually interoperable, and where interfaces need to
be adaptable, natural and intuitive. Thus, in most cases the technology should result
in simplicity, flexibility and choice, with any complex systems hidden to users.
There are also potential dangers of exclusion if a multi-channel approach is
dropped in favour of an increasing focus only on ICT, thereby excluding
disadvantaged groups from face-to-face and other traditional channels which may be
more appropriate to them in certain situations. Indeed, there is already some
evidence of a move towards just a single ‗e‘ channel, primarily for efficiency and cost
saving reasons., although this is to date aimed only at quite specific groups such as
businesses and students, although even among such groups there will be excluded
individuals.
Part of this challenge is the fact that the concept of (e)inclusion is dynamic and
could change in unpredictable ways. In the medium to longer term, eInclusion may
well become ‗reverse-engineered‘. When everything is ‗e‘ and ‗e‘ is virtually without
32
http://www.who.int/disabilities/en/.
59
cost, and if efficiency is prioritised higher than inclusion, human contact will become
expensive, given that labour costs compared to other costs will rise dramatically.
Thus, the already included and better-off constituents will use their resources and
skills to access human contact with government in situations where this gives them a
better service (for example, in terms of personal advice, care, social support, etc.).
The excluded and worse-off constituents will, however, only have recourse to the
ubiquitous and inexpensive ‗e‘ services, and will not be able to supplement these with
human contact. The e-exclusion of today will thus be replaced by the h-exclusion of
the future, where ‗h‘ refers to human service contact. The EU may need to run h-
inclusion programmes.
5.6 ICT challenges of personalised service production

personalised service production, is described below. For each of these, Table 3
attempts to map their likely relevance for the major trends and transformations
identified in this section. This is an indicative assessment only and shows that most
of the technologies could have wide relevance.
Table 3: Technology matrix for personalised service production

Universal Self- Inter-
Personal
personalisa directed media- Inclusion
relations
tion services tion
User interface & multi-
modal contact     
Single electronic
window     
Multi-channel systems     
Personal, shared &
secure data spaces     
Intelligent agent or
avatar support     
Anomaly detection     
Other technologies     
Negotiating regulations     
Pre-conditions for
service access     
Artificially intelligent
semantic knowledge     
Triggering services    
Personal
‗MyGovernment space'   
Digital semantic person    
‗No-stop shop‘    
Context & location
aware    
CRM, forecasting &
decision-support    
Making the constituent
‗fully sighted‘  
Social networking tools    
Mash-up services    
User interface issues remain critical for service delivery, and many users will
expect multi-model contact, for example voice, gesture, touch, eye movement,
3D and thought, will become important as they have grown up with games and
virtual worlds. Alternative ways of interacting with the web will be vital, ranging
from specific interfaces for children or the disabled, to the application of speech
recognition in the context of reading disabilities, for example on 3D platforms.
60
In maximising simplicity, there is a need for a single electronic window, as
part of the ‗one-stop-shop‘ approach but which evolves to a ‗one-click-shop‘ or
‗one-touch-shop‘ philosophy. User controlled technology (such as Web 2.0
33
mash-up applications ) can also be developed to enable citizens to build their
own personal one-stop-shop for eGovernment services. Thus, simplicity,
flexibility and choice are key concepts, with any complex systems hidden to
users, although still capable of being invoked for transparency purposes. The
aim is to hide the technology and focus on the user‘s interaction with and
benefit from the service, but where the hidden technology can facilitate the fine
tuning of services and provide natural interfaces to meet fully individualised
needs.
Also essential (and not only for ‗disadvantaged‘ users) is the need for the inter-
linking of and control over multi-channel systems (covering both ICT – such
as PC, Internet, call centre, mobile and SMS, handheld, kiosks, etc. – and non-
ICT channels – including face-to-face and post), given that it is unlikely and
probably undesirable that eGovernment becomes the only mode of
government-user interaction. But eGovernment can become the thread between
and the intelligence behind multi-channel service delivery. This will involve
developments for improving channel functionality and switch/choice points in
relation to who the user is, the situation they are in, the service requirements
they have, the business model of the service supply value chain, etc.
The scale and complexity of the public sector, and its technical intertwining with
other actors in society, set quite unique requirements for trust and liability,
prevention of unauthorised access, misuse and fraud. Thus ICT tools for
personal shared and secure data spaces and intelligent agent or avatar
support will need cater for multiple identities, pseudonymity, authentication,
secure data disposal, etc. These agents will need to learn from the user‘s past
behaviour, expressed wishes, or legal decisions and respond accordingly within
the bounds of established governance rules. Given the complexity of these
scenarios, intelligent agent technologies should also be developed to assist in
the control and maintenance of information tagging access, access audits, data
durability (lifetime) and validity / obsolescence and deletion. Authorised proxy
controls will also be required with appropriate security to administer within a
family (parents acting on behalf of children or the elderly), or for trusted third
parties, or in bone-fide business associations. Electronic agents will be needed
to undertake both complex and routine tasks necessary to supervise, preserve
and protect citizens‘ data, which can also support individuals with low digital
literacy or socio-economic constraints, and enable where appropriate
assistance to be given by human agents.
Anomaly detection identifying inconsistent or contradictory data needs to be
built-in, which already takes place in the financial and insurance sectors, and
could improve and better target services and save money in the public sector.
ICT technology should also be related to the increasing availability of other
technologies like professional cameras, radio and mobile transmitters and
receivers, audio equipment, sensors, multi-media mixing, etc, which means that
the use of these technologies need not be restricted to governments, the private
sector or professionals, but can also be used by users to create their own
services. All these technologies can be exploited by users, whether or not in
cooperation with others, to produce government service content, to filter and
share content, and to connect to others‘ content and distribute it.
Agent and avatar systems could also, for example, enable SMEs to
automatically bid for procurement contracts, assuming certain conditions were
met on both sides, and could also assist citizens in the negotiation of
regulations, especially when these are highly complex and thus often beyond
ordinary everyday understanding. These agents should be capable of reasoning
about these regulations. Hence, software tools and online advice systems are
needed to model and reason about these regulations, and to automate this
reasoning. The development of these tools and systems require the
33
Web 2.0 applications that combine and integrate data, content and functionality from more
than one source, thereby enabling users to adapt and integrate different applications to their
specific needs.
61
development of an ontology for eGovernment regulations, such that they can
operate at a pan-European scale.
A citizen‘s agent should be able to address the agency and enquire about pre-
conditions for service access, ascertain whether these are met, and then
proceed to access the service if they are, or inform the citizen who makes the
decision him/herself. The agent does this by knowing the user‘s profile, needs
and instructions, and then roams to discover what the user is entitled to, can
obtain, and the ‗costs‘ or effort involved.
New types of use of artificially intelligent semantic knowledge, for example
as search engines or data bases, will also soon be available which enable the
computer (as well as people) to understand the content of web pages or data
bases. For example, new semantic search engines provide a way for the
world's knowledge to be represented in a form that computers can understand
and process, and for ordinary internet users to be able to add to this knowledge
base without having to understand how the knowledge is represented. Because
knowledge stored in the database can be processed and understood by
computers, direct and accurate answers to questions on any topic will be
possible, thus enabling computers and other automated systems to query the
widest possible domain of knowledge and receive a response in a form they can
process. All knowledge stored will be semantically compatible with existing
stored knowledge (e.g. the same person cannot have two different places of
birth) through a process of cross checking. The database will also be able to
distinguish between permanent knowledge (e.g. place of birth) and transient
knowledge which can change legitimately (e.g. marital status). As in Wikipedia,
knowledge can be added by anyone, but will, unlike Wikipedia, only be
accepted if it is compatible with existing knowledge and will only change this
existing knowledge if enough evidence (i.e. different sources) are available to
show that the existing knowledge is wrong. Thus the ‗reversion‘ wars of
Wikipedia will not happen, but instead the accuracy of knowledge will only
increase over time. It is thus the connections between the knowledge and how it
is structured which are important. This has tremendous implications for, for
example, pro-active services, policy making, etc, both undertaken by humans
as well as automatically by computer, and will lie at the basis of many future
artificial intelligent systems in the public sector as elsewhere.
Governments can also build patterned pictures of individuals so that, for
example, it is possible to detect if someone is about to move house thereby
triggering appropriate services. This could be achieved by recognising
different citizen personas (roles or types), which can be seen as a key to
eGovernment transformation, as a form of segmentation but not only along
standard socio-economic and demographic lines but rather in the context of
different types of behaviour. This could involve pro-active (automatic) services,
but would also normally imply that the user or his/her agent is made aware of
the transaction so he or she can rescind or countermand it.
A personal ‘MyGovernment space' for citizens/businesses should be
developed and made alive by one or more intelligent agents or avatars, situated
on an appropriate token such as a software broker on a PDA, a smart card or
smart-phone, which learn from the user‘s past behaviour, expressed wishes, or
legal decisions. A ‗cockpit‘ with ‗dashboard‘ is needed using intelligent and/or
natural and intuitive interfaces to maximise user access and control, so that
each function can be invoked, turned on or off, delegated and recalled back.
Different functions of agents and avatars need to be investigated in a
government context, including VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality)
through seamless multi-mode interaction. Many intelligent agent systems exist
in the market place, and some algorithms are already available, but research is
needed to adapt and develop them for the public sector.
A ‘digital semantic person’ approach in the public sector context will be
needed, for example based on heterogeneous data integration, consistency
checking over time, adaptive semantic interfaces so the system knows to whom
to adapt the interface, process adaptation according to the individual, etc. This
could include ontology-based services and natural language processing, as well
as the semantic recognition of gestures and other intuitive signals.
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For functions or services which are more routine, recurrent and non-
contentious, user initiated personalisation and direct control can be turned off or
delegated, as part of a ‗no-stop shop’ approach based on intelligence in the
system and past instructions or behaviour. The service thus becomes pro-active
and anticipatory, context relevant, invisible to the user, but also capable of
being made visible and transparent again when the user wishes. Technologies
such as Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 are likely to be very important as they exploit the
intelligence and inputs of users in order to build better services. Apart from
modelling to predict user behaviour ex-ante, automatic referral systems can
map patterns of usage ex-post and show what other users with a similar pattern
did, thus also facilitating learning between users.
In order to move to complete service personalisation, the public sector must be
constantly context and location aware of the constituent‘s needs and situation
through monitoring, as well as through intelligent and complex decision-making.
This implies extreme flexibility in system design so that it can respond to needs
and demands as these change. An important component would be automatic
scenario and simulation development, as well as impact assessment
prognoses, in order to react appropriately to actual situations as well as
anticipated future probabilities, without (necessarily) the conscious or direct
intervention of civil servants or constituents themselves, although this also
needs to be enabled. This could include automatically triggered responses to
actual or predicted situations.
On the supply side, customer relationship management systems, with
decision-support and forecasting based on intelligent knowledge
management and archiving/retrieval of highly complex data, are required. This
will include technologies to support context and location aware sensing,
automatic scenario, gaming and simulation development, as well as rapid
impact assessment prognoses to order to proactively provide (or offer)
individualised services with or without user request.
In many contexts (Member States or agencies) there are legal, organisational or
other barriers to data and intelligence sharing between the back offices of
different agencies which are otherwise necessary to provide personalised
services from a constituent- rather than a public sector-perspective. It may be
difficult or undesirable to remove many of these barriers, at least in the short
term, making the public sector ‗blind‘, but this should not prevent the constituent
becoming ‗fully sighted‘ and benefiting appropriately. The constituent
him/herself should be enabled to access, manipulate and exploit his/her own
data, as well as other relevant data, wherever it is within the public sector, even
if one agency is legally forbidden to access data held by another agency. This
will involve facilitating appropriate data protection and privacy features, as well
as data mining and assembly functions, with the constituent having full control
over this.
The use of new user controlled social software and social networking tools,
encompassing Web 2.0 tools (like blogs, wikis and mash-ups), upcoming Web
3.0 tools (which add open technologies, world-wide-databases, GRID
applications, artificial intelligence, etc.), as well as gaming and simulation
applications (like the Sims and HotDate, which were both invented or strongly
modified by users), is starting to explode. They are already revolutionising the
nature, products/services and business models of many market sectors by
democratising the tools of both production and distribution and ensuring much
closer market matching between supply and demand than has ever been
possible before. (Anderson, 2006) Development is needed into how these tools
can be used by governments to enable users to collaborate in designing and
delivering services.
‗Mashed-up‘ services for government will driven by the less visible aspects of
Web 2.0 which could enable a new process of intermediation whereby public
information and services are mashed up by third parties that are better capable
of responding to constituent needs. (Di Maio 2007b, Osimo 2008). The more
visible aspects of Web 2.0 are communities and social computing (wikis, blogs,
etc.), whilst the less visible are related to the architectural approach that Web
2.0 promotes implying a shift from service-oriented architecture (SOA) to web-
oriented architecture (WOA). Much of the information and services governments
put online could be available for use and re-use using such an approach,
63
enabling greater composability of services in a variety of different contexts. In
other words both services and information should be designed for ‗mashability‘
(mash-ups leveraging content and logic from many web sites and web
applications). The content created, owned and administered by the public sector
could thus be re-used and made available to constituents and third parties for
use as they wish. (Di Maio 2007b, Osimo 2008)
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6 Participative policy making
The strategic transformation needed to maximise the effectiveness of public decision and policy making
focuses on participative policy making to create participative value through collaboration between two or
more individuals who themselves attempt to balance or reconcile any conflicts with their own personal
value. All levels of decision and policy making need transforming, whether initiated top-down via policy
maker initiated processes, mediated by political representatives, or bottom-up through constituents‘ own
policy and political agendas.
6.1 Policy making initiated by government

In recent years existing concepts of governance and democracy have been
dramatically transformed. This is due to increasing pressures and expectations that
the way we are governed should reflect modern methods of efficiency and
effectiveness which draw upon all of society‘s resources, both knowledge and
people. It is also due to expectations that government should be more open to
democratic accountability and broad participation. ICT has considerable potential in
both these areas through its ability to access and manipulate data and knowledge,
and by making government more democratic and participatory through new channels
for democratic involvement.
However, the incorporation of new technology into government policy making
and into the democratic process can also be fraught with difficulty and controversy.
(Millard, 2004) It is clear that eGovernment is not just about putting government
services online and improving their delivery. Rather, it also constitutes a set of
technology-mediated processes that could improve the overall quality of policy and
decision making and change the broader interactions between constituents and
government. ICT is opening up new opportunities, but also reveals new dangers
leading to profound consequences for the way we understand what policy making
and participation can become.
The collective data and knowledge resources of the public sector, as well
as other data to which the public sector has legitimate access, represent a unique
potential, held in trust from society and not available to other actors, both for their
intelligent re-use within the public sector and as products to be made available to
other users. This potentially massive resource of public sector information could be
shared within the public sector for policy modelling and simulation and impact
assessment both ex-ante and ex-post), and thereby significantly improve
government policy making, for example for traffic management and spatial
planning. (Aichholzer & Burkert 2005)
New business models using these data could also provide commercial
services as business intelligence for the private sector (geographic, meteorological,
hydrological, land registry, land-use, socio-economic, demographic, etc.), and thus
become a revenue stream for government, for example companies need good
information about the availability of skilled labour, where to locate their business, etc.
Another model could be to make the data freely available in order to stimulate
business innovation, growth and jobs through value added services and new
products. For example, a new study in the UK concludes that the benefits of giving
government data away outweigh the loss of income from licence fees from the
current practice of ‗loss recovery‘ by more than €200 million per year for the six
largest data sources alone. (Newbery, Bently, Pollock, 2008)
In most cases such information exists somewhere in the public sector, but are
dispersed and difficult to identify or access, not to mention possible legal restrictions
and technology incompatibilities because of multiple formats and structures. In most
cases, data would have to be used in impersonal form (i.e. non traceable to
individuals) in order to protect privacy, but the scope is huge if problems can be
overcome. There could be other problems flowing from the fact that the publication of
public sector information is not always neutral, for example information on flood risk
can change land prices which would directly impact the market and the government
could be open to legal action by those whose land reduces in value as a result. New
business models for solving these problems need to be found, perhaps in this case
by just publishing basic data on historic flooding and factual rather than conjectural
issues, and leaving ‗experts‘ to draw flood risk conclusions (which is how the private
65
sector would do it). However, this means the citizen has the extra cost of employing
an expert or is left with information not immediately usable.
The other major strand in government initiated policy making is drawing in other
actors (the private and civil sectors as well as constituents), through democratic and
other participative processes. One of the fundamental criteria for membership of
the EU is the existence of a set of democratic institutions. Democratic improvement is
therefore an essential part of the EU‘s vision and mandate, and will continue to be so
in the future. Building better governance, and giving citizens a greater understanding
of and share in the decision and policy making processes is crucial to developing the
role of citizens in Europe. (European Commission, 2001) (See also section 9)
Participation is concerned with how individuals and groups can exert influence
on existing power centres in society (specifically the government in this context)
through both formal and informal channels, and thereby impact the making and
implementation of decisions in the governance sphere. This has direct implications
for existing democratic and participatory structures in Europe where a so-called
‘democratic deficit’ has been recognised in recent years because of the loss of trust
in politicians and in the political process, and falling participation rates in elections.
ICT technologies hold out the promise of enhancing the possibilities for constituents,
whether as individuals or groups, to develop new forms of deliberation and to
influence political discourse, opinion formation, policy- and decision making.
Many of these issues have been related to the so-called ‗democracy value
chain’ (or cycle), which links the different aspects of democratic participation
together in order to ensure complementary and reciprocal strengthening. The OECD
has suggested a democracy value chain (OECD 2003a) as stages towards greater
empowerment:
Information (enabling) – a one-way relation in which government
produces and delivers information for use by citizens. It covers ‗passive‘
access to information on demand by citizens as well as ‗active‘ measures
by government to disseminate information to citizens.
Consultation (engaging) – a two-way relationship in which citizens
provide feedback to government, based on the prior definition by
government of the issue on which citizens‘ views are being sought. This
requires the provision of information as well as feedback mechanisms.
Elections – on single issues (for example through a referendum) or for
representatives in a council or parliamentary election.
Active participation (empowerment) – a relation based on partnership
with government, in which citizens actively engage in the policy-making
process. It acknowledges a role for citizens in proposing policy options and
shaping the policy dialogue, although the responsibility for the final
decision or policy formulation rests with government. This step of online
public engagement in policy deliberation is undoubtedly the most difficult
to generate and sustain.
A more recent overview of digital age engagement methodologies compares
the depth and the breadth of participation with the types of outputs they could be
associated with, as shown in Figure 10. Thus, ideas are more likely to be generated
in the depth of smaller groups (although there could be many of these) using a mix of
online and offline techniques, whilst decisions at a societal level need to be broadly
based across mass populations and this could move towards mainly online methods.
eDemocracy refers to the use of ICT to underpin and strengthen democratic
systems and processes, for example along this value chain. It ranges from the most
formal aspects of electoral systems (eVoting) to both formal and informal
eParticipation in the democratic process, such as access to information,
communications and consultation with elected representatives, influencing decision
making, and direct involvement in decision making. Moreover, ICT is increasingly
seen as a useful means to improve the accountability and transparency of political
systems, with the potential to improve consensus-based decision making and to build
increased trust and confidence in political processes.
Despite high expectations, however, ICT has not to date contributed
impressively to improving this value chain through redressing the democratic deficit
nor improving the ‗formal‘ democratic relationship between constituents, their
representatives and government. It is the case that electronic political and policy
66
information is beginning to become important, as evidenced by access to, and use of,
public information and moves to freedom of information initiatives (see section 6.4)
There are also a few examples in elections where eVoting has successfully
increased turnout, for example in Switzerland where the ICT channel is amongst a
number of others including traditional and by post. In Communes conducting local
referenda using Internet voting, turnout was 43% compared to 28% elsewhere.
Internet voting is not intended to replace traditional forms, but rather to act as a third
34
channel. In 2005 the world‘s largest Internet voting to date was successfully
conducted by the public water management authorities in two provinces in the
35
Netherlands with a turnout of 2.2 million. There were also successful experiments
with voting by mobile phone in Ireland and the UK in 2004-2005, but only on a small
scale, and many organisational, procedural and cultural difficulties remain, even
when the technology is unproblematic which is not always the case.
Figure 10: Digital age engagement methodologies

Source: Anthony Williams36
Depth
Moderated brainstorming
Workshops
idea zone
Focus groups
Policy networks
Policy portals
education zone
Targeted communications
Citizen juries
Commissions
Question periods
recommendation
Town halls
zone
Solicited feedback
Deliberative polling
Polling
Elections
decision zone Referenda
Breadth
In terms of consultation and empowerment through ePolling and ePetitioning,

the system as used in the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh has shown significant
levels of use, where the ICT focus has been fundamental in helping to overcome the
geographical problems of distance and communication in a dispersed population. An
ePetitioning service was also set up in the UK Prime Minister‘s office in November
2006 to enable citizens to address and deliver an electronic petition directly to the
Prime Minister and collect signatures via the Downing Street website. By August
2007, about 8,500 petitions were live and 3,600 completed, with over 5 million
signatures collected from 3.5 million different e-mail addresses. This means that
around 6% of the population has engaged directly with the Prime Minister and been
motivated to join the political process. The ePetitioning service only cost £60,000 but
has been extraordinarily successful, and shows that democratic engagement can
34
eDemocracy Seminar, 12-13 February 2004, Brussels, hosted by the European Commission:
http://europa.eu.int/information_society/activities/egovernment_research/doc/edemocracy_repor
t.pdf
35
―World‘s largest Internet election successfully conducted in the Netherlands‖, eGovernment
News, 28 March 2005 , IDABC eGovernment Observatory, European Commission:
http://europa.eu.int/idabc/egovo
36
67
work if it‘s made as easy as using the Internet.37 Overall, however, successful top-
down examples are thin on the ground and have made little real impact on
representative democracy to date.
A particular example of government engagement with private sector firms and
their representative organisations is in the development of rules and regulations
through eRulemaking. An example from the USA is in the transport sector where
comments and inputs into the design of regulations and rules being made by the
government and its agencies is invited online. This shows that rule making agencies
can use ICT to do everything from researching the need for a rule, to managing the
rule making process and allowing constituents to participate more effectively, and to
allow those who violate rules to pay penalties on the Internet. (Eishner, 2005) In the
US, eRulemaking is a requirement on all regulatory agencies. The US evidence
shows that eRulemaking makes sector and company compliance much easier and
transparent, as well as enabling the private sector to directly influence rule-making. It
also makes it much easier for individuals to customise their inputs, but sometimes
also harder for agencies to identify substantive information given the many diverse
comments received.
In order to influence the policy and political agenda at various stages of the
political cycle and at different levels of government, constituents need, in addition to
improved access to politically relevant information, knowledge and skills, to be able
to enter into dialogue and discourse with government as well as with each other. The
core of European democratic politics is not consensus but difference within civilised
rules. But we have no idea yet how to do it online. In fact, it is also very difficult to do
off-line! Even though there may be no absolute requirement for dialogue in order to
reach consensus, dialogue at least increases transparency and helps you know why
you disagree and enables wider assessment of policy options, etc.
Another area where the impact of ICT promises much but has not to date been
impressive is the role of democratically elected representatives, or politicians. This
is both because politicians have been relatively slow to use ICT, but also because the
technology does raise the potential to re-engineer representative democracy. The
question is posed whether this is a choice we wish to make, or is it more simply a
question of supporting our existing democratic processes and enabling them to
function better?
However, the use of ICT for political campaigning has started to take off,
particularly in the USA with both Democrats and Republicans using sophisticated
web outreach techniques to raise funds from millions of small donors and to precisely
target local issues. In the 2007 election to the Scottish Parliament in the UK, the party
now in power (the Scottish Nationalist Party, SNP) used the ‗Activate‘ computer
system which enabled it to have detailed information – down to shopping preferences
gleaned from supermarket loyalty cards – on the Scottish electorate, street by street,
house by house. As a result, it was able to target its mailings with extreme precision
– pensioners heard about council tax, students about loans – and both were told that
the SNP was coming to the rescue.
Despite the present democratic deficit experienced at many levels across
Europe as elsewhere (for example, the loss of trust in politicians and the political
process, and falling participation rates in elections), there is arguably still a need to
continue representative democracy complemented by new forms. An example of the
latter could be ‗collaborative direct democracy’ as a synthesis between the ancient
Greek democratic traditions of direct decision making in the city forum (agora), which
has long been seen as impractical in mass societies, together with the election of
representatives as in modern democracies. The application of new technology could
lead to a synthesis of the best aspects of these two traditions, and thus both re-
38
engage citizens through on-line participation and retain professional legislators.
A more recent overview of different governance forms of democracy is shown in
Table 4, where three governance models are depicted. First, hierarchical governance
as, more or less, the form of representative democracy we have today. Second,
37
Unit, UK Cabinet Office
38
As presented by Stephen Coleman at the European Commission (2004) eDemocracy
Seminar, 12-13 February 2004, Brussels:
http://europa.eu.int/information_society/activities/egovernment_research/doc/edemocracy_repor
t.pdf
68
marketplace democracy which is similar to the Greek agora form but scaled up by
ICT, and third deliberative democracy based on networks as a cross between the first
two.
Table 4: Governance models of democracy

Source: Simon Smith 200839
Networks –
Hierarchical – Marketplace –
Type of governance deliberative
rep. democracy direct democracy
democracy
Rationale for Allocative efficiencies, More self-government Co-production of

participation knowledge-gathering and self-organisation outcomes and values
Enable more vertical

Diffuse deliberation to
What is eP being discussion (reps use Diffuse decision-making
arenas for horizontal
asked to do? eParticipation to pick up throughout society
and vertical discussion
concerns)
Effects on democratic Arena unchanged Multiple arenas

Arena expands
arena (parliament) (enclaves)
Representatives of Each citizen in own Emerging communities

Who participates?
social interests name – project teams
Decision-makers (better
Citizens (have own Communities where
Primary beneficiaries access to localised
interests represented) participation occurs
knowledge)
Benefits spread to
Secondary Benefits spread if Benefits spread if
those with identical
beneficiaries representation effective enclaves connected
interests
Not too many to New relationships and

Numbers required As many as possible!
complicate decisions! their sustainability key
Existing capacities may set practical (if not legal or ethical) limits to top-down
participation. Too much participation may not be in the interests of democracy if the
system is not be able to cope because a massive increase in participation
overwhelms it, and it could become unstable. Further, too much participation may not
be in the interest of the citizen, certainly without on-going commitment, knowledge
and perhaps some training, if this leads to shallow, knee-jerk or populist participation.
New technologies and methods could reduce the cost of collective policy making, but
thereby could de-stabilise the existing political system with, for example, too many
decisions and not enough responsibility.
The right of policy and decision making must be balanced against the need for
responsibility for those decisions. Collective decision making produces problems –
if all are responsible then no-one is. (See section 6.5) Note, however, that the same
arguments have been used throughout history to restrict the democratic franchise,
and limits to participation may only be an attempt to preserve elitism or the
meritocracy. There is a particular challenge of scale, i.e. share of voice, getting
heard but also balancing your voice with everybody else‘s. Perhaps the use of
intermediaries and mentors can help solve this. Intermediaries can help develop a
community voice, rather than a mass of individual voices which, on their own, are
unlikely to be heard. How do we put the voices together?
Just as serious, however, is the ‗digital danger‘ of trivialisation and short-
termism which can result if direct voting or participation by Internet were to be widely
introduced. These already bedevil the political system and could be made worse by
the unthinking introduction of ICT in participatory decision-making without educational
and informational support structures, and without engendering responsibility for
decisions on the part of those participating. For example, a situation could arise
where frequent eVoting reduces complex issues to over-simplified yes-no questions
and sacrifices the long-term view with pressures for immediate gain and quick ill-
39
As presented by Simon Smith (Leeds University, UK) at the ―eParticipation at European level:
current state and potential‖ Workshop, 16 May 2008: http://www.European-eParticipation.eu
69
thought out populist panaceas. It could undermine voters‘ sense of being
accountable for their decisions if voting becomes too routine and too divorced from
the process of policy assessment. Above all, there is a need to avoid potential
problems such as trivialisation, populism, lack of responsibility, and dominance by the
loudest. (Millard, 2004)
However, whether or not citizens use ICT to participate in democratic
processes, current evidence indicates that most will only get involved if they see a
threat or issue that directly (and perhaps dramatically) affects them personally (i.e.
the ‗nimby‘, not in my back yard‘, syndrome). Maybe ICT will make this involvement
easier and more effective. Apart from this, the small number who already get involved
are likely to continue to be involved with ICT, and maybe even more. According to the
Economist: ―The story so far is that technology intensifies the democratic process but
does not fundamentally change it.‖ (2008, p.15)
Thus, introducing ICT to democratic participation (however defined), can pose
profound political, ethical and practical problems, especially in relation to the digital
divide, i.e. how can the technology ‘have-nots’ participate, and whose voice is
40
heard? A recent analysis of the ―Your voice in Europe‖ web-site and online service,
showed that it was very exclusive, i.e. used mainly by self-selected groups. How do
online consultations actually influence the political discourse and political agenda
setting, etc.? To date, they are often initiated top-down and used to legitimise existing
policies, so that all the parameters are already set by the policy makers. ICT thus
needs to be managed to support different types of involvement, and to ensure that
the only result is not to magnify the voice of the already involved.
The biggest concern is public apathy and lack of understanding of the
participatory and democratic process. However, useful evidence is starting to be
collected as to how to break the democratic deficit, such as people (especially
young people) getting involved if they are approached in relation to specific issues of
relevance and interest to them, and not just ‗consulted‘. Older people, once started,
can get on very fast with ICT, as they have the time, a dispersed family and still a
true ‗sense of community closeness‘. It is possible to build for the future by working
with children in schools on democracy in their country/locality, how it works, what it is,
what the council does, etc. This seems to be the way to engagement, not by trying to
get them to ‗participate‘. Online games, etc., can be successful, enabling the children
and young people to become more involved, and thus more likely to participate and
41
vote in the future.
More recent experience also supports these conclusions, for example local
citizens juries, promoted only a few years ago in the UK, have not worked because
they were being pushed as participation for its own sake. The issues people were
really interested in were not adequately taken into account, and the approach was
too much in terms of technology push and did not start by recognising how
42
relationships actually work in communities. Where a bottom-up approach is
facilitated, however, which enables local, specific and concrete topic hooks (for
example single issues) to start the participation process going, people do become
engaged. Once this happens, it may also be possible to encourage a natural process
of widening out to encompass related and more general issues which participants
themselves embark upon. This may be way to marry and re-configure single and
multi-issue politics, which at present has unknown implications for representative
democracy, although ICT seems to be quite well suited to meet this challenge.43 The
unknown is the actual long-term impact and how to design the engagement process,
not just using traditional mechanisms but also the ICT channel, and applying different
weights and different ways of analysing each channel. Part of this may be
constructing ‗ideal discourse rules‘.
40
http://europa.eu.int/yourvoice
41
―eParticipation: the view from the Local eDemocracy National Project‖ presented by Isabel
Harding (Director of the UK government Local eDemocracy National Project), at the European
Institute of Public Administration (2005) Workshop ―The digitisation of European public
administrations: what‘s the political dimension of electronic governance?‖, Maastricht, 1 April
2005
42
43
Workshop on eParticipation at European level: current state and potential, 16 May 2008,
Brussels: http://www.european-eparticipation.eu.
70
There is also some discussion whether eDemocracy can save public financial
resources, especially at local level, by engaging more citizens in local democratic
processes for less money than traditional methods. The UK has prepared an
44
eDemocracy benefits guide which was sent to all local authorities 2006. The guide
relates eDemocracy to existing council agendas, details the level of investment
needed by councils to implement eDemocracy services, and covers the efficiency
savings and strategic benefits it creates. This is an example of central government
providing information resources and advice for local authorities, where it is
increasingly recognised the real democratic challenge exists.
6.2 Empowerment from the bottom

Despite limited progress so far being made in using ICT to improve participation
in top-down policy making, more informal, bottom-up initiated forms of engagement
and participation by citizens, advocacy groups and activists have already been
boosted considerably by ICT. There also seems to be potential for using ICT to build
coalitions and to mobilise individuals and groups around one or more specific
interests or issues, and perhaps even to start to act as countervailing powers to
government. Although this should not be over-hyped and longer term impacts are
difficult to predict, there is some evidence that, as more and more constituents now
use the new forms of participation and engagement (for example, mass collaboration
Web 2.0 tools), it is likely that they will also be used to pressure governments and
other authorities from the bottom, and to start to develop their own agendas,
policies and power relatively independently from government.
One of the greatest potential transformations which ICT, such as social software
and social network tools, can facilitate is the strengthening of bottom-up, often
informal democratic and participatory involvement by citizens. It is becoming possible
to combine and leverage the interests and expertise of huge numbers of
people, not just within one country or region but globally. There are two important
aspects of this, firstly that it links together people with minority views and interests,
which prior to this technology enabler were both isolated and unknown, not only to
the wider public or existing authorities but also to each other, and gives them a strong
potential voice. Second, it enables the members of such groups, however small in
number, to link and organise trans-nationally, thereby potentially establishing
countervailing powers which can be global in extent.
These developments can be a huge problem and challenge for traditional top-
down participatory and democratic frameworks, based as most are on national
systems. However, there could also be benefits given that an increasing number of
st
political issues in the 21 Century are not confined within nation states and require
an international response across a range of interest groups and not just
governments, such as globalisation, migration, the environment, tourism, crime, trade
and investment, etc. Many of the emerging trans-national interest groups are thus
agenda setting and lead the way in terms of global politics, whilst established
participatory structures struggle to keep pace. In this context, the activities of
Greenpeace and Amnesty International are relevant. The issue here is can the
establishment recognise and incorporate these movements, thus bringing them
into the mainstream and benefiting from the additional expertise, energy and
involvement they contribute, or will they grow as countervailing and competing
powers? In reality, of course, both of these things are likely to happen. However, in
contrast to Greenpeace and Amnesty International, many of these new forms of
politics are centred on short-term issues.
There has been a recent explosion of interest in such possibilities, even in the
traditional world of book publishing, starting with Surowiecki‘s ―The wisdom of crowds
-- why the many are smarter than the few‖ ‖ in 2004, followed by Anderson‘s ―The
long tail‖ and Tapscott‘s ―Wikinomics -- how mass collaboration changes everything‘‖
in 2006. And, just in the first few months of 2008, Leadbeater‘s ―We think: the power
of mass creativity‖ and Shirky‘s ―Here comes everybody.‖ Many of the big ICT
industry players are also using similar language, such as when Cisco (2007) talks
about the ―power of us‖. Perhaps some of the proposals are mere hype and
speculation, but already the private sector is successfully using some of the ICT tools
44
―Business case for eDemocracy‖, eGovernment Bulletin, issue 199, 14 November 2005:
http://www.headstar.com/egb/
71
being discussed, such as IBM with their ‗policy and innovation jams‘ as large scale
web-based collaborations.45
The swift development of the Internet has inspired two sorts of claims that large-
scale transformations in the structure of political influence are under way (Bimber
1998):
1. the claim that ICT will erode the influence of organised groups and
political elites
2. the community-building claim that the Internet will cause a restructuring
of the nature of community and the foundations of social order.
These claims are significant because they address fundamental questions
about the causal role of communication in public life. According to Bimber (1998)
close evaluation of both claims suggests that the assumptions underlying them are
improbable at best. Instead, he suggests an alternative model of ‗accelerated
pluralism‘ in which the Internet contributes to the on-going fragmentation of the
present system of interest-based politics, and a shift toward a more fluid, single-
issue group-centred pluralistic politics with less institutional coherence. This
indeed would induce a plurality of countervailing powers, but as a pluralism which
is fragmented and unstable based on the rapid organisation of interest groups for the
duration of a lobbying effort, followed by their just as rapid dissolution.
In some contrast to this, Agre (2002) questions the assumption, often
inadvertent, that technologies such as web technologies simply imprints its own logic
on social relationships leading to the disruption of existing structures through a form
of technological determinism. Agre‘s alternative approach instead traces the ways,
often numerous, in which an institution's participants appropriate the technology in
the service of goals, strategies, and relationships that the institution has already
organised. This ‗amplification model‘ can explain how technology is used to bind
people more tightly together into (often pre-existing) social networks.
Both fragmentation and amplification are likely to be relevant in different
contexts and under different policies. At European level, the European Parliament‘s
Research Initiative views participation within the three contexts of culture (social and
community networks for example), opportunity (and this is where most eParticipation
activity has been focused), and context (trust, satisfaction, etc.). The evidence shows
that initiatives should start by asking why people should want to be involved, and that
efficacy is vital in ensuring that citizens see a link between their participation and
46
the policy outcomes. The technology, in this sense, is neutral, but nevertheless
provides powerful transformative potential. Whether fragmentation or amplification
results from the application of ICT to bottom-up participatory involvement, the result
of both is to strengthen pluralism.
The plural society is one based on variety and diversity, and, importantly,
tolerance of such variety. This postulates a patchwork quilt of different rights and
responsibilities, rather than ‗coherence‘ in the form of a consistent and uniform
approach to important policies and values. (Vibert 2001) The United Nations (2005)
calls for a knowledge to co-exist in diversity, how to generate it, use it and benefit
from it. This is based on accepting and respecting differences in a pluralistic world,
and focusing instead on the much larger area of what we have in common and which
unites us, through a series of central cultural thoughts. Rifkin (2004) states that
Europe‘s pluralistic values aim to achieve harmony within Europe, as well as with the
rest of the world, thus providing a model of behaviour for other powers. (See also
section 9.4)
ICT seems to be able to strengthen the formation and activities of non-
governmental interest groups, whether from the community, from private interests or
from established institutions. These have the advantage that they typically respond to
actual on-the-ground and practical needs, and can often find additional resources
and energy through being genuinely grass-roots and bottom-up driven. However, in
most cases they are beyond formal democratic control, many are un-elected, and
there can be questions about who they represent and who gains and who loses from
their actions. To whom, ultimately are they accountable, and who decides this?
(See section 6.5.)
45
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/20605.wss
46
The EPRI initiative presented at the European eGovernment Ministerial Conference, 24-25
November 2005, under the UK Presidency.
72
This raises the threat of descending into a form of street politics or mob rule.
There are burgeoning examples of the use of mobile devices to organise instant
direct political action on the streets, such as during the Gothenburg, Seattle and
Genoa globalisation summits in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Here, political
activists, whom some would call ‗agitators‘, were able to counteract and often be one
step ahead of the police and public order authorities in mounting their demonstrations
designed to send strong dissenting messages to the politicians attending the
summits. The use of mobile phones enabled groups of activists to coordinate their
sometimes violent behaviour in real time, and thereby often frustrate the best efforts
of the authorities who were slow to realise what was happening. Clearly, such
examples are controversial, the more so since crime syndicates and terrorist cells
have started to adopt the same tactics and use of technology, but the potential for a
significant increase in participation, and especially direct action, is clear enough.
6.3 Empowering communities and localities

Another major trend in ICT enabled bottom-up empowerment is giving more
autonomy and power to local communities and social groups. In order to extend
subsidiarity, there is considerable debate about the need for the ‗double devolution‘
of power from the central government to local government, and from local
government to communities, neighbourhoods and citizens themselves, and
47
hence beyond formal politics and formal democracy. This will take the partnership
between state and the civil sector into a new phase and provide a major opportunity
to rebalance the relationship between the state and the citizen. This grass-roots
community and informal form of organisation and networking is the antithesis of the
managerial approach of much top-down policy making. The question is does it work?
The counter question is does top-down policy making ‗work‘? Clearly a balance is
needed – perhaps quite similar to that illustrated in Figure 6: ‗Goods‘ and ‗bads‘ of
centralised and de-centralised (e)government systems.
Subsidiarity – having power located at the lowest possible level commensurate
with efficiency and effectiveness – should be the guiding principle. At its heart, the
new politics of subsidiarity go beyond the constraints of existing structures to
policies that empower citizens and communities to have the freedom to innovate and
to take greater control over their lives. In its advocacy role for constituents at a local
level, the community can provide a voice for citizens, campaign against injustice,
tackle vested interests, and challenge the balance of power within society. Just as in
economic policy, the top-down approach, based on nationalisation, has been largely
abandoned in Europe, perhaps the same needs to be done across all public policy
areas. (See also Figure 8: the government value chain)
In order to promote the independence and viability of the community sector,
the devolution of budgets down to citizens and communities – for example
community groups and even constituents receiving direct payments – opens up a
different form of accountability, i.e. direct to the citizen, rather than via the state. This
could include neighbourhood-based grant giving, for instance, through citizen's juries,
or community foundations. Another guarantor of independence for the community
sector in the future could be access to and control over assets, including financial,
human and material. Communities can play a role both as a service provider, and as
‗choice advisors‘ or ‗brokers‘ helping to inform citizens, particularly the most
disadvantaged, of the services available to them, and negotiate packages of support
to meet their needs. (Compare the personal budget approach in section 5.2.) Some
examples of what is happening already in the UK include neighbourhood policing
teams in Birmingham which have put ‗street champions‘ on every street, while in
Harrow (London) the public can directly participate in discussions on the way the
local authority sets its budget. The London-based Demos think-tank advocates and
reports on so-called ‗ everyday democracy‘, such as experiments involving citizens
48
participating in budgetary allocations.
47
‗In Denmark there is discussion on this in the context of the amalgamation of the lowest level
public authority councils, undertaken at the beginning of 2007 in order to create efficiencies and
economies of scale, and thus leaving local communities even further from formal power. Also,
the ―More power to the people‖ speech by Government Minister David Miliband, 21 February
2006, reported in The Guardian newspaper (http://www.guardian.co.uk).
48
http://www.demos.co.uk, accessed 21-2-06
73
In ensuring subsidiarity and reciprocity beyond formal democracy, the real
challenge is to find the appropriate role for community empowerment, which
balances with and complements local (and central) formal democracy. This begs the
question: which public domain roles should be subject to formalised democracy
(voting, etc.), and which can be put beyond formal democracy -- the boundary
between the two is always shifting, and ICT could be one of the levers in this process
-- and how are the two to be balanced so that subsidiarity and reciprocity are
maximised? Thus, an increasingly important task in the public domain as a whole is
to ensure reciprocity by establishing better links between formal democratic systems
and the systems operating beyond formal democracy, and especially between local
authorities and community activities. The question for the local authorities is are they
too small for the big things and too big for the small things?
In terms of policy-making and political links between formal democratic systems
and the systems operating beyond formal democracy, and especially with community
activities, new forms of interactive decision-taking and policy-making are required.
49
For example, the UK‘s ‗Power Commission‘ report proposes that citizens be
enabled to directly propose legislation or launch a public enquiry if they obtain
petition signatures from at least 1% of the registered electorate, whether at central or
local levels of government. Facilities for voting in national or local referenda would
also be established. This is seen as a way of both legitimising and exploiting single-
issue politics (such as animal vivisection, closing a school, etc.) which have grown
immensely over the last ten years, often at the expense of formal politics and voting,
and thus as a way to channel the energy and commitment of such activities.
However, it also raises dangers of trivialisation and decisions taken out of
context, without tracking affects on other priorities and values, or by those who do
not take long-term responsibility for the consequences. (See also section 6.1) It is
precisely responsibility for the latter, of course, which is the task of elected
representatives in our systems of formal democracy. The question is, is there scope,
need and legitimacy for extending these opportunities and responsibilities away from
representatives to non-elected citizens or interest groups? Is it possible to sufficiently
change the culture of civil society through information, education and support, and
thereby draw them into direct decision-making, without experiencing the dangers?
One way to support information and education at the informal community level
is through knowledge exchange in learning communities and organisations, for
example through ‗communities of interest’ as social networks of
practitioners.(IPTS 2004a) Such approaches rest heavily on the existence of trust
between members, which often requires frequent face-to-face contact and the
exchange of tacit or ‗sticky’ knowledge, whilst more codifiable or ‗leaky’ knowledge
can be mediated by ICT. Empowerment and influence therefore do not focus
primarily on information and knowledge per se, but on social practice, and the
communities and networks which form around it, typically at the local and ‗near‘ level.
Empowering communities thus requires a focus on information literacy, education in
community and social matters, and training and support in social enterprise,
communication and service needs.
There are also potential dis-benefits in terms of variable service standards,
uncertain quality, and blurred responsibility and accountability, as soon as we
step outside the formalised public sector. Moreover, handing over some power to un-
democratic, un-elected organisations, can pose ethical as well as practical problems.
Establishing and applying standards (or codes/charters of conduct), though not too
rigid or the benefits may also disappear, for both services and the activities for un-
elected communities bodies, could be a way forward. It is of course also possible, to
elect such bodies and use other processes like consensual policy making or even
conflict-resolution and appreciative inquiry techniques where such are warranted.
(Cooperrider & Whitney 2007)
On the other hand, formal democracy can also end up as the dictatorship of the
majority, and miss or avoid serving the needs of all and especially of minorities. It can
also become party political when this may not be appropriate at the very local level.
So, should there be a space for social enterprise and social entrepreneurs beyond
formal democracy? If there is, it must ensure that it does not conflict with formal
democracy and really does fill a genuine power gap
49
‗The Power Commission‘ consultation document published in February 2006 by the UK
government.
74
How ICT is used in human, social and economic contexts to build social capital
is crucial to empowerment. Social capital comprises the trust and networks of
friendship, neighbourhood and organisations which determine much of our individual,
social, cultural, economic and political lives. It includes the connections that people
maintain with family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, etc., and the social resources
that can underpin and may be embedded in these ties, such as trust, shared identity,
shared language, common beliefs, reputation and norms of reciprocity. These
resources make it easier for people to work and live together and they have been
demonstrated to play a beneficial role for health, education, public participation and
the realisation of economic opportunities. In this context, Putnam (2000) has
identified two important types of social capital:
a) bonding social capital -- tight, strong ties with the most immediate family
members, closest friends and within closely-knit communities of like-
minded people that are bound together by common features that they
regard as fundamental to their identity, such as ethnicity or deep religious
beliefs (homogeneous social groups)
b) bridging social capital -- rather more loose, less committal connections to
acquaintances, colleagues, and far-flung, weaker ties between rather
diverse communities (heterogeneous social groups).
Recent research also shows that social capital can be a very important factor in
promoting inclusion, cultural diversity and multi-culturalism. (IPTS 2007). Again,
Putnam (2007) in the context of socially disadvantaged groups (and the example he
specifically uses relates to ethnic groups in the US), concludes that there is often a
negative link between social inclusion and social capital, at least in the short term.
Put crudely, the more diverse the neighbourhood in terms of different social groups,
the less likely you are to trust your local shopkeeper, regardless of his or her group.
Group diversity leads not so much to bad group relations as to everyone becoming
more isolated and less trustful. In other words, it lowers both bridging and bonding
capital in a process he calls ‗hunkering down‘, as people withdraw from all kinds of
connectedness in their community. And what follows is a long list of negative
consequences, which include less confidence in local government and the media,
lower voting registration (though higher participation in protest), less volunteering,
fewer close friends, lower rates of happiness and perceived quality of life and more
time spent watching television. It affects almost all relationships, from the most public
to the most intimate.
However, Putnam also points out that ‗hunkering‘ is typically short term and that
successful inclusive societies create new forms of social solidarity. US history indeed
shows that that all migrant groups develop an intense ethnic identity (often reinforced
by religiosity), whether Irish, Italian, Jewish, Hispanic, etc., tend to marry within ethnic
and faith communities, and to maintain close ties to the country of origin. But, none of
these inhibit integration in the long term. And, according to Putnam, the increasing
ethnic and especially religious identification of Muslims in Europe today fits neatly
into this well-established pattern. Thus, bonding social capital can be a prelude to
bridging social capital rather than precluding it.
In sum, it seems that internal bonding within existing social groups is an
essential aspect of social capital but that alone it is not enough for a modern inclusive
and multi-cultural society to which Europe aspires. In addition, groups need access to
other ideas and insights in order to avoid fossilisation, so that bridging social capital
is also essential. This leads to the hypotheses that bonding and bridging social
capital are not mutually exclusive, even though they have often been presented as
such, and that this may be because the roles they play are different and potentially
complementary.
The question is whether ICT can be used to bridge between heterogeneous
individuals, communities and groups, or is it best at bonding between similar
individuals and within existing homogeneous groups? What are the roles that the
public realm can play in both cases? Existing research shows that ICT can be used
for both ‗bonding‘ and ‗bridging‘, depending on circumstances and purpose (IPTS
2004a). Thus, it depends on how the technology is used, which means that decision-
making and policy frameworks are crucial for successful and appropriate ICT
application. Further, in what ways and to what extent ICT affects social capital is
not clear, and at least 3 different ways have be identified (Quan Haase & Wellman
2002):
75
i) ICT transforms social capital by providing cheap and simple ways to build
relationships with others on the basis of shared interests, not hindered by
the limitations of time and space. This may lead to a major transformation
in social contact and civic involvement away from local and group-based
solidarities and towards more spatially-dispersed and sparsely-knit
interest-based social networks. In other words, the balance between
bonding and bridging social capital is changed in favour of the latter.
ii) ICT diminishes social capital. Just like television was assumed to do
earlier in media history, ICT draws people away from real-life contacts with
family and friends. Further, by facilitating global communication and
involvement, it reduces interest in the local community. In other words,
particularly bonding social capital is reduced.
iii) ICT supplements social capital, given that it is just another means of
communication to facilitate existing social relationships and forms of civic
engagement. People use ICT to maintain existing social contacts by
adding electronic contact to telephone and face-to-face contact. Further, it
adds an online social dimension to existing social networks in the offline
world. In this sense the Internet gives an extra impulse to existing patterns
of social contact and civic involvement. In other words, both bonding and
bridging social capital are increased, though bonding probably more so.
Most evidence suggests that ICT is potentially of great importance for both
bridging and bonding social capital. (IPTS 2004a) However, Frissen (2003) also
argues that ICT is more active in bonding social capital, i.e. it mainly plays a role in
reinforcing interconnections among people with shared interests rather than
connecting people from different communities with different worldviews. This may
lead people to become self-referential and concentrate too much on their existing
close networks, to the neglect of the larger community or national concerns, so that
this phenomenon might be characterised as ‗blinding’ social capital. To this extent,
the use of ICT could lead to the balkanisation of public interest.
More recent research, on the other hand, seems to show a somewhat different
set of ICT effects on social capital, but using a more nuanced typology in which the
terms bonding and bridging both refer to social capital formed within groups
homogeneous in some way, while the term linking social capital is reserved for
groups composed of heterogeneous elements. This, in effect, divides Putnam‘s
bonding social capital into two sub types, one with strong and one with weak ties
(Kareis, 2008). Definitions, plus the ICT impacts empirically derived from discussions
with access panels made up of a sample of 3,572 regular Internet users in 12 EU
regions are as follows:
Bonding social capital: strong ties between like people (or organisations) in
similar situations; exclusive in character:
– ICT is unlikely to create bonding social ties because of the difficulties
of building trust in purely virtual environments
Bridging social capital: more distant or ―weak ties‖ of like persons (or
organisations); hugely affected by ICT
– ICT strongly supports some types of bridging social capital, for
example expatriate communities
Linking social capital: weak ties which reach out to unlike
people/organisations, e.g. those which are entirely outside of the
community or sector; inclusive in character.
– ICT is also likely to create bridging and linking social capital as it
lowers the costs for identifying and interacting with people or
organisations with similar needs or interests
Better understanding of social capital and how it is formed or adapted by ICT
use is clearly needed, as it is one of the prime factors in community and group
formation and empowerment. Indeed, Gareis‘ 2008 work also points to the fact that
structurally weak regions suffer from a below average stock of bridging/linking social
capital, a conclusion that clearly draws a connection between ICT use and regional
development which has clear governance implications. It is not clear, however, in
which way any causal arrows could be drawn.
Many of these issues come together in the concept of ‗citizen-centred
governance‘ which is seen as a possible response to the fundamental challenge
76
arising from the governance of communities in creating flexible, effective
organisations for delivering public services, while at the same time promoting the
values of local democracy. (Joseph Rowntree Foundatio 2008) This approach is
based on two design principles, first local knowledge, i.e. the expertise that citizens
and service users have to contribute to the formulation of policy and the design and
delivery of services. Traditionally, expertise was regarded as something restricted to
professionals. Now, however, it is recognised that citizens and service users have
their own equally important local knowledge to contribute.
Second, local representation which emphasises how participatory forms of
governance can contribute to making public decisions more democratic. Engagement
in governance is about ‗representing‘ the views of particular local constituencies in
the decision-making process. This gives greater legitimacy to decisions. These two
principles have different implications for governance design. Local representation
requires attention to the legitimacy of participants as representatives of those for
whom they speak. There is also an expectation that they are accountable to their
constituents. In contrast, local knowledge emphasises the importance of creating
spaces that enable new understanding to be generated through open, informal
deliberation. The role of ICT in both these areas could be substantial but remains
largely untested.
6.4 Transparency and openness

Transparency and openness in the public realm are seen at different levels.
First, there is the ‗informational commons‘ which involves issues of content,
connectivity and the capability of different groups to access and use information.
(Drache 2004) Content refers to the type and nature of information communicated
and the way it can be used to facilitate social and economic processes. The public
domain contains huge reservoirs of potentially socially and economically valuable
data, information and knowledge, which could be used both inside and outside
government. As described in section 6.1, some of this public information could and
should be made freely available. (Aichholzer & Burkert 2005)
There are many current moves to public sector freedom of information
initiatives across Europe, as recently in the UK, and for many years in Sweden
(Rexed 2001). In the latter case all information used and generated by government is
in principle available in the public domain, except if government successfully puts the
case to an independent judiciary that certain information could threaten legitimate
interests, compromise the work of government or create important risks. The list of
criteria by which such judicial decisions are made, however, is also available in the
public domain and can itself be questioned and legally challenged by the public.
At a deeper level than simply having access to public sector information,
however, ICT can support moves towards much more extensive transparency as part
of the concept of open government. For example, in such a situation constituents
could trace every single interaction with the public administration right down to the
name of the individual who is dealing with their query or case in real time. In another
example, as part of a move on from eProcurement, a proposal from London is to set
up a web-site on which all the Mayor‘s and Assembly‘s public procurement over a
certain value will be listed in order for anybody to be able to see how much public
money is being spent on what, and by whom. Developments like this could be part of
a move towards a situation, not just of transparency of information, of services and
their availability, or similar, but also transparency of the purpose, actions,
processes and outcomes of government. This would mean that all could potentially
have access to (perfect) knowledge about what is going on, and the impact this has
or is likely to have. This would make it possible to relate decisions and actions very
precisely to the whole set of diverse (sometimes contradictory, sometimes
complementary) needs of all actors. (See also Blakemore & Lloyd 2007).
System transparency could enable constituents and civil servants to trace and
track requests and cases through the public sector, in order to follow progress, know
which part of the system (perhaps down to individual civil servants) is currently
responsible, and to better foresee and circumvent bottlenecks or roadblocks.
Similarly, it should be possible to track and trace decisions, even when these have
taken place ‗invisibly‘. The placing of responsibility (and indeed IPR where
relevant) could be critical, especially in relation to constituents who, by way of their
status or situation, may not be able to exercise their own responsibility, such as
77
children, the elderly, the handicapped, etc. This will also allow constituents to
become involved, to be better informed and better able to exercise some control for
their own benefit.
At another level, transparency and openness could ensure more responsive
and better decision and policy making. It is important that the public sector is not
only transparent but is also responsive to the needs of constituents as a result of that
transparency. Democratic politics thus, in a sense, becomes more important in this
task. Total transparency makes government a better, sharper, more precise tool for
responding to constituent needs and making appropriate decisions. And thereby
allows all actors, including within the public sector, to be more aware of what
government is, should be, and what its tasks are. It also means that, even if the
actors themselves cannot agree with each other or what their roles are, at least there
will be much greater transparency and knowledge about the views and needs of
other actors. It will make it possible to know what is agreed and not agreed, what
government should do and not do, etc., so that government could be conducted more
efficiently, given that government is anyway the art of compromise, trade-offs and
balancing.
We could also ask the question how we can be as efficient as possible in
delivering democracy? This is not an appropriate question in the private sector
because here there is one interest only (i.e. profit, and shareholder value), but it
could be attempted in the public sector. This would also be instrumental in furthering
the policy goals of universal human rights, citizenship, quality of life, etc., as well as
of economic growth through the efficiency pillar. Transparency can also be seen as
50
the basis for trust. Total transparency in the public sector actually implies really
being able to ‗both see and get what we pay for‘ and to make this visible to all. It
should also imply the end of invisible, divisive, Kafka‘esque bureaucracies not
knowing what they are doing except for serving their own ends. Transparency can
also save time and money through reducing errors, pooling resources and
knowledge, reducing duplication, and promoting cooperation. Transparency also
51
reduces corruption.
However, there are almost certainly legitimate interests which should be
protected from total transparency and openness: This includes legitimate privacy
needs and interests of citizens and businesses, for example when their data are used
by government. Just as important, however are the interests of civil servants and
politicians, especially during the decision and policy making process itself, for
example from intrusive exposure and monitoring which could result from all their
actions and decisions being made totally transparent. This could bring about stress
and too much focus on measurement and performance at a personal level, and lead
back to an overly bureaucratic stance, working strictly to rule-books rather than being
flexible and prepared to take measured risk with policy ideas. This could also lead to
an unwillingness to make decisions, or to take responsibility for them. For
example, there is some evidence that freedom of information legislation does change
how civil servants operate, but not always in ways which are necessarily beneficial.
One top ranking civil servant in the UK government is quoted as saying ―I would
never now write down advice to ministers‖, and accuses the legislation (brought in
the UK from the beginning of 2007) of ―impeding the effective work of government,
not least because officials face „frivolous‟ or „time-consuming‟ fishing expeditions from
journalists and others.”52 (Soete & Weehuizen, 2003, have also explored some
aspects of this.)
6.5 Accountability, rights and responsibility

Accountability flows from responsibilities as well as from openness and
transparency. It is also related to ethical considerations, which are, both in theory
and practice, highly important in the public realm. There are different types of
accountability. First, political accountability should be exercised by politicians and
democratically elected representatives. Second, administrative accountability rests
50
Cf. the ―European Transparency Initiative‖, IDABC European eGovernment News Roundup, 2
November 2005, No. 116.
51
The web-site http://www.privacyinternational.org provides an overview of the current status of
the freedom of information and transparency initiatives of government.
52
The Guardian newspaper, 15 June 2007.
78
on civil servants individually as well as on the public sector as an institution. This also
includes the likelihood of changing accountability when private sector, and
community, partners are involved in undertaking public sector tasks, such as policy
making or delivering services. Third, citizen accountability in not mis-using or abusing
public sector services or facilities. This relates to responsibilities. Fourth, the general
ethical and moral accountability of all actors, including citizens, businesses,
communities, and the public sector. If things go wrong, the boundary or balance of
power, accountability and responsibility between government and constituent
becomes important, so there also needs to be an open and fair appeals procedure.
Formal agreements may need to be entered into, such as a Service Level
Agreement (SLA) or citizen charter, both for individuals or groups of constituents.
When government is just one player amongst many (see sections 3.4 and
3.5), new forms of accountability need to be found. Bovens and Loos (2002) address
this issue when they describe the shift from legality to transparency. A new form of
accountability is needed when governments have to share power, for example
because of the processes of de-territorialisation, horizontalisation and
dematerialisation. De-territorialisation refers to the fact that many challenges and
issues faced by government cross borders (for example, trade, pollution, migration,
crime, etc.), and can present the national legislative with accomplished facts over
which it has no immediate control. Globalisation and rapid change and turbulence
cause the formal legislature to lag behind, and requires new flexible forms of
regulation. If, for example, national diasporas can link, organise and operate the way
territorial societies do now, then the current iron link between democracy and
territoriality might grow weaker.
Horizontalisation allows the partial shifting of the production of generally
binding rules away from the traditional legislative power to other regulatory parties
that may have no democratic legitimacy, such as independent administrative bodies
(cf. quangos), umbrella organisations and interactive policy partners. The process of
dematerialisation makes it possible for all authorities, including those in the private
and civil sectors, to move faster than legislators in the public sector and in
parliament.
A relatively new and overt task for government is therefore that of arbiter or
referee between competing interests. Traditionally, such arbitration was performed
more or less automatically through existing legal, regulatory or precedence systems.
Increasingly, however, this is performed more overtly through a formal or even
informal process of arbitration, taking each case on its merits as a unique instance,
where government may also rely on expert or other non-government input. This shift
signifies useful flexibility and enables more responsive government, and can also be
seen as a shift from legality to arbitration. (Bovens and Loos 2002). Many of these
developments put the spotlight firmly on the ‗public service ethic‘, and how this
needs to adapt to the new roles of the public sector and the sharing of governance
power with other actors. (See section 4.5) It can also lead to arbitrary decisions,
however, as it may be less clear precisely why decisions have been taken, given that
it will be more difficult to refer to a fixed or stable rule set. This is why any move from
legality to arbitration must also be accompanied by increased transparency,
openness and accountability.
In the shift from legality to arbitration and transparency there are clear benefits
and dis-benefits. On the one hand flexibility and more responsive government is
likely, whilst on the other a reduction (or at least dispersion) of accountability and
democratic control can take place. The latter is likely in situations where many private
interests are represented, each of which has variable powers, which could be greater
even than those of the government, and where there are few or unclear legal or
procedural rules being followed. This can add to the democratic deficit, as well as
increased complexity.
Thus, there is also a need to re-balance rights and responsibilities. A
common malaise of current governance across Europe is little or no appreciation of
respective rights and responsibilities between all actors. In particular, many
constituents tend to think of government only as providing them with a series of
rights, and only think of their responsibility in terms of keeping within the framework
of law. More active forms of responsibility are seldom contemplated. New
balances between rights and responsibilities could result in a more general re-
st
thinking of the 21 Century social contract, where a fundamental shift may be taking
place. (See also section 9.5).
79
Thus rights tend to be seen purely as receiving services, whilst responsibilities
tend to be seen as paying taxes and complying with rules and regulations where
relevant, although sometimes reluctantly. This view of rights and responsibilities links
directly to many of the personal values discussed in section 3, given that many
citizens think of what they get from government in the same context as shopping at a
supermarket, i.e. to satisfy or maximise their individual needs. Such a view is
supported by many, including Vibert (2001) who suggests that political choice (i.e. as
pertaining to government) should be understood and exercised in the same way as
market choice, i.e. simply in terms of supply and demand. Others, such as Rifkin
(2004), however, see the public realm as distinct from the private realm in that it
focuses on the generation of public value and public goods which implies that even
individuals have certain responsibilities over and above those of consumers
There is, however, also a deeper and more basic meaning of rights and
responsibilities. In this, rights are seen, not just as receiving services and building
personal value, but also in terms of political rights. (Bovens & Loos 2002) Also,
responsibilities are seen as a duty or desire to actively contribute to public value,
perhaps at the community or other informal levels, perhaps through more formal
democratic and political systems. Such a deeper view of the value of rights and
responsibilities tends not to be relevant for the private sector, except that even here
there are pressures to enhance corporate social responsibility, though this is seen
mainly in terms of improving brand image and thus market share. This deeper value
of rights and responsibilities is, however, arguably one of the those which most
sharply separates public value from personal and private value. For example, the
United Nations (2005) calls for humanity to build on the ‗Age of Knowledge‘ and enter
into the ‗Age of Responsibility‘.
6.6 ICT challenges of participative policy making

participative policy making, is described below. For each of these, Table 5 attempts
to map their likely relevance for the major trends and transformations identified in this
Table 5: Technology matrix for participative policy making
Policy Empower- Account-

Trans-
making Empower- ing ability,
parency
initiated by ing the communi- rights &
& open-
govern- bottom ties & responsibili
ness
ment localities ties
Policy Development:
Modelling, Visualisation   
and Simulation
Policy & innovation
jamming tools   
Tracing and Tracking
Policy Outcomes     
Intelligent Mass
Cooperation Platforms   
Electronic gaming,
language processing,
visualisation, and     
semantic technologies
Information assurance     
Policy development modelling, visualisation and simulation: Tools and

technologies are needed to manipulate and exploit the vast reserves of
Europe's public sector collective data and knowledge resources. Technologies
which could be developed include semantic web applications to access and
visualise background knowledge repositories, translation, games and virtual
worlds, process modelling, data mining, pattern recognition and visualisation
and other gaming-based simulation, forecasting and back-casting, and goal-
80
based optimisation techniques. Cloud computing applications built on large
scale ‘governance webs’ can provide the power of distributed computing for
large scale data analysis and storage. Pooling web-wide computing resources
can be a key issue for eGovernance. These systems can also be used to
animate large-scale societal simulations that forecast potential outcomes and
impacts of proposed policy measures. Parameters include impacts on
movements of people, commuters, goods and services, jobs, costs, benefits,
social impact and resulting social burdens. The public sector could use these
tools to examine options based on the simulated behaviour and wishes of
individuals, groups or society as a whole to understand the possible outcomes
of government proposals, decisions, legislation, etc.
Some experiments have already been made with ‗policy and innovation jams‘
– large scale web-based community collaborations over a given topic – where
anyone in an organisation, company or community can suggest ideas, comment
on them, refine them, express support or even explain why an idea might or
might not work - promoting those ideas that participants think have the greatest
potential to improve performance, grow the business, solve existing problems,
or improve group culture. These can be supported by global networks of subject
matter experts using data mining tools to track the most promising ideas and
help manage top-rated ideas through the formal review processes. For example
IBM53 has demonstrated that Jams may also be applied to societal issues in the
context of the World Urban Forum organised by the United Nations where
39,000 people from 194 countries participated in a HabitatJam on making our
cities better places to live – creating 70 ideas that were presented back to the
next UN Forum. Another focus point are on-demand communities that help to
coordinate voluntary activities – by the end of 2006 IBM had aligned over
75,000 employees through on-demand communities in voluntary activities
related to 80 countries ranging from online mentoring of students at elementary
schools to support in choosing and implementing Open Source software in non-
profit organizations. Technology challenges relate to a better understanding of
community processes (e.g. with regard to interaction patterns, governance or
motivations) as well as to information retrieval and simultaneous large-scale
interaction technologies.
Intelligent Mass Cooperation Platforms: How can citizens and businesses
use technologies that build on and extrapolate from Web 2.0 social software
and future Web 3.0 tools, for bottom-up, user-controlled, massive social
collaboration through networking and ‗crowdsourcing‘ processes, in order to
influence or steer policy formation and governance decisions? These tools can
enable the contribution of many individuals to address complex and
multidimensional policy issues, but driven from the bottom, and could also
involve reputation management systems for enhancing trust‘. They could
include semantic applications for socially-based bottom-up ontology building
processes (such as tagging and folksonomies) and automatic metadata
building, simulation and mixed reality technologies, prediction markets, social
reputation applications, opinion mining, information visualisation, collaborative
filtering and consolidation, as well as mash-up applications based on semantic
cooperation platforms. How can these tools help to traverse language, culture
and other interests to empower multi-national groups and virtual communities
through bottom-up processes for learning, opinion formation, and knowledge
creation and sharing? The tools must include security, identity and access
controls to ensure privacy and data protection where appropriate.
Tracing and Tracking Policy Outcomes: Citizen participation in policy
development implies the ability to track the whole public sector policy formation
and decision making process, as well as trace whether and how their and other
contributions have been considered and whether they have any impact on
political and policy outcomes. Although some systems already exist for this they
are highly formalised and inflexible, so new adaptive configurations are needed
which also retain privacy and data protection where warranted, and which build
integrity and trust. Thus the research should look at how political outcomes can
be made transparent to citizens and businesses and whether their own political
53
One of the most prominent examples is IBM‘s innovation jam: http://www-
03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/20605.wss
81
activity and discussion have had an impact, given that many often fail to see
any link between the two. Account should also be taken of the potential impacts
this could have on the willingness of decision-makers to experiment, take
calculated risks and float innovative policy ideas if there is ‗too much‘
transparency. A balance may need to be struck between full openness with
legitimate confidentiality.
Electronic gaming, language processing, visualisation, and semantic
technologies for generating new ways for individuals and groups to engage,
create, learn together, use and share information and knowledge amongst
themselves within the democratic and public participative process. Government
and citizens can provide iterative and multi-path comment and feedback in
political debate and decision-making.
Citizens and businesses need to gain access to and validate the information
held about them by each government agency and ‗trusted third party‘ which
manages separate fragments of the data relating to them. Thus, ‗information
assurance‘, i.e. which data are held about whom, shown to whom, and how
they are collected, validated, stored, used, and deleted, needs to be addressed
in a public sector context.
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7 Trust, privacy and protection
Making sure trust, privacy and protection underpin all eGovernance strategies is a transformation
needed as the sine qua non of all successful eGovernance policies and activities. Central to this
transformation will be conformable and negotiable security, greater control by constituents over their
own data and own (often) multiple identities, and a focus on trust, resilience and risk management. In
fact, these are key for any activity using ICT across society, whether in the public, private or civil
sectors, and thus should not be seen in isolation. So, getting this right in the public sector will benefit all
other activities.
7.1 Security, data protection and identity management

There are many security and data protection challenges resulting from the
trends and drivers presented earlier in this report, where data and information are
shared across multiple actors, but also need to be timely, accurate and error light.
Security and data protection are the sine qua non of all other eGovernment
developments. (Millard & Shahin, 2006) A lot can be learnt from the private sector,
but the scale and complexity of the public sector, and its technical intertwining with all
other actors in society, make the requirements for eGovernment quite unique.
Present data protection systems in terms of trust, liability, viability, security and
privacy processes are not yet adequate to the challenges of public sector identity and
authentification management, nor to the prevention of unauthorised access, misuse,
fraud and error. Overall, the approach is one of risk management which requires
conscious planning of risks, and risk mitigating measures rather than expecting that
‗security‘ is something you can either turn on, or off. In some countries, such as the
UK and Italy, this is a huge problem and considered the main challenge of
eGovernment. It is an issue which is made much worse when the twin problems of
acute lack of trust in the government‘s handling of personalised data, on the one
hand, and the technical complexities of combining government data and systems, on
the other, come together. Solutions, are therefore also political, behavioural and
psychological, as well as technical.
Well functioning and ubiquitous federated and interoperable identity and
authentification systems are vital (IAAC, Identity Roadmap for the UK, 2006)
through enhanced eIDM (electronic identity management) approaches. These are
needed to enable multi-actor electronic interaction (such as G2C, G2B, B2C and
C2C), where the weak point is often the constituent (citizen or business) him- or
herself given there will remain problems with access and competence. This also
needs to take account of the increasing blurring of roles, such as when private
companies deliver public services, or constituents themselves are involved in
supplying services. The importance of eIDM is not only in relation to eGovernment
services but also has much wider significance as the basis of electronic interaction
between constituents and businesses, as well as between businesses themselves,
and with the civil sector. eIDM, whether or not developed by or for the public sector,
and as with the other issues addressed in this section, is thus important across the
whole range of societal interactions.
One of the main trends will be to give individual constituents much more control
over their own data,54 and that this may also become a commercial service. For
example Google and Microsoft are already starting to offer constituents personal
online data repositories for their own health data (see section 5.2). This would also
mean that any agency wishing or obliged to offer a service would first have to get
permission from the constituent to access and use their data. One way to do this is
using certification systems for trusted third parties as intermediaries between the
owners of data (i.e. in most cases the constituents) and the putative users of data
(i.e. the service agencies). These approaches would also mean that constituents
could only be identified with their specific consent, and imply that agencies would be
required to pursue information minimalisation, i.e. using as little data as possible to
54
83
perform a given task. Constituent anonymity except where explicitly sanctioned by
regulation or through permission given, is thus likely to become the norm.
Security, which is orthogonal to anonymity (CTCP Scenarios and Gaming,
2005), in the eGovernment space is also of paramount concern, and will require
solutions very different from those of today‘s systems which are predicated on
relatively stable, well-defined, consistent configurations, contexts, and participants in
security arrangements. The new paradigm will instead be characterised by
‘conformable’ security, in which the degree and nature of security associated with
any particular type of action will change over time, with changing circumstances and
with changing available information. Here, users‘ electronic agents may need to
negotiate a unique security agreement for the precise services, conditions and
context pertaining, encompassing for example multiple identities, pseudonymity,
specific authentication rather than identity, anonymity, secure data disposal, etc.
There are technical solutions for most of these areas individually but not yet which
integrate them in a public sector context.
To enable back-office and inter-agency integration and interoperability, common
or mutually recognisable data structures and information sharing protocols will be
needed, and the use of standards can help facilitate accessibility. (EURIM, 2008)
Standards are needed to address the issue of the proliferation of identities, allowing
one human individual to seamlessly and easily manage identities relating to different
institutions (e.g. government, financial institutions, employers, etc.) and different roles
(employee, citizen, customer), which in some cases have specific requirements (e.g.
an authorised representative of a large organisation, a medical doctor). As it is often
not possible for different agencies, nor indeed Member States when developing pan-
European services, to re-engineer systems already developed, the use of standards
tailored for the European context will be critical to achieve interoperability. These
standards need to guarantee interoperability at the semantic level (i.e. level of
meaning), even if the technologies themselves are based on different technical
standards. (Secure eGov Project, 2008)
Some security standards see information security primarily as a management or
service oriented issue. Competent examples of this approach are ISO/IEC 27001
Information Security Management System, ITIL Security Management and BS
25999-Business Continuity Management. Another class of international standards
which do not have an information security focus but address related issues, such as
COBIT 4.0. A third class consists of international standards that approach security
from a technical and functional prospective, such the Common Criteria for
Information Security Evaluation or the PCI (Payment Card Initiative) of
Mastercard/Visa.
Other security and data protection issues arising from the collaboration of
multiple agencies, particularly for pan-European and cross-border eGovernment,
will become even more important in future (Secure eGov Project, 2008):
Different cultures -- The EU is a mix of widely different cultures spanning
27 different Member States, each with particular national habits and
expectations. There are also regional variations that may serve to affect
the deployment of eGovernment, for example, in preferences for forms of
regulatory intervention.
Different legislation -- Despite the presence of a number of pan-European
legislative directives, there is still a wide variety of legislation in place
concerning security, data protection and privacy. For example, although
the Data Protection Directive has been transposed into the national laws
of Member States, there remain differences in the details of its
transposition. Also, EU law allows the coexistence of national laws that
deal with overlapping or adjacent areas. Such a patchwork of national
rules complicates overall compliance.
Consideration of legacy systems -- Across the Member States there is a
broad range of eGovernment systems in varying stages of deployment.
These range from stove-piped systems in one or two areas (e.g. driving
licence renewal, application forms) to highly sophisticated environments
with gateways, eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML)-enabled
interoperability and electronic identification (as is the case in Austria,
Belgium and, to a lesser extent, Estonia).
84
Different security approaches -- One critical factor for cross-border
services is the requirement for interoperability or comparability of security
levels and approaches. Although when using certain networks (e.g.
sTESTA) each participant must be certified according to a common
standard that they meet security requirements, this is not possible with the
open nature of such services. Other ways would need to be found to
achieve equality of security, so that what constitutes a certain level in one
country may be understood similarly in another.
7.2 Information assurance

A risk-based approach to the management of information assets within public
administrations is a crucial building block for future eGovernment. While common
understanding is that information security can be reduced down to the
implementation of technical measures (such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems
and so forth), in actual fact it requires managerial effort including, but not limited to,
policies and procedures, management buy-in, leadership and continuous monitoring,
audit and compliance. Understanding and taking on board the doctrine of
information assurance instead of the more focused and technical concept of
information security supports the achievement of confidentiality, availability and
integrity requirements, and helps to support the message that ‗security‘ and
‗assurance‘ are not end states but processes. (IAAC, 2006, Secure eGov Project,
2008)
Given the vast amounts of data and knowledge constantly being created, sifted,
analysed and stored by the public sector, systems are needed to tackle the challenge
of long-term data preservation. This need will increase even more with the adoption
of dynamic social networking technologies for governance, as we move to an era
where society as a whole will play an active role in data creation and use. At the
same time, technology will continue to change fast. In this context, how can dynamic
data be preserved, how are data vetted for preservation and robustly preserved when
there is not always a well-defined gate-keeper, and how is the provenance of the
data validated?
Another important aspect of this is the need for reliable electronic record
management and document life management, including storage and retrieval
systems which are compatible with changing technologies over the longer term so
that out-of-date archives can still be accessed.
7.3 Resilient and robust infrastructures

Highly reliable, resilient and pervasive networks, including large scale wireless
and mobile applications, large scale knowledge grids, and re-usable and shared
data, are all necessary for all eGovernment developments. Such infrastructures,
developed by or for the public sector, can also support private and civil sector
activities, and thus contribute both directly and indirectly to societal development
across the board, and thus to the creation of public value.
According to the Secure eGov Project (2008), a dependable infrastructure is
one which supports the storage, transmission and management of data used in any
eGovernment application. It must also be robust in the face of attack from both the
electronic sphere and the physical space, which may have consequences in the
information infrastructure. Also, it must be resilient, including properties of ‗graceful
degradation‘, i.e. no single attack must be capable of bringing the entire infrastructure
to its knees; rather, the service must degrade gradually over time, with enough
opportunity for alternatives to be found.
Having a dependable infrastructure may not necessarily mean a separate
infrastructure for public networks either – there are procedures, techniques and tools
(e.g. Domain Name System Security (DNSSEC), Internet Protocol Security in Internet
Protocol version 6 (IPSEC in IPv6)) that would permit a comparative level of
technological assurance to a privately-run secure network. Engineering a network
with such properties of resilience has the benefit of meeting two objectives: first, that
dependency is created so that government can rely upon an alternative (manual or
even paper-based if necessary) system; second, it maximises the channels available
to the citizen, helping to address the problem of the digital divide (as many will still
want or have to use face-to-face or manual forms of interaction with government).
85
Finally, measures needed to provide for the dependability of the infrastructure
are continually evolving and are doing so at a rapid pace as we move into the
ubiquitous Information Society. Clearly, the requirement for each Member State to
have a dependable infrastructure is important, but such infrastructures must also be
dependable in the context of their connection to others in other Member States.
7.4 Privacy
To ensure privacy, European governments as data custodians must abide by
the data protection principles embodied in the current European Data Protection
Framework. Adherence to these principles may be affected by a number of factors,
for example, the effectiveness of any data protection ombudsman or supervisor, the
competence of data custodians and the surrounding context or environment.
Furthermore, the presence of outdated residual data will serve to complicate matters
and may offer opportunities for error. Thus the requirement to ‗clean up‘ databases,
by removing obsolete data, must be met.
Another critical issue in ensuring privacy is not breached when deploying
eGovernment services is ‘mission creep’ (i.e. the expansion of the mandate of any
such service to fulfil other out-of-scope requirements), which may occur with
acquiescence to law enforcement demands. Given the large amounts of data in
circulation (much of it related to identity), it would be natural that representatives from
the law enforcement and intelligence communities will want to have access to such
data. Attempts to use or interrogate data sets made available by eServices would be
pushing the boundaries of the spirit or letter of the Data Protection Directive 94/46/EC
and should be resisted as much as possible. Therefore, the implementation of
eGovernmernt must be acutely aware of mission creep and expansion of
requirements driven by law enforcement needs. (Secure eGov Project, 2008)
Like security, any deficiencies in any agencies‘ adherence to privacy principles
will result in a corresponding ‘race to the bottom’, as privacy protection becomes
only as strong as that of the agency with the weakest protections. This could
seriously undermine user trust, and thus the uptake of eGovernment in general.
Some of this challenge can be addressed by creating more transparency, allowing
data use subject to revealing who uses the data and for what purpose, and to have
the possibility to correct erroneous data. Also, a wider use of the right to consent is
an important part of any data protection approach, as is an effective remedy in the
case of privacy breaches.
European privacy requirements dictate that personal information (PI) or
sensitive personal information (SPI) is only collected for the purpose for which it is
intended. Data from UNISYS indicates that European citizens are very concerned
about breaches of privacy: according to the UNISYS Security Index, misuse of
personal information is a concern for 81% of respondents and 50% are significantly
worried. Yet taking a proactive stance to the delivery of eGovernment may contradict
this. This might require reorganisation of information usage in order to enable
administrations to collect data at one gateway, and then use it where necessary to
deliver eligible and required services without the constituent filling in more forms
(whether on paper or online) to confirm their eligibility.
7.5 Constituent needs, trust and risk

In any privacy and data protection system, understanding human behaviour is
vital, i.e. how people actually use ICT and how they feel about this in relation to their
perceived needs. According to indicative research undertaken by the Belgian
information and communication technology (ICT) agency FEDICT, there are a
number of key constituent needs for eGovernment:
a 24/7 electronic counter (with the ability to make and receive payments
and follow through all stages of a transaction)
a central website with all forms available online
opportunities for the empowered management of personal data (e.g. via a
digital safe)
proactive forms of service delivery that are respectful of privacy
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short overviews of procedures, steps and time-limits for interactions with
the public sector
pre-completion of forms and the proactive distribution of grants and
benefits.
In an ideal world, citizens should not have to enter the same information
repeatedly to qualify for benefits, and yet be able to count on their data to be treated
with respect to privacy. User-centric eGovernment takes a proactive approach. This
means that, for example, a person who is eligible to receive benefits or rebates
simply does so automatically. (See also section 5.1) In an ideal example, the
administration has all the required information needed to:
1. make an assessment of eligibility in advance
2. confirm amounts and details with the relevant ministry
3. automatically pay into the constituent‘s bank account via authorised
interaction with the financial institution following confirmation and
notification to the constituent.
In one sense then, ‗the best e-Government is no government’ or at least a
55
minimal level of interaction with agreed consent and trust from the citizen. In the
UK, one of the aims of the current service transformation programme is to reduce
avoidable contact (HM Treasury 2007) and this is also in line with the ‗disappearing
service‘ approach through automatic service delivery (see section 5.1).
Trust thus underlines all aspects of privacy and data protection, and well as
being highly dependent upon them. Trust, indeed, seems to be one, if not the,
common factor in the successful use of ICT for the purposes, not just for
eGovernment, but also more widely in the economy and in the social lives of citizens
and communities. (Millard, 2006a) High levels of trust positively impact economic and
social relations of all sorts, and reduce inequality which is itself a barrier to both
empowerment and economic performance. (Wilkinson 2005, Social Capital Project
2005) It also minimises suspicion of new technology and change generally. Trust also
improves dealings with government and civil society. Reciprocal trust is critical in
furthering empowerment (Social Capital Project 2005), but this remains highly
misunderstood, especially in the context of the public sector and eGovernment to
which it is highly relevant. (See also Fukuyama 1995, Putnam 2000, and section 6.3)
Lack of confidence in government is often linked to a perceived lack of
openness and honesty, incompetence in service delivery, and improper use of
personal data. Confidence is built through positive experiences of services,
treatments, processes and systems working well, and providing constituents with
maximum fulfilment (i.e. actually achieving what they wish to achieve with the
smallest and least cost effort, simply and quickly.) It is also generated through rapid
and effective responses when things do not work well, especially in situations where
responsibility is clearly allocated and accepted and genuine efforts are made to
rectify the current situation, as well as learn from the failure to build better systems in
the future. Confidence builds when all this takes place, but, and perhaps more
important, when it is visibly seen to take place. Openness and transparency are thus
highly important. (See also sections 6.4 and 6.5)
Trust is also a mediated process, which takes time to build but can be quite
quickly undermined through failure, lack of communication and response, or mis-
representation. Trust requires two- (or more) way mediation which builds
relationships, so is enhanced where relationships, especially personal and even one-
on-one relationships, are involved. Relationships imply reciprocation in both
directions, i.e. where the government trusts the constituent (for example by giving it
accurate data on themselves and by allowing them to use data responsibly), and the
constituent trusts the government (for example nit to mis-use of lose their data). Trust
is rarely a one-way process, especially as it may also be dependent, not just on us
(i.e. the constituents) trusting the government with our data, but just as much upon
whether government trusts us to be responsible for our own data, to participate in
decision-making responsibly, etc. (See also section 5.2)
55
Interview with Jan Deprest (24 April 2008), Fedict. Belgium. Data from Fedict indicated that
two-thirds of Belgium Internet users and 80% of Belgian citizens expressed a preference for the
pre-population of all forms required for interaction with the public sector.
87
It seems likely that, in most cases, the more experience of the technology you
56
have the greater the trust in it. However, at present, there seems to be some
increasing mis-trust by those more experienced, perhaps because Web 2.0 has re-
set the start button on trust and thus constitutes a disruption. This may also be
generational as the previously more experienced users are the older generation who
are more mis-trustful of social networking, whilst the younger generation who are
starting to use the technology in the Web 2.0 era seem to be more trustful of this.
Much of the current concern about trust does seem to be concern about Web 2.0, so
much so that people are now demanding more control of their data and privacy. The
previous approach to privacy was in a silo context, now we need an approach which
relates to joined-up whole-of-government. The challenge ten years ago was getting
people online, but now the challenge is getting them to trust joined-up government
and the technology.
There is a need to cope with risk and scale. Genuine trust is most needed, but
also builds most easily, in high risk situations, where these risks are made explicit
and open, where those responsible are transparent about their motives and actions,
and are honest, as well as seen to be honest. Further, where possible, those affected
should be consulted and included in decision-making processes so that risk is jointly
shared and owned. There is also what is often a psychological barrier, i.e. the need
to accept risk and that it is impossible to have 100% security.
A greater amount of broader risk acceptance is also required, i.e. ‗measured
risk‘ which takes small risky steps which together if successful can transform a
situation, but if one step fails the damage is not great and is containable. This would
allow greater scope for experimentation in the public sector, better enabling it to
st
exploit the benefits of ICT and meet 21 Century societal challenges.57
Trust and risk are often also dependent on scale, so that local, near and small
scale systems, which focus on issues constituents are themselves confronted with in
their daily lives, generate more trust, especially in a context of simplicity. Large scale,
more remote and complex issues, where it is more difficult for constituents to see and
understand the relevance for them (despite the fact that such relevance is often very
high), tend to generate low levels of trust and high levels of apparent risk.
7.6 ICT challenges of trust, privacy and protection

trust, privacy and protection, is described below. For each of these, Table 6 attempts
to map their likely relevance for the major trends and transformations identified in this
There is a need for high data security and data protection systems supporting
trust and confidence through government related identity and authentification
management systems and to protect these from unauthorised access. These
should reflect the unique public sector-constituent relationship, with full user
control (subject to legal requirements) which also prevents misuse and fraud.
An analogy with how banks use and handle their clients‘ data may be useful
here because banks are relatively well regulated, with rules on what they can do
with data in terms, for example, of authentification and auditing. Banks thus
mimic the public sector at least in this aspect and provide useful models for
viability and for trust-legitimacy-liability issues, but the public sector is still
unique in the type of relationship it has with its constituents and thus in the way
the technology needs to be designed and used. (IAAC, 2004, Secure eGov,
2006).
The whole question of information assurance - what data is held about whom,
and how is it collected, validated, stored, used, and deleted - needs to be better
addressed in a public sector context. The difference between public and private
sectors is that in government there may be personal information that the state
has a legal duty to keep, but does not want the subject of the data (or others)
even to be aware that there are data; and would certainly not wish to divulge the
56
Interviews with William Dutton (7 May 2008), Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, Andrew
Miller (7 May 2008), Member of UK Parliament and Chair of House of Commons IT Committee,
and with John Kootstra and colleagues (9 May 2008), the Netherlands..
57
88
content of the data. This, however, goes against the principles of transparency,
so must be strictly related to legal provision and oversight.
Data authentification systems are needed for constituents and agencies users
to evaluate the authenticity of data they use (e.g. from third parties, for use in
mash-ups, for data re-use, etc.)
Table 6: Technology matrix for protection, security and trust
Resilient
Security & Constituent
Information & robust
data Privacy needs &
assurance infrastruc
protection trust
tures
Identity and
authentification     
management systems
Information assurance     
Data authentification     
Centralised vs
decentralised data     
security
Conformable security    
Checking who is
accessing data    
Constituent control  
Constituent privacy  
Making the constituent
fully ‗sighted‘  
Constituents‘ electronic
agents  
Reputation
management 
Large centralised public sector databases can be highly efficient, cost effective
and simple, but any security breach is also more likely to cause large scale
damage and loss of trust than in smaller decentralised systems. A balance
needs to be found in terms of overall effectiveness, legality and data security
between such large systems, on the one hand, and sets of decentralised and
semi-autonomous databases (though linkable when required through common
and interoperable standards), on the other. We need technological solutions to
find this balance in different contexts. These could include decentralised
databanks to minimise the damage of security breaches, clearing houses,
trusted third parties, information broker systems trusted third parties,
autonomous networked nodes, etc. Or perhaps it is possible for centralised
databanks to be adequately secure through proper training, systems &
procedures?
Many current solutions are predicated on relatively stable, well-defined,
consistent configurations, contexts, and participants in security arrangements.
Future systems may instead require ‗conformable’ security, in which the
degree and nature of security associated with any particular type of action will
depend on the relationship and may change over time, with changing
circumstances and with changing available information.
Systems are needed for checking who is accessing data and from where,
especially when this is not being done in approved locations or by approved
people. This could include real-time monitoring of the location of databases and
terminal devices for accessing them.
Full constituent control over their data and security should be enabled
(subject to legal constraints and the competence and wishes of the constituent),
which can also facilitate any one constituent permitting their security system to
link to, or join, the systems of other individuals, such as within a family so that
parents act on behalf of children or adult children act on behalf of the elderly, or
89
other group such as in a business network. There may be a need to establish
‗personal data services‘ functionality as a third party service which can protect
individuals or groups against intrusive profiling whilst still supplying legally
required data. Such systems would also be good for the business sector. Some
of the different models required include multiple identities, pseudonymity,
authentification, anonymity, secure data disposal, etc., as well as the need for
clear audit trails and data lifetime research. There are technical solutions for
most of these areas individually but not which integrate them in a public sector
context. One of the key distinctions is between data ownership versus data
custodianship. For example, the user may say he/she is prepared to release
data only to agency X, but if X then ties to pass the data to agency Y the data
will die. How can this be implemented and validated? Also, an opt-in, opt-out
facility should be available as some users may wish to give government their
data each time they interact, whereas others may prefer to only provide their
data once and then re-use a service and access different services on the basis
of these data.
When considering constituent privacy, there is a need to allow citizens and
businesses to gain access to and validate the information held about them by
government and/or any ‗trusted third parties‘ which are managing separate
fragments of the data relating to the user. A key challenge here is to strike a
good balance between government accountability and constituent privacy.
Accountability needs to be inbuilt, so that if things go wrong it is clear who is
accountable and how the situation is resolved. Accountability implies
transparency in showing how and why the agency or the agent performs the
way it does, and this could involve the use of audit trails and traceability. Agents
must also be secure within these parameters. How, through the interaction
between the user and the agent, and then with the agency, is control exercised?
There is also a need to consider agent-to-agent interaction and how this is
controlled and implemented.
In many contexts (Member States or agencies) there are legal, organisational or
other barriers to data and intelligence sharing between the back offices of
different agencies which are otherwise necessary to provide personalised
services from a constituent- rather than a public sector-perspective. It may be
difficult or undesirable to remove many of these barriers, at least in the short
term, making the public sector ‗blind‘, but this should not prevent the
constituent becoming ‘fully sighted’ and benefiting appropriately. The
constituent him/herself should be enabled to access, manipulate and exploit
his/her own data, as well as other relevant data, wherever it is within the public
sector, even if one agency is legally forbidden to access data held by another
agency. This will involve facilitating appropriate data protection and privacy
features, as well as data mining and assembly functions, with the constituent
having full control over this.
Research is needed into how the constituent’s electronic agents, and the
security systems supporting them, of individual users can combine, cooperate
and act across defined functions within temporary group networks (specified in
terms of time) or semi-permanent networks (until further instructions or legal
triggers are applied). All functionalities and services need to be sharable and
usable by one or more group members, including the merging of data, identities
and group security/privacy within legal requirements. This could also enable
intermediaries to act on behalf of a group, whether or not in formalised
relationships, but always through voluntary, transparent or legal procedures.
Reputation management systems can enhance ‗trust‘, for example in
constituent controlled technology (like Web 2.0 mash-up applications) which
creates a ‗shared‘ space between government and citizens.
90
8 Production of ICT and technology innovation
Maximising the production and use of ICT for public sector innovation is a key strategic transformation
needed to support and deliver all other transformations for eGovernance to 2020. eGovernment has
reached the stage where it is inconceivable that any government or public sector project would not use
ICT, so that the technology is no longer seen as an add-on but is intrinsically bound up with
developments in any aspect of government.
8.1 Current trends continuing

In many ways, the public sector has been quite poor at maximising the benefits
ICT has to offer, certainly compared to the private sector. Some important lessons
can indeed be learnt from the private sector (but this learning can also go both ways),
but the challenge will remain particularly as technology continues to develop at a fast
pace. However, there are perhaps some understandable reasons for many of the
problems the public sector has in exploiting ICT, not least the complexity of the
governance task and the very large number of actors involved, much more so than in
the private sector. Indeed, the undoubted successes there have been in
eGovernment have sometimes been reached against the odds, and thus stand as
highly significant achievements.
An overview of eGovernment policy against eGovernment technology is given in
Figure 11 along a time horizon showing the main developments from the mid 1990s
to 2010. Technology developments are shown in terms of research and development
attention rather than implementation, which always lags. Possible (near) future
technology drivers are also shown in Figure 11 and summarised in section 8.2
below.
The current (2008) status of eGovernment technology, thinking and
programmes shows that still absolutely essential is to get the back office organised
and integrated first, without which interoperability and multi-channel are impossible 58
To progress, it is necessary to develop a circle of trust in which organisations are
free to participate or not. The willing and able must be supported in a targeted
manner to allow champions to emerge, whilst laggards are treaded respectfully. This
requires thinking in terms of end-to-end processes, not in levels or organisation of
government, and embraces a ‗connective government‘ covering public, private and
civil sectors, intermediates and constituents.
Also of high importance is user-friendliness and the development of user-
centred services, as compared to the more one-size fits all approach of ten years
ago. Constituent segmentation has become important, but this has still to adequately
address individual personalisation needs.
There is focus on interoperability between Public Administrations, including at
the pan-European level, although progress here is limited, and on multi-level
eGovernment between different national, local, and regional authorities which had
been developing ‗island‘ solutions. These developments have been supported by the
further development of the IDA Programme to become IDABC (Inter-exchange of
Data between Administrations, Business and Citizens), and the TESTA network
promoting interoperability and extended security for public administrations. The
European Interoperability Framework (EIF) is also now going into its second version.
However, in the European context, central coordination and facilitation is not
enough. In addition, the EC should push, pull and execute, whilst letting Member
59
States decide if they wish to join on a voluntary basis. There will be a Europe of
different speeds, but this is a necessary approach and ‗champions‘ should be
stimulated to lead. This should involve the exchange of information between
countries, with proportionality of data request and finality in data protection, and is
58
Interview with Jan Deprest (24 April 2008), Fedict, Belgium.
59
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Figure 11: eGovernment technology map and European policy
Source: Updated from Millard & Shahin, 2007
European Area for R&D & full internal market operation Enlargement, ERA, citizenship, internal market Common European Information Space
European policy Innovative businesses, SMEs & accelerated eCommerce eGov, eLearning, eHealth & dynamic eBusiness Competitiveness, innovation for jobs & growth
context Use of the Internet & an Information society for all Widespread broadband & secure infrastructures Inclusion, participation & quality of life
PA systems & internal PA re-organisation Broadband connecting all administrations Efficiency, effectiveness & measurement
Data exchange between PAs Interoperability framework for pan-European services Sharing, enablers & high impact services
Domain objectives eGov service roll-out & easy access eGov service use, interactive multi-platform & PIAPs Inclusion & democracy
Benchmark (BM) supply + best practices BM supply & demand (BM S&D) + good practice (GP) BM S&D & impact, GP + benchlearning
Standardisation, interoperable & reusable ICT systems Knowledge management & organisational innovation eParticipation & inclusive eGovernment
EU research Cost-efficiency, inter-working, & trust & confidence Interoperability, pan-European services & open source Efficiency, transparency & accountability
expected impacts User friendly, affordable, accessible services User interaction, mobile services eProcurement, sucure & authenticated access
eDemocracy: online access, consultation, voting eDemocracy, eParticipation: democ. deficit & process High socio-economic & other policy impacts
Interaction Ergonomic touch screens Information One-way interaction User centred and personalised systems Cognitive interfaces Personalisable & intelligent services
eGov applications
interfaces Two-way interaction PIAPs

User-friendly systems/user needs analysis Design for all Full transaction Multi-lingual content & interfaces eAccessibility User driven systems
Channels &
One-stop-shop Multi-channel systems Flexi-channelling
platforms
Online multi-media channels Portals organised by life & business events mGovernment Intelligent systems for policy support
Integration Standards for back-office integration Interoperability between PAs, Businesses & Citizens Organisational innovation & learning PPPs & PCPs
technology
BPR & interoperability inside PAs Intelligent PA systems Interoperability at pan-European level Multi-level eGovernment Transformed & networked government
Non-netw. HW Visualisation systems Authentification systems eIDM infrastructures Federated & interoperable eIDM & security
Enabling technologies
& infrastructure Cataloging Smart cards Wearables Record management systems
Non-net- Open source Ontolologies & natural language processing

worked SW Office software Voice Recognition Intelligent interchangeable agents
Public sector information Knowledge management systems
Digital TV Web 2.0 Web 3.0
Networked HW, Broadband Internet Mass collaboration networks
Internet Mobile Telephony G2 Mobile Telephony, G3 & handhelds
infras. & SW Policy development modelling
WiFi & WiMax Mash-up
Online fora applications Ambient intelligence
Worldwide Web e-bulletin-boards
Semantic web Digital business
GRID & cloud
computing ecosystems
1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 Future
FP5 FP6 FP7

eEurope 2002 eEurope 2005 i2010
n
Lisbon I Lisbon
Plan II
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essentially a European task. For example, the Services Directive could lead to a
huge number of bilateral connections, in a 27x27 mesh. This is undoable and
requires a central platform.
Another example, in which there is some progress, is the Single Euro
Payments Area (SEPA), an initiative for the European financial infrastructure which
involves the creation of a zone for the Euro in which all electronic payments are
considered domestic, and where a difference between national and intra-European
cross border payments does not exist. SEPA aims to improve the efficiency of cross
border payments and turn the fragmented national markets for Euro payments into a
single domestic one. SEPA will enable customers to make cashless Euro payments
to anyone located anywhere in the area using only a single bank account and a
single set of payment instruments. The project includes the development of common
financial instruments, standards, procedures, and infrastructure to enable economies
of scale. This should in turn reduce the overall cost to the European economy of
moving capital around the region (estimated today as 2%-3% of total GDP).60
In terms of the current status of eGovernment roll-out, the latest 2007
European benchmarking shows that progress has continued since the last
measurement in 2006 (CapGemini, 2007), as shown in Figure 12.
Figure 12: EU achievement on five-stage sophistication model, 2007

Source: Cap Gemini (2007)
Figure 12 shows that ―Europe has achieved an average overall sophistication

maturity level that is between „two-way interaction‟ and „fully transactional‟, or more
precisely 76%. The progression in sophistication of services is important compared to
2006, where it reached a level of two-way interaction (electronic forms). It is even
more significant since new Member States have joined the EU and Turkey has also
been taken into account in the scoring.” (Cap Gemini 2007) The services measured
in these benchmarking surveys are, however, a standardised basket of twenty which
have largely remained unchanged (for comparison purposes) since the first
measurements were made in 2001, so do not address new services. However, the
achievement is clear, even though there is considerable variation between Member
States.
Further, the supply side roll-out and sophistication of eGovernment services
remains ahead of actual use, revealing a considerable supply-demand gap, what has
been termed the ‗user-gap‘ (Undheim, 2008), as shown in Table 7.
Another area which has became very important recently across the whole of
eGovernment is identity management (or eIDM), which is key for both organisation
of (personal) data and access management, and this continues the discussions
60
According to RTE News, 27 March 2007: http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0327/banking.html
93
related to, and building on, smart cards which started ten years ago. eIDM now
includes the development of biometric national cards and eSignatures.
Table 7: eGovernment supply and demand side indicators 2005-2006

Sources: (1) European Commission (2006);
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/eeurope/i2010/docs/studies/_Toc149123166); (2)
European Commission (2007a), (3) Interpolated from CapGemini (2006).
eGovernment services for citizens eGovernment services for enterprises

EU 25 % basic public % using of which for % basic public % using e- of which for
services fully eGovernment returning filled services fully Government returning filled
available services in forms available services in forms
2005 (1) 32% (3) 22.1% 5.5% 62% (3) 57.4% 33.0%
2006 (2) 36.8% 23.8% 8.1% 67.8 63.7% 44.8%
Also an important preoccupation at this time, although progress is slow, is

knowledge-enhanced eGovernment applications, which aim at improving public
services, democratic processes and public policies through knowledge enhanced
ICT-based solutions and knowledge management, to support organisational
change, innovation and learning within agencies. Many of these new knowledge-
based approaches involve a focus on semantic-based technologies, including
semantic web and support for cognitive interfaces, which encode ontologies, or
taxonomies of meanings, separately from data, content files and application codes.
This enables machines as well as people to understand, share and reason during
application execution time, and thus also enables adding, changing and
implementing new relationships or interconnecting programmes in new and different
ways.
Much current attention is also currently being placed on the fact that the public
sector manages large volumes of personal and confidential data, such as health
records, income data, commercial information, etc., which when intelligently handled
as value-adding knowledge, with either a public and/or a commercial benefit, could
be an important source of public sector information providing vast new resources
and new potential services. Citizens and businesses also need to feel that external
control by, or unauthorized transmission of information to third parties, of such
information is prohibited by adequate and verifiable technological safeguards. This
links back to data security and eIDM, but also moves to notions of best value-for-
money solutions and decreasing the dependence on ‗closed‘ ICT suppliers which has
drawn interest in many administrations to open source solutions. This area of work
is often called Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS).
Some eGovernment services are now being provided locally at municipal or
regional level. This requires tools, applications and technical solutions which can
support multi-channel and multi-lingual services and service portals, including
Public Internet Access points (PIAPs) and call centres, which enable the seamless
provision of services and content to all. Rolling out broadband Internet for all
citizens and businesses across all regions, including rural and peripheral areas, has
thus become a big challenge but one which is still not met.
There has also been a recent focus for the first time on mobile, or
mGovernment, as many central and local governments have started to offer
eGovernment services via a variety of multiple channels for service delivery. Mobile
services have become increasingly relevant considering the much faster growth of
the mobile penetration rate compared to PC-based Internet access, a factor which is
already playing some role in bridging the digital divide.
Recent attention has also started to be strongly directed towards applications
for eDemocracy, for example focusing heavily on knowledge Management for
decision-making, openness and transparency, on improvements to the parliamentary,
legislative and judicial processes, as well as on eParticipation and new models of
engagement. However, again, actual achievements are only being very slowly
realised.
A complementary and more dynamic and critical perspective than the above is
shown in Figure 13. This incorporates Gartner‘s original eGovernment hype cycle
from 2004, which depicted the ‗trough of disillusionment‘ there was at that time
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caused by the immense difficulty of achieving a whole-of-government approach
through the enterprise architecture (EA) mechanism.
Figure 13: eGovernment hype cycle, 2007

Source: Di Maio (2007)
In 2007, efforts to move out of this trough have not made much headway due to
excessive ambition, wrong scope and an EA focus on the current scope rather than
the future state. EA should be seen as an incremental process which is forward
looking, rather than as a framework. Thus, Figure 13 shows that the attempt at a
joined-up and whole of government architecture has so far encountered so many
obstacles that it may fail and go back to silos (dashed - brown - curve). At the same
time, governments may be overly distracted by the more visible aspects of Web 2.0
(social networking, etc.) which, although being hyped at present, will only provide
value if they are heavily focused (heavy - red - curve). A more sustainable approach,
according to Gartner, is also to embrace business models supported by the more
invisible aspects of Web 2.0 which enable ‗mashable‘ services and content through
a web-oriented architecture (WOA) approach (light - blue - curve), i.e. the
architectural potential of Web 2.0. (Di Maio 2007a, Osimo 2008)
8.2 Key future developments

Above all ICT will become a utility, so where it comes from is not important,
although its quality, resilience, reliability and interoperability based on open
standards is crucial.61 There are many eGovernment challenges and opportunities
resulting from rapid changes in the technological environment. Prominent among
these is ambient technology as systems and services which are everywhere, fully
interoperable and truly convergent (in both technical and non-technical terms). They
are instantly and unobtrusively accessible or available through constant monitoring
via network sensors and receptors of who is where, and what their needs are in
changing situations. However, to get there we will need to remove the serious
interoperability bottlenecks between back-offices which will remain a significant
challenge for many years, ensure that data registers are shared (within legal and
privacy constraints) and that inter-agency workflows and processes are enabled, also
at different levels of government. (Broster 2008)
This also implies ambient Intelligent space (ISTAG, 2002) for supporting
mobile users, each of whom is constantly moving and being offered inter-
changeable agents and objects which manifest themselves through such things as
caches, liquid software, and downloadable applications. In this space, intelligence is
61
95
pervasive and unobtrusive in an environment which is sensitive to the presence of
living people, and supports their activities. People, physical entities and their
agents/avatars share this new space, which encompasses both the physical and
virtual worlds. Here, people will participate in a multiplicity of parallel, overlapping,
inter-leaved and evolving one-to-one as well as peer-to-peer (P2P), one-to many,
and many-to-many, relationships. Some of these will be very short-lived, established
temporarily and instantaneously, whilst others will be longer term and more stable
and permanent. Much communication between participants in these relationships will
be asynchronous, as well as in real time, so that virtuality applies to time as well as
space.
Well functioning and ubiquitous federated and interoperable identity and/or
authentification systems are also vital, as is user anonymity which is orthogonal to
security. Security in the ambient intelligent space is of paramount concern, and will
require solutions very different from those of today‘s systems which are predicated on
relatively stable, well-defined, consistent configurations, contexts, and participants in
security arrangements. The new paradigm will instead be characterised by
‗conformable‘ security, in which the degree and nature of security associated with any
particular type of action will change over time, with changing circumstances and with
changing available information. Here, users‘ agents will negotiate a unique security
agreement for the precise conditions and context pertaining.
eGovernment will also require personalisable and context-relevant ICT,
customer (or in this case, citizen) relationship management systems, and decision-
support and forecasting systems based on intelligent knowledge management and
archiving. Personal eGovernance modules/spaces will become important which
are context-sensitive, intelligent and personalisable, also for tracking and tracing
service progress. User control and self-directed services will be a main trend.
Multi- and flexi-channel approaches also lie at the base of these
developments, in which both technical and non-technical channels need to be
available, inter-changeable and mutually interoperable. Interfaces need to be
adaptable, natural and intuitive, including through the large range of handheld
devices and wearables. Advanced multi-model interfaces, for example voice,
gesture, touch, eye movements, 3D and thought, will also become important. This
implies full eAccessibility according, for example, to W3C guidelines. These
developments will enable services to become fully intelligent and personalisable,
as well as empower users to determine how they access services and how they
choose channels, whether ICT or non-ICT, face-to-face, telephone, etc., best suited
to changes in task, situation and purpose, through appropriate channel switch points,
thereby enabling full flexi-channelling. Indeed, some experts predict the
convergence, or at least blurring, of the physical and virtual worlds, e.g. through
‗Second Life‘ and similar applications. Strong focus on mobile channels and G3
services will be a very important part of these developments, as will the first serious
use of digital TV and integrated home platforms, all of which have been shown to be
extremely important, not least for inclusive eGovernment.
New types of intelligent systems will focus on new ways of organising and using
data, giving rise to completely new types of services, which will see a dramatic break
compared with developments to date. These include new web-services based on
advanced semantic applications, and web-oriented architecture (a sub-set of SOA,
service oriented architecture).
New types of artificial intelligence, for example for search engines and
knowledge systems, will also soon be available, such as that being developed by the
62
Cambridge based firm ‗True Knowledge‘. One of the fundamental problems in
current Internet search is that computers (unlike humans) cannot understand the
content of web pages. Google, for example, simply uses combinations of key words,
but does not understand their content or meaning, and cannot use natural language,
but simply accesses pages which have a statistical correlation with key words. As a
result, finding information in the early 21st century still involves a process of guessing
keywords that may appear in an appropriate web page and hoping that a search
engine retrieves a document with the desired content sufficiently near the top of the
list reasonably quickly.
62
http://www.trueknowledge.com/
96
The new semantic search engines, however, provide a way for the world's
knowledge to be represented in a form that computers can understand and process,
and for ordinary internet users to be able to add to this knowledge base without
having to understand how the knowledge is represented. Because knowledge stored
in the database can be processed and understood by computers, direct and accurate
answers to questions on any topic will be possible, thus enabling computers and
other automated systems to query the widest possible domain of knowledge and
receive a response in a form they can process.
The knowledge stored will be semantically compatible with existing stored
knowledge (e.g. the same person cannot have two different places of birth) through a
process of cross checking. The database will also be able to distinguish between
permanent knowledge (e.g. place of birth) and transient knowledge which can
change legitimately (e.g. marital status). As in Wikipedia, knowledge can be added by
anyone, but will, unlike Wikipedia, only be accepted if it is compatible with existing
knowledge and will only change this existing knowledge if enough evidence (i.e.
different sources) are available to show that the existing knowledge is wrong. Thus
the ‗reversion‘ wars of Wikipedia will not happen, but instead the accuracy of
knowledge will only increase over time. It is thus the connections between the
knowledge and how it is structured which are important. This has tremendous
implications for, for example, pro-active services, policy making, etc, both undertaken
by humans as well as automatically by computer, and will lie at the basis of many
future artificial intelligent systems.
Location-based (geo) services are likely to become much more important,
which can in real-time handle both routine and emergency tasks, dependent on
where the user is located. What will happen, for example, when applications like
63
Google Earth are adopted as ‗standard‘ for any information that is location based?
Another promising development could be location-based participation, for example
helping to re-design the park you‘re walking in, or the hospital organisation which
kept you waiting and you think you have a solution, i.e. a location or an event creates
the opportunity for services, content or dialogue.
Underlying all these developments, will be the need for highly reliable, resilient
and pervasive networks, including large scale wireless and mobile applications,
knowledge GRIDS, and re-usable and shared data. A potentially revolutionary
development is free mobile services at present based on WiFi in local area networks
and already operating over 30 km. This could provide many services in real time free
of charge. Further wireless developments include WiMax based on microwave
access. By 2020, if not before, everything could be mobile, free, voice activated and
using standard open source software. Technologies supporting semantic persons,
objects, situations and standards, will be needed based on ontology approaches and
natural language processing, and the recognition of gestures and other intuitive
signals. Open source and open standards will be essential ingredients.
Moving beyond so-called Web 1.0 (email, instant messaging, web pages, etc.),
the development of Web 2.0 components includes social software, social network
tools, RSS, podcasting and MP3 players, blogs and wikis. Add to these the
widespread availability of other technologies, like cameras, recording equipment,
sensors, etc. which used to be the preserve of professionals but are now becoming
widely available. Many of these technologies are already becoming quite mature but
have not yet been taken up to any extent in the public sector.
Web 3.0 describes various evolutions of Web usage and interaction along
several paths, which could be realised in the third decade of the Web (2010-2020),
such as wide-scale ubiquitous seamless networks, networked and distributed
computing, open ID, open semantic web, large scale distributed databases, and
artificial intelligence.
The use of Intelligent mass-collaboration networks and platforms by
constituents which build on and extrapolate from Web 2.0 social software and future
Web 3.0 tools, for bottom-up, user-controlled, massive social collaboration through
networking and ‗crowdsourcing‘ processes, in order to influence or steer policy
formation and governance decisions. These tools can enable the contribution of
many individuals to address complex and multidimensional policy issues, including
being driven from the bottom, and could also involve reputation management and
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97
other systems and initiatives for enhancing trust. They could include semantic
applications for socially-based bottom-up ontology building processes (such as
tagging and folksonomies) and automatic metadata building, simulation and mixed
reality technologies, prediction markets, social reputation applications, opinion
mining, information visualisation, collaborative filtering and consolidation. These tools
could help to traverse language, culture and other interests to empower multi-national
groups and virtual communities through bottom-up processes for learning, opinion
formation, and knowledge creation and sharing. They must also include security,
identity and access controls to ensure privacy and data protection where appropriate.
These technologies are largely what Gartner terms the more visible aspects of
Web 2.0 (see section 8.1 and Di Maio 2007a), but perhaps of more longer term
interest are the business models supported by the more invisible aspects of Web
2.0 which enable ‗mashable‘ services and content through a web-oriented
architecture (WOA) approach, i.e. the architectural potential of Web 2.0. (See also
section 3.4) Osimo (2008) operationally defines Web 2.0 as a combination of
technologies (e.g. Ajax), applications (e.g. wikis) and values (e.g. user as a
producer), and also distinguishes between the back- and front-office impacts of Web
2.0, i.e.:
back-office impacts – regulation, cross-agency collaboration, knowledge
management
front-office impacts – service provision, political participation and
transparency, law enforcement.
Policy development modelling, visualisation and simulation tools and
technologies which will help manipulate and exploit the vast reserves of Europe's
public sector collective data and knowledge resources. Technologies which could be
developed include semantic web applications to access and visualise background
knowledge repositories, translation, games and virtual worlds, process modelling,
data mining, pattern recognition and visualisation and other gaming-based
simulation, forecasting and back-casting, and goal-based optimisation techniques.
Cloud computing applications built on large-scale ‘governance webs’ can provide
the power of distributed computing for large scale data analysis and storage. Pooling
web-wide computing resources can be a key issue for eGovernance. These systems
can also be used to animate large-scale societal simulations that forecast
potential outcomes and impacts of proposed policy measures. Parameters include
impacts on movements of people, commuters, goods and services, jobs, costs,
benefits, social impact and resulting social burdens. The public sector could use
these tools to examine options based on the simulated behaviour and wishes of
individuals, groups or society as a whole to understand the possible outcomes of
government proposals, decisions, legislation, etc.
A governance web may rest on a ‗digital business ecosystem‘ defined as an
‗organism‘, flexibly composed of different formal units (such as firms or public
agencies), able to carry out processes and functions by temporarily and automatically
linking between and disengaging from electronic ‗hooks‘ within the ICT system of
each unit, in order to respond in real time to unpredictable tasks as they arise. Very
often middleware is at the core of such an ecosystem, for example using a peer-to-
peer (P2P) platform specially designed to enable businesses to create, integrate and
operate with both real-world and software services for SMEs. This takes place on an
Internet-based intelligent distributed infrastructure as a free common platform, using
open source software and open standards, in which no one firm can dominate, thus
offering equal status between companies. A future vision of a digital business
ecosystem is one where it is able to evolve into a distributed cognitive system,
engineered to embed mechanisms of evolution and adaptation to local needs and
cultures, whose content is democratically and socially constructed, and that enables
the participation of small producers of knowledge and services. Seen from this
perspective, the digital business ecosystem clearly offers a new type of business
model which could become an important approach for the public sector in the future
in creating and delivering both content and services. (European Commission 2007b).
Another aspect of this is the need for reliable record management systems,
including for document life management, storage and retrieval, which are compatible
with changing technologies over time so that out-of-date archives can still be
accessed.
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The nature of many of these technologies is potentially highly transformative
(enabling the emergence of new markets, stakeholders and partnerships,
empowering of constituents, turning traditional business and organisation models
upside down, etc.), and could lead to new types of transformed and networked
government. Certainly, there could be significant disruptions which will raise new
questions for governments about the mandate and role of the public sector. There is
some evidence that we are on the edge of a major move towards the ICT-based
commoditisation of large numbers of business processes (Davenport, 2005), and
that this will also profoundly affect the public sector in the next five to ten years. All
types of business processes, not just in relation to designing and delivering services,
but also from developing software, through hiring personnel to at least some aspects
of policy development through automatic modelling, scenario and simulations, are
being analysed, standardised and routinised, and this knowledge is being codified
and facilitated by ICT. This could lead to process commoditisation and outsourcing
on a massive scale.
It is arguable that many of these technology developments will mean that the
public sector must grapple to avoid the simultaneous loss of knowledge and control
over basic processes and over the competencies, decisions and policies needed to
support these and which lie at the basis of all services in the public interest. We will
need to better understand which aspects of the public sector‘s activities can and/or
should be codified and commoditised (for example through ICT) and outsourced or
‗networked‘ with other actors (both private and civil sectors, and as increasingly
seems likely, constituents themselves).
8.3 Transformative and disruptive technologies

Cisco (2007) describes how ―the role of technology will evolve from an enabler
to profound change agent, transforming the structure and culture of government and
often representing an integral part of the solution to the very challenges to which its
pervasive influence is giving rise.‖
Traditional government, which was originally built on principles of the industrial
society, is less and less able to face the complex demands and problems of the
information society. The stove-pipe architecture of public administration, but also the
changing power balance in the political arena, are often a barrier to governments in
fulfilling their tasks and in gaining citizens‘ trust. Moreover, the tasks society expects
of government, as well as the tasks government takes on itself, have changed
dramatically in the past and are likely to change just as dramatically in the future.
(See section 9.2)
In a changing society, the technologies governments use thus need to be
related to these tasks, to political circumstances and changing societal demands.
These are rarely determined by technology itself, although the technology can
provide transformative opportunities.
Transformative technologies may lead to a significant change in the existing
establishment; open the gate to new players, lead to new institutional forms, change
the value chain and relationship between actors and bring in new solutions to the
complex problems that current governments are facing.64
The next question to be answered is: which technologies have this potential?
One way of looking at this is not to say that the technology is itself transformative, but
that the deployment of technology is.65. For example, the development of the Global
Positioning System (GPS) did not lead to radical change in itself, but the widespread
use of GPS -- for navigation purposes for example – did lead to a fundamental shift in
involved actors, new markets and solutions. When technology is fully exploited
throughout society, the effects are likely to be much larger and longer lasting. As
64
Within the FISTERA (Institute of Prospective Technological Studies, European Commission
DG Joint Research Centre) project disruptive technologies were defined as: technological
evolutions that lead to a disruption; this is a significant change in the scenario involving actors
and the rules of the game (WP2 Key European Technology Trajectories, First Report on Key
European Technology Trajectories, 30 September 2003).
65
To put this in perspective, with ‗transformative‘ we do not mean that the deployment of
technology in itself determines transformation but has the potential - together with other factors
such as policy, skills and prevailing values – to stimulate or enable transformation.
99
Perez (2002) has argued: ―The full fruits of the technological revolutions that occur
about every half century are only widely reaped with a time-lag. Two or three
decades of turbulent adaptation and assimilation elapse, from the moment when the
set of new technologies, products, industries and infrastructures make their first
impact to the beginning of a „golden age‟ or „era of good feeling‟ based on them.―
On the other hand, not all technologies are widely used; they must also have an
intrinsic potential to become transformative. In the literature, the notion of
‗transformative‘ is often termed ‗disruptive‘, for instance by Christensen (1997)
According to Christensen (1997) disruptive technologies are novel technologies that
bring completely new approaches and products to the market place. Ironically, they
are often also ―innovations that result in worse product performance, at least in the
near term‖. Yet, disruptive technologies always improve in performance and
eventually make obsolete -- or at the very least overshadow -- the previous
conventional technology. In addition, and most importantly, they lead to some new
applications to which the current conventional technologies did not have an inherent
capacity to contribute.
Examples of disruptive technologies and conventional technologies that were
overshadowed are: transistors versus vacuum tubes and (in read-write memory) flash
memory versus random access memory disks. Arguably, human ability to travel to
the moon and safely back was enabled by the development of the transistor and
would have been significantly more complex had vacuum tubes been the only
electronic technology available.
Transformation can be enabled by the deployment of existing and new
disruptive technologies. An example of the first is gaming technology, whilst
nanotechnology and biotechnology are examples of the latter. In the public realm, a
lot of existing technologies that have transformative potential are not yet fully
deployed (Evens & Yen 2006, and Torres, Pina & Acerete 2005).
This is why we expect that, over the next five to fifteen years, transformations
will mainly result from a process of adaptation and assimilation of existing
technologies, as well as some new technologies which will become embedded in
certain parts of society first, and especially in the private sector.
Finally, it is wise never to forget that eGovernance is (just) part of governance.
ICT is a (very powerful) tool or enabler, and does seem able to go further than most
tools with the potential to transform government, both what it is and does as well as
how we think about it. However, it cannot ultimately be understood or exploited if
entirely divorced from mainstream government and public sector developments more
generally. A pertinent quote in this context is from the ex-eEnvoy in the UK, Alan
Mather (2003): ―eGovernment isn‘t any different from government. It just might make
it better, sooner.‖
A summary and systematic overview of main technology trends relevant to

eGovernment is provided in the Annex, section 13.
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9 Public value governance
Public value governance ensures that public goods and society-wide benefits are created, so
distinguishing the public realm from other realms, and are driven forward by visible value systems and
innovative approaches to open source governance. A strategic transformation is taking place from a
focus on delivering eServices to a focus on the value of those services to constituents, and from New
Public Management, which has dominated the last ten years of public sector thinking, to Public Value
Management.
9.1 Public Value Management

A strategic transformation seems likely up to 2020 with the aim of ensuring that
the overarching goal of public value governance underpins all policies and activities
within the public realm. Although public value is a contested concept, both politically
and operationally, it is needed to distinguish the public realm from other realms
(whether private, civil or constituent), and to justify the creation of public goods and
society-wide benefits.
Public value is enabled by the overarching governance structure designed to
balance and reconcile the other two types of value (personal/private and
participative/collaborative) where these are contradictory, as well as proactively
promote collective benefits. Undheim (2007) characterises public value from the
constituent perspective as ―do not burden me – give me what I deserve‖. The public
value balance is also seen as a huge unresolved challenge of ―the complexities of
„sweating assets‟ to meet the „value squeeze‟ of balancing objectives of social
outcomes and service delivery against resource demands to meet the „entitlement
crunch‟ where an ageing population consumes ever more public services.‖ (Cole &
Parston, 2006, and Blakemore 2007)
Public value also specifically looks for longer term benefits, which are thought
to be larger than the sum of the benefits provided by personal and participative value
which are often short-term, thus requiring a trade-off which normally only the public
sector can arbitrate.
One response to these tensions is the proposal that ‗Public Value
Management’ (PVM) should be the ―new narrative for networked governance‖.
(Stoker 2005) This is explicitly contrasted with hierarchical and control-minded public
sector traditions, as well as the competitive and customer-focused business mentality
of New Public Management (NPM). As Grönlund (2008) expresses it: ―Hence, as
seen from the point of view of eGovernment development, NPM is generally
conserving organisations, reducing not only incentives for cooperation but also failing
to at all measure system benefits, both in terms of government efficiency and
effectiveness.‖ (See also section 4.1).
Instead, PVM is premised on partnership, nuance and dialogue: ―The key point
in understanding public value management…starts with the understanding that
preferences are not formed in a vacuum and should not be taken as given. Part of
the challenge of public managers is to engage in a dialogue with the public about
their preferences but in a way that allows for deliberation about choices and
alternatives…Discovering preferences involves a complex dialogue so that efficiency
and accountability are trading partners, not the objects of a trade-off”. (Stoker 2005)
According to the United Nations (2008), it may therefore be possible for the
public to act as either customer or citizen, depending on the circumstance and need
(and more importantly, the legitimacy of both roles must be built into governance).
Stoker argues that PVM is the only sort of governance paradigm that can adequately
address the complexity and interdependencies of today‘s governance and
managerial systems that demand a renewed reconciliation of the often conflicting
demands of efficiency, accountability and equity.
Unlike the underlying logic of NPM and CRM, PVM embraces a much more
multi-faceted set of relationships both within the public sector and between
governments and other actors including constituents. This view is consistent with the
approach of Borins‘ (2007) focus on the impacts of digital connectivity on democracy,
through the participative imperative of eGovernance. Thus, PVM broadens the
scope of eGovernment beyond the service delivery realm to include notions of
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democratic accountability, participation, transparency and legitimacy, as well as
institutional innovation and transformation, strongly mediated through direct
engagement with and the empowerment of non-public sector actors and constituents.
PVM can thus be seen as managing the public sector in order to achieve public
value as the ‘ends’ (the overall purpose) of governance, in contrast to considerations
only of efficiency and effectiveness which should be seen as the ‘means’ of
achieving this. Thus, as far as the ‗means‘ are concerned, we are not interested in
public sector management, transformation and innovation for their own sake, but we
are interested in such management, transformation and innovation which maximise
public value.
Definitions of public value itself need to be negotiated across society, and are
likely to include a strong focus on (see also section 4.5):
1. the economy -- growth, competitiveness, employment, jobs, productivity,
innovation, spatial cohesion and territorial development
2. social life, quality of life, welfare, wellbeing, happiness, inclusion, diversity,
plurality
3. democracy, participation, citizenship, trust
4. liberty, justice, peace, security, human rights, societal rights and
responsibilities, social contract
5. environment, sustainability, physical assets, amenity
At the present time, European public value is given direct expression through
the major high level EU policy priorities, especially the Lisbon and Gothenburg
strategies.
When considering public value, it is may be important to make a clear
separation between political decision making and governance. The public value level
is also the political layer which should, in principle, govern all other layers. Here it is
decided what the desired public value is and the rest is governance and execution,
i.e. how to organise it (section 3 of this report), how to do it (section 4), and with what
outcomes (sections 5 and 6). For example, it could be decided to increase the
competitive position of EU through a burden reduction of 20%. Such burden
reduction would be an important boost to EU competitiveness and would meet one of
the Lisbon goals. Being serious about public value has important consequences for
governance and hence the organisation of government, as the stove pipes would
66
need to disappear and the power balance between layers would need to change.
9.2 Paradigm shifts in public value and governance

Our notions of public value and the governance arrangements needed to
achieve this (i.e. the structures, roles and relationships governing how our society
functions, with particular emphasis on the role of the public sector) are constantly
changing, and are strongly conditioned by transformations in society’s underlying
values. There have perhaps been three major transformations in the last two
hundred years in Europe, and a fourth seems currently to be underway, as illustrated
in Figure 14.
Figure 14 is also partially based on the work of Bovens & Loos (2002) and
shows a number of governance paradigm shifts as cumulative accretions of societal
values in relation to expectations about the role of the public sector. Each
consecutive paradigm shift is added to those already established, not replacing them
but often re-interpreting them for the contemporary age.
Although the foundations of modern Europe had of course been laid earlier,
they began to assume a well defined shape during the 18th century with the
development of the liberal constitutional state, arising out of the Enlightenment and
consisting of concepts such as liberty, property rights, the rule of law, etc., each
having their central focus on the protection of citizens from government as well as
from each other. In the19th century, a second layer was added, consisting of the
democratic constitutional state where the focus was on civic participation in
government, political rights, the parliamentary system and the separation of politics
from administration. As the mercantile and capitalist class amassed wealth they also
66
Interview with Robin Linschoten (13 June 2008), Chairman of ACTAL the Netherlands.
102
desired to wrest power away from the traditional aristocracy. Coupled with the by now
established liberal consensus, this led to voting, elections and parliamentary
th
representation, although it took until well into the 20 Century for all adults to achieve
full suffrage across Europe.
Figure 14: Changing societal value drivers in Europe and the role of the public
sector
Source: Frissen & Millard et al (2007)
4.
Empower-
ment
Values ??
collective and
21st C individual
3. Social values
20th C
collective and individual
2. Democratic values
19th C
1. Liberal values
18th C
th
The political and socio-economic upheavals of the 20 Century gave rise to the
enactment of the first social legislation with its key emphasis on the provision by
government to citizens of a large number of socio-economic rights, such as
employment, education, health, and, above all, solidarity across class divides. This
saw the foundation of the welfare state, dramatically extending the expected role of
the public sector into new areas. This was perhaps also partially driven forward by
women‘s suffrage from the democratic paradigm shift which, although not resulting in
many female politicians, did mean that all politicians had to take their concerns
directly into account for the first time.
st
For the 21 Century, we suggest that ‗empowerment‘ will be the bedrock value
upon which the public sector is expected to act and the roles it should play. The
strong trend towards empowerment is already evident, and underlies each of the
strategic transformations described in this report, partially because it is
quintessentially supported and driven forward by ICT, but also because many
societal and global trends point in this direction.
Many different definitions of ‗empowerment‘ exist, but the purpose here is not to
review or refine these. However, in the present context the term can cover how
citizens, communities, groups and interests in society can themselves be enabled
th
bottom-up to further their own as well as collective benefits. The 20 Century welfare
st
state was essentially top-down, paternalistic and bureaucratic. 21 Century
empowerment is both a reaction against this and a natural progression. We see its
imperative in moves towards respect and accommodation for plurality, diversity,
difference and the establishment of countervailing powers. We recognise it in
decentralisation, devolution, the break-up of hierarchies, the emerging poly-centric
world, a demand for more openness, involvement and influence, and the burgeoning
growth of multiple channels and a myriad voices.
Although reactionary, centralising and authoritarian forces are still powerfully at
work, moves towards greater empowerment herald a new balance between top-down
and bottom-up which is in favour of the latter but which still requires strong, albeit
different, top-down functions, such as new open, looser, more cooperative and
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pluralistic governance structures, processes and mindsets. These new forces are
also reworking and re-interpreting what we mean by protection, democracy and
social solidarity from previous paradigm shifts, as well as extending the new form of
governance into completely new areas, as evidenced in this report, such as service
personalisation, pre-emptive and early intervention services, and participative
decision and policy making.67
9.3 Changing definitions and drivers of eGovernance

Section 9.2 provided a relatively long-term, historic view of paradigm shifts in
public value and governance: However, at a more micro level over a shorter time
horizon, important changes have also been taking place over the last ten to fifteen
years, first with the rise of New Public Management and, arguably, now with the
ascendancy of Public Value Management and eGovernance. In particular, three
evolving policy goals of eGovernment have already been identified and described in
section 2.2 above.
The evolving roles and constituent views of eGovernment illustrated in Figure 2
seem to go hand-in-hand with the changing innovation, technological and socio-
economic drivers of eGovernment over the last fifteen years, as summarised in
Figure 15, which also shows a notional mapping against the consecutive IST
Research Programmes for eGovernment.
.
Figure 15: Changing innovation drivers for eGovernment, 1994-2020
Source: Millard & Shahin et al (2007)
Future
FP6
FP5
FP3-4
Technology- Cost-driven: back- Constituent-driven: Policy-driven

Main drivers driven office, economic front-office, social
(cumulative) (Public) value-driven
Process Product/service Organisational Public value and

Main Technology innovation: do innovation: do innovation do new values-driven
innovations innovation: existing things new things, but in things, but in innovation: do new
(cumulative) new tools faster, cheaper, same transformed things in new
better organisations organisations organisations with
new values
1994 2020
Figure 15 shows both the main types of innovation and the main drivers
enabling and forcing change on government and the public sector since the mid
1990s, plus the authors‘ predictions up to a notional 2020. The early period was very
much characterised by a technology-driven approach in which ICT was seen as a
new tool for the public sector, initially used for creating and connecting public sector
networks. This approach was soon joined by a decidedly cost-driven agenda in
which it was realised that ICT could provide the basis for the innovation of back-office
processes (business process re-engineering), enabling the public sector to do
existing things much faster and cheaper. As technology developed, but also, and
more importantly, as decision-makers and the market started to better understand
what the technology could do, innovations also began to develop new products and
new services, taking their cue from what the constituents and the market wanted.
Until now, developments had been very much driven by back-office and efficiency
considerations, but now through such approaches as CRM, a front-office,
constituent-driven approach was added to existing approaches, which of course
remained important. Thus, the focus shifted during the period (also in terms of
67
These four paradigm shifts can also find their analogy in Maslow‘s needs hierarchy (Maslow,
1943). See Section 5.1 and footnote 16.
104
benchmarking) from mainly rolling out services to also include the actual use and
take-up of services and the effectiveness impacts this would have on constituents.
Innovations until now had not seriously touched organisational and institutional
arrangements, being both more radical and difficult as this starts to question the
historically long and often separate development paths of the European public sector
in different countries and at different levels. But in the context of the need for joined-
up government, the sharing of processes and data across all agencies in the back-
office and across national boundaries, and the sharing of services from the
constituent perspective in the front-office (and linked to the drive for pan-European
services), public sector transformation has recently become a key driver, at least in
some Member States.
This is also very much part of a policy-driven agenda, in which ICT use by the
public sector starts to be directly and explicitly linked to overarching societal policies.
For example, economic growth and jobs, social inclusion, democratic involvement,
quality of life, etc., as articulated in the EU‘s Lisbon (especially Lisbon II) strategies
for 2010. Thus, the agenda was set for looking at ICT use in the public sector as
directly contributing to the achievement of such policies, particularly through
organisational transformation, as well as continuing to develop new services and new
processes.
This is the situation now emerging, at least in terms of expressed purpose and
intentions, although it remains difficult to implement this in practice. And it is here that
the challenge arises. How can the public sector, given its long and complicated
history and the legacies arising from this, make the necessary practical changes?
(Frissen & Millard, 2007)
Part of the way forward is, arguably, a more conscious linking to public or
societal values within a European context, i.e. to become consciously (public) value-
driven. Such values should build on the Lisbon policies, but also encompass a re-
assertion of European values at a time when Europe has recently expanded and may
be expanding even more. This would include empowerment (individuals, groups,
communities), extending democracy (beyond the ballot box and formal institutional
structures), multi-culturalism and pluralism (within the wider European value set), and
evolving, especially European and global, notions of citizenship. (Rifkin, 2004)
As the European Union evolves in future, it seems we will be more consciously
guided by an articulation of our ‗values‘ than ever before. This we can already see, as
many countries struggle to re-assess their national and regional identities, to create
and identify a European value-set, and take account of the threats as well as
opportunities of the values of others in the globalised world. There are also tentative
steps being taken towards identifying global values, for example through ongoing
efforts to ensure conformance to the UN‘s human rights declaration of 1948, seeking
to establish frameworks for ‗good governance‘ and pursuing the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) for 2015. (Sachs 2008)
Two of these critical governance values leading to 2020 which have not been
examined earlier in this report, i.e. pluralism and citizenship, are addressed in the
next two sub-sections.
9.4 The plural society

Siedentrop (2000) sees several forms of pluralism relevant for European
st
governance in the 21 Century. The first is formed by individuals, and the value that
individuals should be free, under law, to lead their own lives based on the idea of
universal human rights as the test of political legitimacy. Individuals choose to pursue
different values within a framework of law which protects individual freedom, but
which also sets clear limits to such freedom, i.e. the vision of ‗equal liberty‘. This type
of pluralism can be equated to personal or private value as described in this report.
Siedentop‘s second form of pluralism is based on groups, group cultures and
multi-culturalism, where groups are defined either by a particular socio-economic,
cultural or political characteristic, or by a specific set of beliefs and values. This is
exercised through the values of freedom of association and communication. In the
European context, this is especially important in relation to minority group
representation and protection, for example of ethnic and religious groups. This type
of pluralism can be equated to participative (or group) value as described in this
report.
105
A third type of pluralism, underpinning the others, consists of differences in
belief and value systems which arise from four main sources (Vibert, 2001):
religious belief and value systems
non-religious belief and value systems, such as eco-fundamentalism or
particular political belief systems (such as socialism, conservatism,
liberalism, etc.)
even in cases where beliefs and values are shared at some abstract and
general level, there will frequently be differences about how to interpret a
basic value
divergence in attitudes when new social issues are involved, such as
medical advances and the prolongation of life -- in such cases there may
well be uncertainty about which values are relevant, as well as different
views about their application.
The issue of pluralism has therefore become less a question of, for example,
incompatible religious or belief systems, and much more a question of the different
interpretations that people can put on values that may often be shared at a high level
of generality. Thus the issue is really one of tolerance of the different interpretation
of values, rather than absolute value systems. This should be reflected in the design
of Europe‘s political and democratic systems. This type of pluralism can be equated
to public value as described in this report.
The biggest challenge in establishing a pan-European politics that transcends
territoriality is determining how to unite all the contending forces in a new sense of
shared purpose that is as powerful as the age-old territorial imperative. ―Having lost
the comfort of our geographical boundaries, we must in effect rediscover what
creates the bond between humans that constitute a community.‖ (Guéhenno1995)
One useful concept is perhaps ‗maze Europe‘, which shows how fixed borders
give way to zones of interactivity, fuzzy or rolling borders, held together by multi-
level regulatory arrangements. (Christensen & Jørgensen 2000) This is already
beginning to happen in the EU, as regions, civil society organisations, and cultural
diasporas interact across traditional nation-state boundaries. It is also happening at
the periphery of the EU. Many countries bordering the EU, and even those somewhat
removed have entered into ‗association arrangements‘ with the EU. As commercial,
political and cultural exchanges between the EU and its neighbours increase in
density and diversity, borders become even fuzzier. Perhaps, the EU‘s very mission
is to ―unbundle territory‖. (Ruggie 1993) This also has potential dis-benefits, of
course, in an era of illegal immigration, terrorism and international crime.
The plural society is one based on variety and diversity, and, importantly,
tolerance of such variety across Europe. Saul (1997) underlines the fact that ―All the
lessons of psychiatry, psychology, social work, indeed culture, have taught us that it
is the acceptance of differences not the search for similarities which enables people
to relate to each other in their personal or family lives.‖ This relates to the policy level
but also drives, and is driven by, attitudes and culture, and particularly by our ethical
and moral mindsets and choices.
Variety and diversity across Europe requires a patchwork of different rights and
responsibilities, rather than ‗coherence‘ in the form of a consistent and uniform
approach to important policies and values. (Vibert 2001) The United Nations (2005)
calls for a knowledge to co-exist in diversity, how to generate it, use it and benefit
from it. This is based on accepting and respecting differences in a pluralistic world,
and focusing instead on the much larger area of what we have in common and which
unites us, through a series of central cultural thoughts. Rifkin (2004) states that
Europe‘s pluralistic values aim to achieve harmony within Europe, as well as with the
rest of the world, rather than the hegemony which he sees the US as currently
pursuing.
We can thus think of pluralism as a landscape in which there are no absolutes
in terms of values, beliefs, and rights, at least in the collective or social sense. There
may be absolutes for the individual, however, as long as s/he who holds such
absolute beliefs accepts that these should only be applied to her/himself and not be
imposed in any coercive sense on others. Thus, in a pluralistic society, the function
of the state is not to be neutral but instead to guarantee both this landscape of
pluralism as well as the conditions in which its citizens can try to make good lives for
themselves by choosing between a range of pluralistic values, both moral and non-
106
moral, and to provide them with the means and conditions for so doing. These
conditions would include an education system that teaches about the plurality of
values; a judicial and legislation system that would make possible the resolution of
public conflicts about values; a loose system of some religious, secular, cultural or
moral advice; and some further system which would probably be quite informal, like
an ethos or a prevailing sensibility that would maintain the spirit of tolerance and
encouragement of individuality without which the plurality of values would hardly be
possible. (Kekes 1993)
9.5 Citizenship
Citizenship is a difficult concept often involving subjective individual feelings of
belonging and identity. However, citizenship is often defined in specific ways by
lawyers and policy makers in specific countries to include the granting of certain
rights, and often also the requirement of certain responsibilities, from nationals or
members of a given country or legal entity (like the EU). In order for citizenship to be
understood and exercised, information needs to be provided on what it is, how to
exercise it, and the rights and responsibilities it involves. Citizenship is also an
evolving concept and a new key task is to improve the role, relevance and functioning
of citizenship. This could include:
improving the relationship between represented and representatives (see
section 6.1)
providing information to ensure citizens are aware of the complete set of
political institutions, and the possibilities available to them for having an
impact on the decision-making process (see section 6.4)
improving the democratic process within the EU institutions and all its
constituent parts, which also looks at how a European identity can be
developed. (European Parliament 2005) (See sections 6.1 and 6.2)
Citizenship is a complex array of linkages between local, national, and (in
Europe) European institutions, to which some or many or all citizens may feel an
affinity. Outlining citizenship goals for each level, and linking these, could be a major
task, as it goes further than setting out a series of rights, given that there is also an
institutional aspect to take into consideration, i.e. the impact of democratic institutions
on society. Of particular relevance in the present study is citizenship at the
European Union level which is a contested concept by lawyers and policy analysts
alike, but there are specific attributes that have been brought into existence with the
completion of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993. The EC Treaty accords certain rights to
68
EU citizens, such as the:
freedom of movement and the right of residence within the territory of the
Member States
right to vote and stand as a candidate at elections to the European
Parliament and at municipal elections in the Member State of residence
right to diplomatic and consular protection
right of petition to the European Parliament
right to refer to the EU Ombudsman.
Within these rights accorded to nationals of the EU‘s Member States, a whole
host of policy issues arises, such as the movement of citizens across the EU
between different jurisdictions. These issues have consequences for policy at both
the national and the European level.
The concept of citizenship is also changing dramatically to meet the needs of a
globalised world. (Rifkin, 2004) The established nostrums of citizenship derived from
Marshall (1950) and Bovens & Loos (2002) are built upon the establishment of civil
th th
rights in the 18 Century, political rights in the 19 Century, and social rights in the
th
20 Century. (See section 9.2) Now, a further development and broadening of the
citizenship concept may be desirable. Sociologist John Urry (1995) lists six new
th st
categories of citizenship emerging in the late 20 and early 21 Centuries, described
in terms of rights and responsibilities from a clear empowerment perspective. (see
also section 6.5):
68
Source:
http://europa.eu.int/youreurope/nav/en/citizens/factsheets/eu/eucitizenship/eucitizenship/en.html
accessed September 1, 2005.
107
The right of cultural citizenship which recognises the right of every culture
to preserve and nurture its identity.
The right of minorities to take up residence and remain in other societies
and receive the full rights as well as undertake the full responsibilities of
the native-born population.
The right of ecological citizenship, in which every human being has the
right to live in a sustainable and harmonious relationship with the earth
and to enjoy the fruits of the natural world.
The rights of cosmopolitan citizenship as the right of every human being to
enter into relationships with other citizens, societies and cultures without
interference by state authorities.
The right of consumer citizenship as the rights of people to open access to
goods, services and information flowing across the world.
The right to mobility citizenship, which covers the rights and
responsibilities of visitors and tourists in their passage through other lands
and cultures.
New balances between rights and responsibilities, and particularly the role of
st
new forms of citizenship in this, could result in a more general re-thinking of the 21
Century social contract, where a fundamental shift may be taking place as part of
the paradigm shift described in section 9.2.
All of these new kinds of citizenship exist below and beyond, as well as within,
nation-state borders. Each in its own way undermines nation-state territoriality as the
exclusive realm of citizen engagement. These new forms of citizenship are de-
territorialising rights and are moving towards universality in nature and scope. The
rub, as Urry (1995) notes, is that ―there is an increasing contradiction between
citizenship rights, which are universal, uniform and globally defined, and social
identities which are particularistic and territorially specified.‖
9.6 An eGovernance vision for the 21st Century

The 21st Century is heralding a decisive paradigm shift in the way we (in
Europe, as well as globally) are moving towards much greater bottom-up
empowerment than previously seen. ICT is the major enabler (but not the only one),
and this is being and will be reflected in all aspects of our lives, including of course
our relationships with government and the public sector. We still have to adjust our
governance structures, processes and mindsets to cope with this, and in doing so,
we will be more consciously guided by an articulation of our ‗values‘ than ever before.
69
The world is indeed being ‗turned upside down‘. (Millard 2008) We have
made such paradigmatic governance shifts in earlier periods, as described in Section
st
9.2. Now, in the 21 Century, ‗empowerment‘ seems to be the next great turning
upside down – literally. (Frissen & Millard 2007). The role of government is changing
from facilitation to empowerment, although some level of facilitation will remain
necessary, and regulation will only take place when really needed. In thinking about
the future, goals (ends) should be more important than the ways (means) to get
there, so that public value becomes the measure of ‗need‘, and, ultimately equality in
the relationship between government and constituents is the basis for public value
creation.70
But, there is in many ways a current crisis of confidence in European
eGovernment, both amongst researchers and practitioners. eGovernment research
itself has perhaps come to its own turning point, and some are even saying that
71
―eGovernment is dead‖ as it was not included in the first two years of the IST
Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technology Development
commencing in 2007 for the first time in many years. One of the reasons for this is
undoubtedly that eGovernment, at least the first generation (as defined by the United
Nations, 2008), has come of age. Today it is inconceivable that any government or
69
A direct analogy is made here with Christopher Hill‘s (1972) book ―The World Turned Upside
Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution‖, which describes the bubbling ferment of
radical ideas at the grass roots of English 17th C society, which we also now know were fuelled
by printed broadsheets distributed nationwide by a dense stagecoach and messenger network,
the period‘s equivalent of the Internet.
70
71
http://www.epma.cz/Docs/CfP_6thEEEGOV2008_November07.pdf (accessed 20-1-08).
108
public sector projects would not use ICT -- the technology is no longer an add-on but
is intrinsically bound up with developments in any aspect of government. Government
changes enabled by ICT are now mainstream. This said, there remain many areas
where research, development and deployment of ICT in government, including at the
pan-European level, will continue to require huge effort.
But the approach to eGovernment must change to reflect the trends and
drivers described in this report. In particular, we can see that since 2005 there has
been a phenomenal growth in mass, on-line collaborative applications, using a
number of different formats – such as Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Second
Life, as well as innovation jams used by business. It is clear that the use of such
collaborative tools and visualisation technologies offers tremendous potential to
create new forms of governance, service delivery and overall transformation of the
government-constituent relationship.
On-line communities can leverage considerable human knowledge and
expertise and rapidly build their capacity, in particular through so-called
‗crowdsourcing‘ as collective intelligence which exploits the ‗wisdom of the crowd‘.
This is enabled by ubiquitous information networks, and permits governments to tap
the insights of large numbers of people to arrive at decisions and outcomes that are
often more efficacious than only relying on solutions provided by a small number of
‗experts‘. Extrapolation of the present exponential growth leads to scenarios where
large numbers of people could, if equipped with the right tools and incentives,
simultaneously voice opinions and views on major and minor societal challenges, and
thereby herald the transition to a different form of dynamically participative ‗eSociety‘.
(Broster 2008, Tapscott & Williams 2006, and Surowiecki, 2004)
While such scenarios are readily imaginable, we also recognise that we
currently do not have appropriate governance models, process flows, or analytical
tools with which to properly understand, interpret, visualise and harness the forces
that could be unleashed. Further, there are also serious challenges, contradictions
and barriers to be overcome in deriving the promised benefits, which can only be
addressed by looking at the technology within its wider socio-economic context, as
well as at the various levels governments must operate on from local to pan-
European.
The legitimacy of governments is derived through democratic processes
combined with a requirement of transparency and accountability. In a world that is
increasingly using non-physical communication and borderless interaction, traditional
roles and responsibilities of public administrations will be subject to considerable
change and classical boundaries between constituents and their governments
are blurring. The balance of power between governments, societal actors and the
population will have to adapt to these challenging new possibilities. For example,
new governance models imply that governments will need to increasingly become
one player among many drawn from the private and civil sectors, as well as from
constituent groups. Governments will thus become arbiters, coordinators and
funders, instead of only regulators and sole agents, through a series of governance
webs, or ‗g-webs‘ (Tapscott, Williams, Herman, 2007), operating across the ‗cloud‘ of
distributed computing.
st
There will be fewer barriers in the 21 Century for citizens and businesses to
participate in decision and policy making at all levels, whether directly, through
elected representatives or by creating their own political agendas and processes.
Advanced tools – possibly building on gaming and virtual reality technologies – can
empower citizens to track the totality of decision making processes and see how their
contributions have been (or are being) taken into account. Opinion mining,
visualisation and modelling into virtual reality based outcomes and scenarios can
help to shape, guide and form public opinion.
However, modern decision and policy making is complex and must be
based on a process whereby issues are examined in the context of available
evidence, where political negotiation takes account of the needs of all interests, and
that all those involved accept responsibility and accountability for the outcomes.
Strong dangers exist that decision-making will be monopolised by those ‗who shout
loudest‘, or that the debate becomes hijacked by ‗hostile interests‘. There is also a
risk of ‗unauthenticated opinions‘ which mislead and confuse, so more understanding
is needed of how ICT can assist the process of arriving at legitimate and widely
beneficial outcomes despite the avalanche of mutually contradictory opinions and
‗facts‘. If this is not done, inertia will take over resulting in lack of action, whether by
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constituents at the local level or by Member States at European level, as all actors
retreat into their familiar comfort zones.
In the 21stC many administrative, linguistic and cultural differences will become
interoperable through the use of semantic-based cooperation platforms, enabling
Europe’s diversity and plurality to be better exploited socially, economically and
culturally, rather than purely acting as a barrier. However, it is likely that the relatively
less educated in information societies will remain a challenge, although their needs
will change, and questions of digital literacy, confidence and political cognition will
be permanent issues to be addressed. This is the more so given that the pace of
knowledge sharing and knowledge creation will continue to accelerate. There is thus
a danger of social bifurcation as the 21stC will also see the rise of the younger ‗Net
Generation‘ (those who have grown up in the digital and Internet world) who will both
demand governance services and responses to match, and become public sector
workers expecting to net-work (‗wiki‘-work) rather than work hierarchically. (Tapscott,
Williams, Herman, 2007)
st
Also in the 21 Century, transparency and trust will characterise a changed
relationship between governments, businesses and citizens. Governments
st
traditionally collect, process and store significant quantities of data. In the 21
Century, the relationships will have changed and many businesses and citizens will
be able to ‗authorise‘ access by governments to ‗data spaces‘ of their own data which
they control and update. For some citizens this may, however, be too difficult or
inappropriate, as the complexities of managing all of one‘s personal data over the
lifecycle of an individual, family, community or business are potentially huge, so new
technologies and approaches would also be needed to tackle this problem.
These data could be stored in the ‗cloud‘ so that storage will be a network
commodity and provided as a service. Such a scenario would result in a ‗private
shared space‘ jointly accessed by data users and/or their agents and data providers.
These shared spaces will require maximally robust access rules and procedures and
hence new technologies and tools that ensure security, privacy and data
protection. Data protection is also one of the main sources of trust in such
technologies, and in the new forms of eGovernance this will have to be earned
through demonstrable transparency and accountability of processes and tools.
st
Much evidence points to the likelihood that the 21 Century will see a step-
change in technology, governance and thinking. The purpose of this report has
been to stake out some of the ground which the eGovernment community needs to
occupy in future policy, deployment and research. This is ground which is already
seeing phenomenal changes in technology and market dynamics, but now needs to
apply these to governance systems and societal challenges. eGovernance, as a
legitimate and powerful approach to policy, research and practice, needs to be there.
Existing trends show how market forces, hand-in-hand with technology, are changing
the parameters of supply and demand, and how this, together with incipient new
forms of empowerment from the bottom are starting to change the face of public
services and the role and mandate of government in the governance system.
History shows how the market and technology are very good servants but very
poor masters. Policy, public value and our shared values and visions are
everything. Markets and technologies are not brought down from the mountain
carved in stone, but are created and shaped by governance systems – regulation,
standards, monopoly power or the lack of it, government interventions, plus a whole
host of other signals and guidance which structure both the market and the
technology developed and rolled-out.
Previous paradigm shifts were not primarily driven by markets, at least in their
critical early stages. The canals, railways, electricity, telephones, etc., were not
initially demand-led but were driven as much by visions and expectations, and often
lost money in purely market terms in their early phases.
st
The 21 Century step-change will likely be the same. It will demand, not just
new technology (much of which we are already starting to see), but new governance
structures, processes and mindsets. In new Europe, and the globalised world in
which Europe operates, new governance systems are needed based on types of
empowerment which both harness the bottom-up energy, entrepreneurship and
responsibility of people, whilst at the same time promote large scale global
cooperation through processes which build new governance structures. (Sachs,
2008) We do need a new balance between top-down and bottom-up, and this is
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happening whether we realise it or not. In short, we need negotiated, open-source
and porous governance, enabled by new technologies but focused on tackling the
micro problems of individual quality of life and prosperity in Europe, and global
problems like climate change, trade inequalities and poverty.
It is a difficult and slow process to change mindsets, especially in something so
traditional and embedded as government is in Europe in all its diversity. But it has
happened before in quite radical ways and will happen again. The trends and drivers
presented in this report are derived of course from current mindsets, albeit ones
which have tried to look forward based on both evidence and vision. These mindsets
can help guide thinking about the contents and relationships in 2020, but should only
be seen as part of where we are coming from, and should not pre-determine or lock
us out of desirable or likely mindset changes which are partially or even radically
different.
In summary, an eGovernance vision for the 21st Century is potentially
composed of many elements, including:
The need to govern and manage different types of value (personal,
private, participative, public).
The need to govern a plurality, of actors, roles, relationships, needs,
opinions, interests, etc.
Open and porous, even ‗mashed-up‘, governance and government,
supported by governance webs or ecosystems.
Governance structures, processes and mindsets which are negotiated and
open sourced.
The burring of boundaries, jurisdictions, identities and citizenships.
Future governance of the public realm is thus not about the public sector
or government alone, but about an interacting society in which public,
private and civil sectors, as well as constituents, all contribute without clear
boundaries.
Greater constituent ownership and control over their own data, content,
services and identity.
Increasing trust derived from new privacy, protection and accountability
systems, as well as a focus on constituent behaviour.
Balancing transparency with privacy and rights with responsibilities.
A continuing focus on platforms of efficiency and effectiveness.
A continuing focus on, and re-working of, protection, democracy, solidarity
and inclusion from previous paradigm shifts.
The new assertive empowerment paradigm, and new balances between
top-down and bottom-up, particularly in favour of the latter.
The need for an increasing focus on governance innovation, particularly in
relation to new business models and value chains for delivering public
functions and public value.
The increasingly conscious role of collective values (local, national,
European and global) in framing policies and strategies.
Universally personalised, pre-emptive and early intervention services, as
well as self-directed services.
Fully participative decision and policy making, whether initiated top-down
or bottom-up, and both within and beyond formal democratic structures
ranging from community and locality based to the global scale.
The burgeoning and constantly renewed power of ICT is or can be used for all
these governance and societal challenges, but also for control and even repression
in a nightmare Orwellian surveillance ‗big-brother‘ state. Thus, we will need strong
policies and values to navigate the choices ahead. The challenge is real and the task
is urgent.
If we look back fifteen years, instead of looking forward to 2020, we find that the
technology has transformed out of all imagination, whereas the public sector, despite
some notable exceptions, has hardly changed at all. The future may hold more of the
same, and government will almost certainly, as in the past, find it impossible to keep
up with technology. But maybe this does not matter and addresses the wrong set of
issues, which are too focused on ‗means‘ rather than ‗ends‘?
Key uncertainties towards the future include how governments across Europe
will deal with change and opportunities, what services people will want and use, and
what policy choices will need to be made, both in terms of European cooperation and
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in terms of governance. Will we have a common technological and organisational
infrastructure to support all governance services in 2020, or will each new service
require its own new infrastructure? Developing some concrete 2020 scenarios
derived ultimately from the ‗ends‘ should help us find partial answers to this
conundrum.
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10 Historical case studies
Technological change is a complex phenomenon. Scenarios on the impact of
technological change on public administration are also inevitably complex. Most of
the literature on the future of eGovernment and eServices is inward-looking,
predicting the future from within the system. However, much can be learnt by
examining earlier examples of the impact of technological change on public
administration. Therefore we reviewed three major technological innovations from the
past to determine their impact on the public sector.
The case studies present information on the following issues:
Technological change. What was the innovation? Was it a fundamental,
radical breakthrough or part of an incremental process of technological
change, or uptake/way the technology is used? What precisely did it
change? For example, did it involve new power sources, new products or
new processes; did it place new demands on the organisation of the
production process of goods and services; or did it create a demand for new
skills? Which alternative technologies did the innovation replace?
Key characteristics of way of implementation. How long did it take for
the innovation to progress from first idea to widespread use? Was it a
disruptive technology? What did the innovation‘s lifecycle look like? Were
there alternative choices and why was this particular technology selected?
Who were involved in turning the innovation into a technology and then
diffusing the technology throughout the economy and society? What was the
institutional background of the innovators (e.g. individual academics,
technical institutes, investment bankers, companies)? Who were the change
agents in economy and society that gave the example of the technology‘s
breakthrough potential?
Impacts on society at large. What was the economic, demographic, social,
cultural and political environment of technological change? What triggered
or constrained the innovation and the diffusion of the resulting technology?
How did contemporaries react to its arrival? Which policies aided its
diffusion?
Impacts on governance and government. What was the impact on public
administration? How did the new technology affect the internal efficiency of
the existing public services? Which new services were created? Which
challenges did the new technology pose for government? What were the
costs and benefits for public administration?
What are the analogies to the current example of ICT? What can we
expect for the future if current developments are extended along the same
lines as in the case study? In which respects is the case study different from
the current state of affairs in ICT and eGovernment?
Our choice of case studies is motivated by the nature of ICT as a technology.
ICT meets the requirements of a general-purpose technology (Bresnahan &
Trajtenberg, 1995; Jovanovic & Rousseau, 2005). It is applied in all sectors of the
economy and society (pervasive). ICT hardware, software, ancillary equipment and
supporting services have shown continuous improvement, resulting in a sustained
decline in costs (improvement). Think, for example, of the steady decrease in the
price of computer processors, storage capacity, memory and other equipment
combined with the unremitting upward trend in the performance of ICT hardware
(Nordhaus, 2001). And innovations in ICT have produced a wave of technical and
organisational innovations, both within the ICT sector (e.g. new business models in
telecommunications) and in other sectors (innovation spawning). This is why our
three case studies concern the some of the main general-purpose technologies of
the last centuries, namely steam, electricity and mass media.
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10.1 The revolution in transport and communication:
railways and telegraph, 1840-1870
10.1.1 Technological change

The massive improvements in transport and communication during the
nineteenth century were made possible by two technological breakthroughs, namely
the steam engine and electricity.
The steam engine –more precisely, the piston steam engine–became the power
source of the Industrial Revolution. It replaced wind, water, and manual power (e.g.
horse-drawn carts, windmills). Its first commercial application was to pump water out
of English mines (the Newcomen atmospheric-engine, 1712). In the course of the
next century, steam would gradually branch out to other industries. After 1800, steam
engines were vastly improved. They became the power source of choice in
manufacturing, transport, water management, public utilities, and agriculture,
replacing water and wind energy as steam engines produce power more efficiently
(to this day steam turbines are widely used in the production of electricity).
Electricity had been known for centuries, but it was not until the nineteenth
century that engineers took over and turned the principles of electricity into practical
applications. The prime example was the development of the electronic telegraph
network, pioneered by Werner von Siemens. This network was initially laid parallel to
railroads; the development of the steam train and the telegraph went hand in hand.
The rise of steam engine and electricity triggered the development of a host of
complementary technologies, goods, and services. Steam engines were used as a
source of power in railroads and light rail, steamships, and even in the first cars at the
end of the nineteenth century. They powered water pumps, sewage plants and
electricity plants. The mechanisation of agriculture began when steam was used to
power tractors and other agricultural machinery, such as mechanical threshers. In
manufacturing steam engines were instrumental in the first drive of mass production,
enabling mechanisation, the division of labour, and increases in the scale of
machinery. The result was a concomitant rise in the metals, shipbuilding and
machinery industries, the emergence of a civil engineering industry, and the
emergence of a vast coal mining industry to supply the economy with its primary fuel.
Vast improvements in the speed, regularity, and reliability of transport encouraged
innovations in trade and communications. For example, electrical telegraph lines
were laid alongside early railroads (e.g. in the Netherlands and Great Britain) and
postal services became far more efficient. The technology was instrumental in
bringing about the industrial revolution and, during its course, developed into a
diverse industry.
10.1.2 Key characteristics of the development process

From its first commercial application in the early eighteenth century to
widespread use throughout most of the industrialised world took between 150 and
175 years (from 1712 to 1850-1880). However, the first century showed little
progress. After the introduction of Newcomen‘s engine in 1712, the first major step
forward occurred in the 1770s (James Watt‘s engine) and for the next thirty years the
diffusion of these inventions was hampered by patent protection. Only in the early
nineteenth century did the steam engine finally make its major breakthrough. The
technology reached maturity –especially with the invention of the smaller and more
powerful non-condensing engine– and could profitably be applied for different
purposes. The first half of the nineteenth century saw a rapid increase in the use of
steam, its diversification into different industries and applications, and the diffusion of
steam technologies to countries outside the United Kingdom.
For most (industrialised) European countries, the time between the opening of
the first railroad and the appearance of a full-blown, steam-powered, modern
transport and communication system took between 20 and 40 years, which was
exceptionally short for the period. One reason for the high pace of innovation was
that there was no clear alternative to this obviously powerful new technology. Another
reason for the change in pace of the process of development and diffusion is that it
changed from an inventor-driven process until the early nineteenth century to a
process driven by engineer-entrepreneurs (e.g. Isambard Kingdom Brunel and
Werner von Siemens) who built whole industries based on the practical applications
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that were based on their inventions. Their work was often challenging and fraught
with risk as the early projects combined the search for profit with the need to
overcome entirely new technological obstacles.
10.1.3 Impacts on society at large
Direct economic effects

The most important economic effects of the transport and communication
revolution of the mid-nineteenth century relate to speed, reliability, regularity and
price. Passenger and freight transport grew at unprecedented rates and at ever lower
prices. Profit margins were generally low, but this was compensated by increases in
volume. This increase reflects the enormous increase in mobility as well as the
contribution of transport and communication to the process of industrial growth. In
addition, the enormous gains in the speed of transport and communication
fundamentally changed production processes. Regional and seasonal price
fluctuations dampened considerably; producers and traders no longer had to
maintain enormous stocks of goods to bridge periods of poor connections (winters in
particular, when rivers used to freeze over and roads were impassable); and time,
weights and measures were standardised, whereas until the first half of the
nineteenth century every town or region had its own time, weights and measures.
The transport and communication revolution supported the rise of new manufacturing
industries (most notably metals, machinery, shipbuilding, and civil engineering) that
defined the second phase of the industrial development of many European nations
(textiles having defined the first) and gave these nations their first experience with
large, networked corporations with many local offices, a central administration, a wide
range of skilled and unskilled employees, and –towards the end of the century–
organised labour. For example, in the early twentieth century the top ten largest UK
firms were all railroad companies.
Indirect economic effects
The main effect of the transport and communication revolution was the
integration of national economies. First, the main urban centres became better
connected. Next, the main rural areas were linked to the railroad network. And finally
–in the last decades of the nineteenth century– remote regions were connected. The
impact of railroads and telegraph lines was reinforced by the construction of major
new canals and the improvement of road systems throughout Europe.
The completion of national systems of transport and communication (generally
after 1850) depended heavily on government intervention. The early railroads and
telegraph lines were built by private entrepreneurs between the main cities where
demand for such services was known. Where good waterways were available (e.g. in
large parts of Germany and in the Netherlands), demand for better transport and
communication was not as high. However, private companies had no incentive to
connect remote, sparsely populated, or economically less advanced regions. The
same was true for canals, although here ownership related to individual pieces of
infrastructure (a canal) rather than an entire network (a railroad company). In most
European countries national coverage was ultimately achieved through
nationalisation, followed by public investments in the further integration of the railway
system. Unlocking remote regions radically transformed agriculture in those regions
(e.g. increases in the scale of production; the use of machinery and fertiliser) and
resulted in a shift of labour to the cities, feeding the general process of rapid
urbanisation.
The transport and communication revolution triggered innovation through
knowledge spill-overs between producers and suppliers (e.g. railroads and steam
engine manufacturers, shipbuilders and sheet metal producers), between
complementary industries (e.g. improvements in the efficiency of the postal service
affected productivity in trade), and between science and engineering (one of the key
elements of innovation during the Industrial Revolution). Industries with a high rate of
inventory turnover benefited from the telegraph, especially industries that produced
perishable goods (e.g. meatpacking; the distribution of fruits and vegetables). The
growth of such industries was facilitated by the introduction of the refrigerated car in
1874. Railroad construction also gave a significant boost to financial markets,
encouraging the development of new ways of financing the enormous demand for
investment capital.
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Social, cultural and political effects
Economic motivations did not always reign supreme. In France, a centralised
railway system was developed by private companies under close government control
with the aim of linking up remote, underdeveloped regions and, at the same time,
promoting political, cultural and military goals.
Improvements in transport and communication supported the creation of a
national identity as time and distance became seemingly immaterial, communication
became ‗instant‘ (at least in comparison to preceding centuries), and information
about other regions and the larger world improved significantly. In the United States,
the railroad and telegraph had a direct impact on citizenship as they made possible
the admission of new states across the continent.
The rise of political mass movements at the end of the nineteenth century was
helped by the availability of an efficient transport and communication system that
allowed organisers to meet and parties to mobilise and communicate on a national
(and sometimes international) scale. Improvements in transport and communication
also fuelled the process of urbanisation, which in turn produced a range of social
changes (e.g. the shift from extended families to nuclear families).
10.1.4 Impacts on governance and government
Governance challenges of new technology

The early history of railroad construction involved an extensive battle of gauges.
The standard gauge (4 ft. 8½ in.) was first used in England and is still the standard
railroad gauge. However, Brunel designed the Great Western Railway as a broad
gauge railroad, and in 1860 the US had seven different gauges (standard gauge
accounted for about half of total mileage). In specific cases there were military
reasons to select a different gauge. For example, the Russians opted for broad-
gauge railroads to prevent invaders from using Russian railroads, while the Finnish
railroads used a different gauge again to stop potential Russian invaders. Ultimately,
the majority of countries adopted the standard gauge; vested interests (read,
investments) in this gauge were too strong. Similar examples of standardisation
challenges involved interregional connections between networks, such as canals,
railroads, and telegraph lines belonging to different companies and the alignment of
time tables of different railway companies.
In the US, the development of the telegraph industry was characterised by the
competition between two dominant patents (Morse versus House) and between a
number of different, regional telegraph companies. One outcome of this competition
was a low quality of telegraph services. This market situation ultimately developed
into an integrated system of separate regional monopolies with higher service quality,
greater economic efficiency (lower costs due to economies of scale) and higher
prices and monopoly profits.
Opportunities and challenges for government/public service delivery
The strongest and most significant impact of the transport and communication
revolution was the integration of nations, concomitant to the process of geographic
integration. Improvements in transport and communication extended the reach of
government, giving central government a stronger grip on regional and local
governments, streamlining the implementation of laws and regulations (including
standards such as weights, measures, and time), enhancing the efficiency of national
bureaucracies (the back-office) as well as giving rise to the growth of such
bureaucracies, something for which Germany is especially famous.
The enormous importance of transport and communication contributed to the
decision to nationalise railways in many European countries. In Europe, governments
regulated markets or acted to become natural monopolists themselves. The
American construction of a transcontinental railroad is a good example of alternative
government intervention. The government subsidised railroad construction by giving
railroad companies 10 square miles of land for every mile of track laid. The telegraph
was not supported in a similar way and companies had to recoup their investments
out of charges. The government also stipulated that prices for short-distance
transport could not be higher than those for long-distance transport on the same grid.
However, American railroad development remained the domain of the private sector.
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Improvements in transport and communication had an impact on defence as
armies became more mobile and better coordinated. At the same time, neighbouring
countries became potentially more threatening as they improved their infrastructures
and communication networks. The construction of international railroad links was
attractive to private investors, but securing private gains required public diplomacy.
The economic impacts of this revolution –rise of new businesses, increases in
the scale and scope of economies, and growth in remote regions– provided
governments with additional tax and other revenues. In addition, the financial needs
of railroad construction made financial markets better able to deal with large capital
flows, which in turn strengthened public financing.
10.1.5 Analogies to ICT

The transport and communication revolution of the nineteenth century and the
present-day information revolution are very much alike. Both consist of dense
clusters of innovations that build, incrementally, on a number of radical new
technologies. The railroad, telegraph, telephone, and the Internet are network
industries, interconnecting regions, industries, and households. The speed and
capacity of communication was then, and still is, key.
In both cases, investors rushed to take advantage of low-hanging fruit. The
gaps in networks had to be filled through government action. Railroads, the telegraph
and the Internet all faced the problem of connecting remote regions.
One important difference is that current advances in the commercial
applications of ICT are due mainly to private enterprise. National network industries
(transport, communications, utilities) have been privatised and monopolies have been
broken down, resulting in a rapid and diverse growth pattern. The nineteenth-century
transport and communication revolution resulted in national network industries in
public hands. Even the late-nineteenth-century public utilities were first
commissioned by government and owned and run by private enterprise, but were
fairly soon taken over by government.
10.2 Electrification, 1890-1940
Fundamental technological breakthrough

Electricity has a very long history. Its origins can be traced back to ancient
times, but the deciding breakthroughs were made in the eighteenth century by
inventors such as Franklin and Volta. In the nineteenth century engineers took over
and turned the principles of electricity into practical applications. The prime example
is the development of the electronic telegraph network, pioneered by Werner von
Siemens. By the end of the nineteenth century, electricity had expanded to the
telephone, radio, transport (the electric locomotive and the electric car), and above all
to the distribution of electricity as a universal power source.
Electricity as a power source arose during the age of industrial urbanisation
after 1870. This was the period of rapid urban growth, driven by improvements in
transport and the rapid growth of manufacturing industries. Initially, urban living
conditions did not keep pace with the extent of rural-urban migration. Cities were ill-
equipped to deal with the enormous increase in waste and sewage, the demand for
housing and fresh water, the rise of crime, and health crises. In response, during the
last decades of the nineteenth century, local governments began to commission
water and sewage treatment plants to improve sanitary conditions and gas utilities to
provide towns and cities with power. This was followed by local electrical power
plants and local health services. The urban utility industries that thus arose were
either in public hands or heavily regulated.
Local electricity production began around 1880, when a number of cities
acquired a public electrical power supply (e.g. Surrey Town in 1881; London and
New York City 1882). This supply was initially used only for street lighting –beginning
with the Grands Magasins du Louvre in Paris (1875) and Holborn Viaduct and the
Thames Embankment in London (1882)– and replaced gas lighting. In the early
twentieth century, electricity became the basis for mass production in manufacturing,
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powering more sophisticated machinery such as Ford‘s conveyor belt. Widespread
electrification on a national scale did not occur until the 1930s, for example in the
USSR (between 1920 and 1931) and the USA (after 1935). Rural electrification was
the final hurdle, which was not taken until after the Second World War.
The development of electricity gave rise to a wide range of commercial
applications and complementary goods and services. Electrical power production
became a major industry and is nowadays considered as the main critical
infrastructure in a society that has become completely dependent on electricity. The
first major commercial product associated with electricity was the light bulb. The arc
lamp and the incandescent light bulb were developed in the late nineteenth century
as well as transmission equipment, cables and other intermediate products. The
twentieth century witnessed a technological revolution around electricity, defined
mainly by the introduction of various industrial appliances based on electricity –such
as assembly lines, battery-powered forklifts, and electric incubators in chicken
farming– and a wide range of household appliances, such as electrical refrigerators,
washing machines, irons, sewing machines, toasters, etcetera.

Electricity is a general-purpose technology, a universal power source that can
be used for any industrial or household purpose. It combines the potential for large-
scale centralised production –resulting in high economies of scale– with highly
decentralised use (pervasive, down to individual households and small enterprises)
owing to cheap transport. It is the latest stage in a development from small, local
power sources (animals, wind, water), to larger, more mobile sources (steam), and to
networked, distributed sources (electricity). The next step could be zero-point energy,
in which user produce their own energy for local consumption, selling excess power
to the grid.
Scientists had known several of the underlying principles of electricity for
centuries. In the nineteenth century the scientific principles were used by engineers
to produce practical applications, most notably for communication, lighting, and
power. Much like other nineteenth-century technological breakthroughs, engineers
were instrumental in the success of electricity. People like Werner von Siemens and
Thomas Edison built highly successful companies by commercialising their
inventions.
Overall, it took about 50 years to move from the main breakthroughs in the
scientific foundations of electricity in the early nineteenth century to the first practical
(commercial) applications in the 1870s and 1880s, and another 40 to 50 years until
electricity had become the dominant source of power. Supply was initially set up
locally, starting in urban centres. Rural areas were only really connected at a later
stage, not least because of the higher costs involved.
The success of electricity depended on a number of complementary
innovations, such as more efficient and affordable lamps, and more efficient motors
for electricity production as well as the technology needed to integrate local
production and distribution into large, centralised networks (national electricity grids).

As a cheap, universal power source, electricity helped bring about the age of
mass industrial production in the first half of the twentieth century. Electricity was
cheaper than steam and, more importantly, could be used to power production at
every level, down to small local enterprises. It triggered a new wave of increases in
the scale and scope of industrial operations and urban living.
Electricity triggered a host of complementary inventions, such as the telegraph,
telephone and radio, incandescent lamps, and electrical locomotives, resulting in the
rise of the electronic equipment industry, producing apparatus for industrial and
household purposes.
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The first effect was that manufacturers were able to better light the work floor,
making it possible to extend working hours. The same was true for the opening hours
of shops.
Through its impact on the production and consumption of affordable
household appliances, electricity is considered as the general-purpose technology
that lay the foundations for the emergence of the mass-consumer economy.
Modern, electrical appliances significantly raised household productivity, freeing
time for other activities. This initially resulted in the demise of the domestic service
industry and only later (after 1960) contributed to the emancipation of women and the
increase in female labour participation.
Electricity laid the basis for the modern means of communication, which
transformed social, cultural and political life during the twentieth century. The social
and cultural dimensions of the information revolution can be considered a
continuation of this development.

As dependence on electricity increased, the importance of security and
redundancy in supply also increased. As long as production was organised locally,
ensuring redundancy was resource intensive. For example, during the 1920s, the
construction of the Hungarian Kelenföld power plant included a 30 MW unit to meet
consumer demand, an additional unit for periods of scheduled maintenance, and
another unit for emergencies. In an integrated (national) network, the inherent degree
of redundancy of the network is much higher and the percentage share of reserve
capacity is much lower. At present, the security and dependability of electricity supply
are of paramount importance, given its status as our main critical infrastructure.
The big challenge for government in the first half of the twentieth century was
to connect rural and remote regions to the existing urban electricity networks and,
thus, create a national power supply. Private companies preferred to focus on urban
centres, where demand was high and network costs were comparatively low. In the
USA, connecting rural regions initially fell to government and rural cooperatives (in
the 1930s). In most countries, rural and remote regions were only connected after
about 1930.
The emergence of urban utilities in the late nineteenth century (mainly public in
Europe; mainly private in the USA and the UK), changed the nature of public service
provision, especially with regard to social services (e.g. health, education, public
transport, sewerage, etc.). Such utilities were either in public hands or required strict
regulation to ensure universal and affordable access. In addition, electricity
supported the introduction of advanced office equipment and the automation of
government‘s back office.
Electricity production and distribution were long considered a natural
monopoly. Government regulation or ownership were consequently considered
essential.

Some have drawn parallels between electricity and utility computing (or on-
demand computing), which allows users to subscribe to networked computing
resources (e.g. computation and storage), much like they do to other utilities (such as
electricity, water, and gas). The advantage of electricity over preceding power
sources was that, once a large (national or supra-regional) and integrated network
had been created, users could be supplied with low-cost power without having to buy
additional hardware and that the effects of sudden, localised peaks in demand could
be absorbed by the network. Electricity and the Internet are both cheap and
omnipresent, networked and distributed services. They also faced the same
challenge of connecting remote regions. However, in the case of electricity,
government played a leading role, while broadband connections to remote regions
were left mainly to the private sector.
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10.3 The rise of mass (broadcast) media, 1940-1970
Fundamental technological breakthrough

Broadcasting is founded on the invention of radio communication. Initially
named the wireless telegraph, it marked the transition from one-to-one
communication (the post, telegraph, and telephone) to one-to-many communication.
The basic technology was developed around 1890-1895 and the first experimental
radio station was set up by Marconi in 1897. The first radio stations were set up in the
early twentieth century, starting with Charles Herrold‘s radio station in San Jose,
California (1909).
In most countries the first stations that regularly broadcast radio programmes
started around 1920 and during the 1920s and 1930s radio broadcasting
experienced rapid growth. In Britain, experimental broadcasting began in 1920, the
BBC was formed in 1922, and it became a semi-public organisation after its licence
expired in 1926. In the Netherlands the first regular wireless broadcast for
entertainment started in 1919, in France and Switzerland in 1922, and in the
following years in most other European countries.
Television was based on radio technology. After radio had developed from
signal (Morse code) to audio, the next stage in its development involved the
transmission of images in combination with sound. The first application of the
underlying technology involved sending images over telephone and telegraph lines,
using Nipkow‘s scanning disk (1884) to ‗rasterise‘ images. The term television was
first used in 1900. Television technology was further developed in the 1920s and
early 1930s. In the 1930s, standard analogue television transmissions started in
Europe, followed in the 1940s by North America. Colour television was developed
shortly after, starting in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and colour TV broadcasts
began in 1950.
Development of (commercial) applications and complementary goods and
services
Early applications of radio were marine communications (based on morse
code), military communications (starting in World War I), and navigation. The radio
also resulted in the development of radar before World War II.
The development of the broadcasting industry was driven by supply, but its
success depended on the availability of radio receivers and television sets. Initially,
few receivers were available. For example, the early colour televisions were not
compatible with existing black and white TV sets and no colour TVs were available
for the general public. Early tests were therefore only accessible to engineers and the
invited press. The first TV programmes in colour in the early 1950s could be viewed
on no more than a few dozen television sets. It was not until 1972 that the US had
more colour TVs than B&W TVs and that more than 50% of households owned a
television set.
In the early stages of the development of broadcasting, hardware and content
were closely tied: radio developers began transmitting programmes, and colour TV
stations were involved in the development and production of colour TVs. The two
industries were, however, soon uncoupled.

Radio and television grew rapidly from the first establishment of the
technological principles at the end of the nineteenth century to the first technical
applications in the early decades of the twentieth century and their commercial
application in the 1920s. Technical development occurred in several locations
simultaneously. This feature may explain the rapid rise of the broadcasting industry
and underlines the importance of standards in its development.
The development of television appears to have been dominated by larger
players, whereas that of radio has been influenced strongly by the input of user-
inventors (e.g. the invention of FM radio by Armstrong). In the early years of radio
120
and television there were close relations between hardware developers and content
developers, but as commercial use increased, hardware and content were
uncoupled.
Technical developments were years ahead of household use. The first radio
stations emerged when few people had radios to listen to broadcasts. The same was
true for the early television stations and colour TV broadcasts. The development of
the mass broadcast media was consequently supply-driven. Once the technology
became more widely available and markets became saturated, its development
became driven by demand (through advertising), even though listeners and viewers
had no immediate influence on content.

The most important effect of the rise of mass broadcast media was the
emergence and rapid growth of a media content industry as well as an immense
market for advertising. This had a strong impact on competition in markets where
radio and television advertising became commonplace. In addition, the electronic
industry was given a boost as consumers discovered the new media and began to
buy radio receivers and television sets.
The rise of the broadcast media had an impact on competing media industries,
such as the music industry (competition with radio), cinemas (competition with
television and, at a later stage, with home video), and print media (advertising). Each
of these industries managed to survive and prosper, despite the apparent threat to
their economic livelihood, indicating that the various media are not perfect
substitutes.
The rise of broadcasting gave a boost to the market for complementary
technologies, such as cable and wire manufacturing, and camera and microphone
production. In addition, public revenues increased, both from licence fees for radio
and television (which were then used to fund public television) and from taxes from
increases business activity.
The rise of mass broadcast media revolutionised cultural, political, and social
life in the industrialised world. Viewers and listeners gained a new, global perspective
on the world as news services began to provide live coverage of national and foreign
events. One important characteristic of mass media is their immediacy. For example,
war is shown live and in colour, which has a direct (often negative) impact on public
perception towards it.
Political parties and individual politicians began to use radio and television to
reach potential voters. One side-effect was that broadcasts became partisan –biased
to one or the other political view–, leaving it up to the individual viewers and listeners
to determine if the information they were given was correct. As a result, radio and
television have an impact on public opinion, on fashions and habits, and on other
aspects of social life, both in substance (e.g. trends) and in the degree of integration
(e.g. common fashion trends across social classes). Mass media have also had an
impact on household time use and patterns of consumption. People nowadays spend
up to several hours a day in front of a television, often watching collectively.
Advertising also became far more effective, reaching consumers in their home at any
time of the day.
A major impact of the mass broadcasting media is the homogenisation of
culture. BBC speech made serious inroads into the toleration of extreme local
accents, and the same happened in other countries. Regional folk music gave way to
Top 40 hits. And the Americanisation of youth culture can be considered a mass
media phenomenon.
121

Regulation was an issue from the start. Government is involved in licensing,
spectrum management, IPR protection, funding, and setting technical standards.
Government regulation began soon after the first stations arose. The US
government began licensing radio operators under the Radio Act of 1912. The same
Act established the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) that regulated radio use, which
was replaced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1934. The FCC
regulates all use of the radio spectrum, interstate telecommunications and
international communications that originate or terminate in the United States.
In Britain, radio licensing was common practice from the start in 1922, when the
BBC was established. The development of European television was initiated mainly
by government and most early stations were public. Developments were
consequently slower than in the USA, where commercial motivations provided a
sense of urgency to the market. Radio and TV licence fees were used to finance
public broadcasting systems. This would remain unchanged until the rise of private
channels in the 1980s.
The FCC sets technological standards for radio and television. One requirement
for colour television was that its broadcasts had to be compatible with existing
monochrome TV sets. The first such standard was approved by the FCC in 1953, but
emerged as a result of self-regulation, having been developed by the US television
industry. There was no such agreement on technical standards in Europe and as a
result the start of colour TV programming was delayed until 1967. European
standards were divided between PAL (Germany) and SECAM (France), both of
which differed from the American NTSC standard.
Regulation was a continuous and dynamic challenge throughout the history of
mass broadcast media. For example, the rise of pirate radio stations and commercial
television in Europe required government to strongly enforce licensing agreements,
IPR protection has been an issue since the start of commercial radio (as it is for the
Internet), and to this day the EU regulates advertising in all broadcast media,
including the Internet.
Radio and television opened up a host of possibilities for new public services
and new mechanisms of service delivery. This included public information services,
public (e.g. politically neutral) news delivery, and public emergency warning systems.
With regard to public news provision, we can see large differences between
countries. The Netherlands had a public broadcasting system, subsidised by taxation
and with air time allocated to broadcasting societies according to their membership,
with a strong anti-censorship policy, resulting in impartial programming. The BBC‘s
central administration also adopted the policy that its news had to be as impartial as
possible. The United States had a ―fairness doctrine‖, but this was regularly ignored
and mainstream programming is driven by commercial sponsoring. In many other
countries, government maintains strong control of content.
Throughout Europe, there emerged government-funded educational
programming, supplementary to other educational policies or as part of broader
social policy programmes. Educational programming is not the prerogative of
government, but is also supplied by private parties.
Political programming, either comprising political party broadcasts or public
access to parliamentary and other political proceedings, has raised the degree of
involvement in national and . And even though the average voter remains passive,
the mass media have become an integral part of public policy and democracy and a
major force in public opinion formation and government outreach. The rise of
broadcast media may even be linked to the emergence of mass (political and social)
movements, such as the sexual revolution, the growth of labour unions, and the civil
liberties movement.

The mass broadcast media are a network industry and are increasingly
multinational, if not global. They provide one-to-many (unidirectional) communication.
122
ICT has reinforced this feature, but now offers the prospect of many-to-many
(multidirectional) communication. And where conventional broadcasting casts the
viewer in a passive role, new Internet-based media allow viewers to self-organise and
become broadcasters themselves.
Mass broadcast media are characterised by the parallel development of
hardware and content, with a need to regulate both. ICT began under similar
conditions, except that regulation seems increasingly to escape the grasp of
government and take the form of self-regulation. ICT has also weakened the location-
based roots of broadcasting.
Mass media have become a strong force in the activation and information of the
general public. Broadcasting has become a powerful political factor as well as a
major economic industry. The Internet provides a functionality that conventional
broadcasting does not have, namely the possibility of building interest-based
communities, geared towards and formed by specific groups with fluid membership,
in which information sharing (content) is controlled by the members rather than the
provider. The rise of the Internet has heralded a move from traditional unidirectional
broadcasting media to new social, personalised media.
10.4 Cross-case analysis

The three historical case studies all refer to radical general-purpose
technologies that had a momentous impact on the economy and society of
industrialised nations. They are also in many ways comparable to current
developments in the information society. (See Table 8) Each case illustrates a
networked technology that transformed the life of all households, citizens, firms, and
governments, down to the lowest level. The pace of technological development was
high and, if the four cases are compared longitudinally, increasing. The scope of their
impacts is also increasing. Transport, electricity and communication were mainly
national in nature; some broadcast media had an international impact; and ICT is
increasingly global in orientation.
Markets are also changing. The early network industries were seen as natural
monopolies. These monopolies have since been broken down, mainly by decoupling
services from the underlying infrastructure. Mass broadcast media were initially
subject to strong regulation and, in Europe, publicly owned. Since the 1980s, they
have increasingly moved into private hands and have diversified. ICT (the Internet in
particular) has never been subject to a similar level of government intervention; the
effectiveness of Internet regulation can actually be seen as a major challenge.
Table 8: A cross-case comparison of key features
Transport and Mass broadcast

Electricity ICT
communication media
Period 1840-1870 1890-1940 1940-1970 1970-
from first
from first from first proof of
Pace of from scientific principle applications to
commercial use to concept to technical
techno- to technical application consumer
maturity in c. 80 application in c. 20
logical in c. 50 years, to products in c.
years, to years, to mature
develop- dominance in c. 40 30-40 years,
dominance in c. 50 industry in c. 20-30
ment years to dominance
years years
in c. 20 years
Internet from
national to
from local to from regional to global;
from local to regional,
Scope regional, then national, then telecom from
then national
national international national to
international,
then global
private (with strong private with
Market natural monopoly natural monopoly
regulation) or public little regulation
inventors (radio); inventor-
engineer- engineer-
innovating companies entrepreneurs;
Key actors entrepreneurs; entrepreneurs;
(TV); advertising private
government government
industry investors
123
We have examined the effects on society and government of each of the
technologies in comparison to those generated by ICT. These are summarised in
Table 9. First, they all imposed demand on regulation proportional to their impact.
The distributed, networked technologies represented a significant break with
preceding technologies and government intervention (especially through regulation
and investment) was required to mitigate the consequences. As a result, their
development transformed the institutional and legislative context in which they
operated.
The nature of these four technologies also implies that they all had a strong
impact on inclusion and integration. They forged nations out of regions, help turn
individuals into active citizens, and provided access to good quality services to
individual households and businesses. These impacts are directly relevant to the
development of government services – in the front-office and the back-office – and to
the general perspective on governance in society. Technologies such as these have
been instrumental in the transformation of government services and the growth of the
modern and open democracy during the last two centuries. Government has become
far more efficient; and ICT promises to increase this efficiency even further. And its
outreach has extended immensely; and ICT and the Internet appear set to
revolutionise the workings of government services and the principles of governance
yet again.
Table 9: A cross-case comparison of thematic issues
Transport and Mass broadcast

Electricity ICT
communication media


 licensing; spectrum;
Regulation  spectrum;
licensing advertising; content;
content; IPR
IPR
  
Efficiency
communication office equipment
Scope;
public   
outreach

Inclusion  
 informing local
and regions into informing mass
integration democratising effect but networked
nations electorate
communities
loss of
national
New congestion; conflict; dissent; government
critical dependency
problems spreading dissent reliability control;
security and
privacy
10.5 Bottom-up versus top-down innovation

Our historical cases studies concern general-purpose network technologies that
are highly comparable to ICT. They are the usual suspects where historical analogies
with current developments are concerned. They share a common feature.
Technological developments were initiated by individual inventors, engineers, and
entrepreneurs, but electricity, steam, and mass broadcasting quickly became the
domain of big business with little room for bottom-up innovation. Even though much
of the ICT industry is similarly dominated by large multinational companies, the
nature of the technology is such that it leaves a lot of room for small-scale bottom-up
innovation in the use of ICT.
User-driven innovation has been recognised as a major source of innovation
(Von Hippel, 1988). Within ICT, prominent examples are Open Source Software and
text messaging (SMS). Open Source Software (F/OSS) began in the mid-1980s to
preserve free access to software code and supports its continuing modification and
development. F/OSS projects are typically set up by individual programmers or small
groups with a specific interest (von Krogh & von Hippel, 2003). Widely used open
source products include the Linux operating system, Apache server software and the
124
Perl programming language. Text messaging or SMS began as a by-product of
mobile telephony. Although it was a technical feature of mobile phones from the
beginning, nobody expected users to pick up on the possibilities as quickly and
massively as they did. (Faulkner & Culwin, 2005) SMS is now considered a prime
example of user-driven innovation. It has produced a host of applications, including
information services (enter a car registration number and receive the car‘s details),
consumer services (mobile payment of parking fees), social organisation (interest
groups using SMS to coordinate public manifestations), and cultural change (impacts
on language). Government has latched on to the opportunities by developing ways to
send public safety information to specific areas (e.g. health warnings or calamity
information to people within reach of specific nodes in the mobile network).
A related application area is navigation. For millennia, navigation was an
individual skill, grounded in a person‘s knowledge of landmarks and ability to read the
stars and other signs of nature. Navigation tools –such as the compass, the sextant,
the map and the marine chronometer– made travel and exploration easier. Such
tools were often developed by individual users with the experience to know what was
needed and to test whether or not it worked. The big challenges were, however,
which tools were accurate, which maps could be trusted, and which view of world (flat
or round) was correct. Navigation tools developed from custom-made to off-the-shelf
products, but until the twentieth century little changed: maps show you the world, tacit
knowledge (your own experience) and codified knowledge (e.g. traffic signs) show
you where you are, and maps and compasses help planes, cars, and pedestrians
find their way. GPS changed the way navigation works, first for the military and then
for everyone. It is based on the network of Global Positioning Satellites, a major
network infrastructure that is can only be constructed by governments and
multinational companies. Once in place, the GPS signal could be used by anyone
and the technology has since produced a wide range of complementary, bottom-up
innovations, driven by small (start-up) businesses, individual inventors, and users.
Even though the first user was the military, its development into a successful
commercial application was entirely based private initiative. As Tang (2006) notes:
―The irony is during the two Gulf Wars, many soldiers even bought their own
consumer-grade GPS receivers that were light and compact and proved their great
value in the battlefield.‖ Government did play a role in the development of
navigational tools, for example by investing in exploration and map making and
certifying tools. However, the market could resolve such governance issues, since
demand will tend towards more accurate tools. Exploration and global charting have
nowadays virtually been completed. The use of geo-information in various
applications is market-driven as individual companies and inventors latch on to
technological opportunities (consider, for example, Google Earth and KML).
Government has become a user of GPS technology, for example for geographic
surveys and traffic management.
Science is another domain where innovation is primarily user-driven. Invention
is integral to the work of scientists. There is a big difference between the user-
innovator, who produces the methods and techniques for his own research, the
conventional user, who borrows the innovations produced by others, and the
innovative supplier, who responds to the demand for more advanced methods and
techniques in other areas of research (Von Hippel, 1976). Scientific developments –
including investments in the research infrastructure– can trigger innovations in other
industries. For example, the construction of the Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope
(KM3NeT, a neutrino telescope with a volume of one cubic kilometre at the bottom of
the Mediterranean Sea) calls for advances in underwater construction technology
and sensor technology. Supplier relations between research facilities and specific
industries have been identified as an important channel for technology transfer and
knowledge spillover between science and industry (Autio, Hameri, & Vuola, 2004).
Where science differs from our historical case studies is that its technological
development has always been user-driven and that only in recent decades there has
emerged a trend towards increases in scale and scope, resulting for example in a
closer cooperation between science and industry (Gibbons et al., 1994).
User-driven or bottom-up innovation remains a powerful force in technological
development. As technologies become cheaper and more easily accessible, the
potential for contributions by individual inventors, entrepreneurs, and users
increases. Even when such contributions converge into a few major multinational
companies –in the case of successful technologies– there remains plenty of room for
the development of small-scale complementary technologies and applications. ICT
125
has become such a technology and bottom-up innovation seems likely to play a
major role in future developments. Scale does remain an issue, especially where the
market may fail to achieve higher-order objectives. With respect to eGovernment, the
interoperability, uniformity and quality of services may not be guaranteed without
some degree of top-down involvement.
126
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12 Annex 1: eGovernment experts interviewed
A total of 23 top European and North American eGovernment experts have
been interviewed during ten meetings or workshops (as listed below) by the
consultants, between April and June 2008. The purpose was explicitly to validate and
supplement our knowledge of current eGovernment trends and future drivers, using
earlier versions of this report as a starting point but not as limiting to the discussion.
Responsibility for the views and interpretations expressed in this later version of the
report, however, rests solely with the authors and should not be taken to impute any
particular view to any expert.
1. Jan Deprest (Fedict, Belgium), and Frank Leyman, 24 April 2008
2. William Dutton (Director, Oxford Internet Institute (OII), London 6 May

2008
3. Andrew Miller (Member of UK Parliament, Chair of House of Commons IT

Committee), London, 6 May 2008
4. Graham Colclough (CapGemini), London, 7 May 2008
5. Andrew Pinder (Former eEnvoy, UK), London, 7 May 2008
6. John Kootstra (JK, Min.BZK), Harry van Zon (HZ, HEC), Pieter Spohr
(PS, NBL), Tanja Timmermans (TT, Min.BZK), Michel Malotoux (MM,
Gartner), Evert Jan Mulder (EJM, HEC), Erik Wijnen (EW, Min.EZ), at
HEC, The Hague, Netherlands, 9 May 2008
7. Anthony Williams (Vice President of nGenera Corporation, Canada, and

co-authopr with Don Tapscott of ―Wikinomics), Joan Bigman (Director,
nGenera Corporation, USA) and Martin Ray (nGenera Corporation,
London) Brussels, 28 and 29 May 2008
8. William Perrin, Farah Ahmed, Richard Sterling, Kevin McLean

(Transformational Government Unit, UK Cabinet Office), London, 5 June
2008)
9. Catherine Fieschi (DEMOS Think Tank), London 5 June 2008
10. Robin Linschoten (Chairman of ACTAL, The Netherlands), 13 June 2008
11. Yih-Jeou Wang (Acting Project Leader, OECD, E-Government Project –

Innovation and Integrity Division, Directorate for Public Governance and
Territorial Development), Paris, 26 August 2008.
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13 Annex 2: Main technology trends relevant to eGovernment
(Source: updated and adapted from Frissen, Millard et al (2007), a study carried out for the Institute of Prospective Technological Studies, European Commission, DG JRC, 2007)
Deployment trends of transformative technologies Components

1. Terminals and wearable computing PDAs, wearable computers, MP3 players, mobile phones
2. Ambient intelligence Robotics, intelligent agents, sensors, language processing, serious games
3. Identification and authentification RFID, biometrics
4. Ubiquitous seamless connectivity WiFi, WiMax, broadband,
5. Commodity devices create open innovation and local factories / Web 2.0 ?? Web technology, social software and networking, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0
6. Storage, processing and sensing Grid, semantic technology, sensors
7. Converging technologies (nano-technology, bio-technology, etc.)
1) Technology trend: Terminals and wearable computing

PCs are becoming less and less important ―terminals‖. As new appliances will embed connectivity and processing capabilities, and they will interconnect seamless with each other making it possible to
convey information on the most appropriate device (PDA, PIM, mobile phone, etc), the PC as most important terminal will disappear. The trend towards commonality of – increasingly portable – terminals is
often called wearable computing. Wearables are terminals that provide portability during operation, enable hands-free or hands-limited use; can attract the user‘s attention, even when not in active us; can run
continuously and attempt to sense the user‘s current context. The technology enhances the communication, organisation abilities and information position of individuals and groups of individuals and could
therefore stimulate new (forms of) organisation and change the information flow and balance between actors.
Components Relevance for eGovernment
PDAs  This is an existing technology that is only now starting to be used in
Personal digital assistants (usually abbreviated to PDAs) are handheld devices that were originally designed as personal the public sector, for example in the policing and healthcare sectors,
organizers, but became much more versatile over the years. The many uses and tasks of a basic PDA include: calculating, but has much greater potential.
use as a clock and calendar, playing computer games, accessing the Internet, sending and receiving E-mails, use as a radio  The technology is mature and has the potential to be deployed on a
or stereo, camera recording, recording notes, use as an address book, and use as a spreadsheet. Newer PDAs also have larger scale by governments.
both color screens and audio capabilities, enabling them to be used as mobile phones (PDA Phone), web browsers or media
players. Many PDAs can access the Internet, intranets or extranets via Wi-Fi, or Wireless Wide-Area Networks (WWANs).
Wearable computers  This is an existing technology that not yet much sued in the public
Personal Computers have never quite lived up to their name. There is a limitation to the interaction between a user and a sector, although many applications are already rolled out for defence
personal computer. Wearable computers break this boundary. As the name suggests these computers are worn on the body like and military purposes.
a piece of clothing. Wearable computers have been applied to areas such as behavioral modeling, health monitoring systems,  However, wearables are still relatively immature, but the technology
information technologies and media development. Wearable computers are especially useful for applications that require has the potential to be developed further and to be deployed on a
computational support while the user's hands, voice, eyes or attention are actively engaged with the physical environment. larger scale by governments.
MP3-Players  This is an existing technology that is only rarely used in the public
A digital audio player (also known as a DAP, or as an MP3 player, due to that format's ubiquity) is a device that stores, organizes sector (mainly Podcasting by politicians).
and plays digital audio files. It comprises three main types: MP3 CD players, simply CD players capable of reading the MP3 file  The technology is quite mature and has the potential to be deployed
format; flash-based players, holding files on solid-state media internal or external to the device; and hard drive based players (or on a larger scale by governments.
'digital jukeboxes'), holding files on an internal hard drive.
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Mobile phones  This is an existing technology of which some functionalities are fully
A mobile phone or cellular (cell) phone is an electronic telecommunications device. Most current mobile phones connect to a applied (communication among governmental practitioners) but of
cellular network of base stations (cell sites), which is in turn interconnected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) which some functionalities are not yet fully applied (communication
(the exception are satellite phones). Cellular networks were first introduced in the early to mid 1980s (the 1G generation). Prior between government and citizens).
mobile phones operating without a cellular network (the so-called 0G generation), such as Mobile Telephone Service, date  The technology is mature but evolving fast and has the potential to
back to 1946. Until the mid to late 1980s, most mobile phones were sufficiently large that they were often permanently installed be deployed on a much larger scale by governments.
in vehicles as car phones. With the advance of miniaturization, currently the vast majority of mobile phones are handheld. In
addition to the standard voice function of a telephone, a mobile phone can support many additional services such as SMS for
text messaging, packet switching for access to the Internet, and MMS for sending and receiving photos and video.
2) Technology trend: Ambient intelligence

Ambient Intelligence is seen by many scientists as one of the most important potential future technological developments. Ambient Intelligence is not a prediction of the future but a vision. It refers to the
future of the information society stemming from the convergence of ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous communication and intelligent user-friendly interfaces as envisaged by the European Information Society
Technology Advisory Group. It puts the emphasis on user-friendliness, user-empowerment and support for human interactions. Ambient intelligent environments will be characterized by their ubiquity,
transparency and intelligence.
Robotics  This is an existing technology that is predominantly applied in the
A robot is a mechanical device that can perform preprogrammed physical tasks. A robot may act under the direct control of a entertainment and automobile industry (and by some governments
human (eg. the robotic arm of the space shuttle) or autonomously under the control of a pre-programmed computer. Robots for rescue purposes).
may be used to perform tasks that are too dangerous or difficult for humans to implement directly (e.g. the space shuttle arm) or  Robots could stimulate a shift in tasks, roles and processes by
may be used to automate repetitive tasks that can be performed more cheaply by a robot than by the employment of a human taking over tasks that up to now have been carried out by people,
(e.g. automobile production; doctor). Specifically, robot can be used to describe an intelligent mechanical device in the form of a but may also support individuals to carry out tasks that hitherto have
human. This form of robot (culturally referred to as androids) is common in science fiction stories. However, such robots are yet been carried out by professionals.
to become common-place in reality and development is yet required in the field of artificial intelligence before they approach  The technology is maturing, however, and has the potential to be
the robots of sci-fi. Internet bots are named after the word robot because they perform mundane, repetitive tasks. deployed on a larger scale by governments (for example in the
healthcare sector).
Intelligent agents  This is an existing technology but is at present mainly only deployed
In computer science, an intelligent agent (IA) is a software agent that exhibits some form of artificial intelligence that assists in the defence and military sectors.
the user and will act on their behalf, in performing repetitive computer-related tasks. While the working of software agents used  The technology is also evolving and maturing, and has the potential
for operator assistance or data mining (sometimes referred to as bots), are often based on fixed pre-programmed rules, to be deployed on a larger scale by governments (for example in the
"intelligent" here implies the ability to adapt and learn. In some literature IAs are also referred to as autonomous intelligent policing and social sectors).
agents, which means they act independently, and will learn and adapt to changing circumstances. According to Nicola
Kasabov[1] IA systems should exhibit the following characteristics:
learn and improve through interaction with the environment (embodiment)
adapt online and in real time
learn quickly from large amounts of data
accommodate new problem solving rules incrementally
have memory based exemplar storage and retrieval capacities
have parameters to represent short and long term memory, age, forgetting, etc.
be able to analyze itself in terms of behavior, error and success
Sensor technology  This is an existing technology that is increasingly applied by
A sensor is a physical device or biological organ that detects, or senses, a signal or physical condition and chemical governments for surveillance purposes.
compounds. There is a wide range of types of sensors such as: Thermal sensors, Electromagnetic sensors, Mechanical  Could stimulate a shift in tasks, roles and processes. Sensors may
sensors, Chemical sensors, Optical and radiation sensors, Ionising radiation, Non-ionising radiation and Acoustic sensors. take over tasks that up to now have been carried out by people, but
may also support individuals to carry out tasks that hitherto have
been carried out by professionals.
 The technology is relatively mature and has the potential to be
deployed on a larger scale by governments.
138
Language processing  This is an existing technology that is maturing and that is
Language processing refers to the way human beings process speech or writing and understand it as language. Most recent predominantly used in the telecom industry
theories back the idea that this process is made completely by and inside the brain. Speech processing is the study of speech  It enhances new communication between individuals and computers
signals and the processing methods of these signals.The signals are usually processed in a digital representation whereby and therefore new products, services and processes.
speech processing can be seen as the intersection of digital signal processing and natural language processing. Speech  The technology is maturing, and has the potential to be deployed on
processing can be divided in the following categories: a larger scale by governments (for example in the policing and
social sectors).
Speech recognition, which deals with analysis of the linguistic content of a speech signal.
Speaker recognition, where the aim is to recognise the identity of the speaker.
Enhancement of speech signals, e.g. Noise reduction, Speech coding for compression and transmission
of speech.
Voice analysis for medical purposes, such as analysis of vocal loading and dysfunction of the vocal cords.
Speech synthesis: the artificial synthesis of speech, which usually means computer generated speech.
Serious games  This is an existing technology that is mainly used for entertainment
Serious games are computer and video games that are intended to not only entertain users, but have additional purposes purposes.
such as education and training. They can be similar to educational games, but are primarily focused on an audience outside of  It enables new approaches and shifts in existing paradigms (for
primary or secondary education. Serious games can be of any genre and many of them can be considered a kind of example learning and training paradigms).
edutainment, but the main goal of a serious game is not to entertain, though the potential of games to engage is often an  The technology is mature and has the potential to be deployed on a
important aspect of the choice to use games as a teaching tool. A serious game is usually a simulation which has the look and larger scale by governments.
feel of a game, but is actually a simulation of real-world events or processes. The main goal of a serious game is usually to train
or educate users, though it may have other purposes, such as marketing or advertisement, while giving them an enjoyable
experience. The fact that serious games are meant to be entertaining encourages re-use. While the largest users of SGs are the
US government and medical professionals, other commercial sectors are beginning to see the benefits of such simulations
and are actively seeking development of these types of tools.
3) Technology trend: Identification and authentification

Transformative technology trend. Using electronic identification technologies - such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and biometrics - almost everything (human beings, animals and objects) and
even components of products can be identified. RFID systems are emerging as a practical means of auto-identification in a wide variety of applications from access control to animal tracking. RFID systems
are likely to supersede bar codes in some applications and complement bar codes in others. RFID is expected to help in reducing costs of supply chain management and inventory; cost savings have been
estimated to be as high as 8–10% of inventory associated costs.
RFID  This is an existing technology that is mainly deployed by the retail
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data industry.
using devices called RFID tags or transponders. An RFID tag is an object that can be attached to or incorporated into a  It enhances transparency (tracking and tracing of people, animals
product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification using radio waves. Chip-based RFID tags contain silicon chips and and objects) and therefore could result in changing power balances,
antennas. Passive tags require no internal power source, whereas active tags require a power source. new roles and new tasks.
 The technology is mature and has the potential to be deployed on a
larger scale by governments (for example for tracking and tracing
purposes).
Biometrics  This is an existing technology that is increasingly deployed by
Biometrics is the study of automated methods for uniquely recognizing humans based upon one or more intrinsic physical or governments for identification purposes.
behavioral traits. In information technology, biometric authentication refers to technologies that measure and analyze human  It enhances transparency (tracking and tracing of people, animals
physical and behavioral characteristics for authentication purposes. Examples of physical characteristics include fingerprints, and objects) and therefore could result in changing power balances,
eye retinas and irises, facial patterns and hand measurements, while examples of mostly behavioral characteristics include new roles and tasks.
signature, gait and typing patterns. Voice is considered a mix of both physical and behavioural characteristics. However, it can  The technology is mature/maturing and has the potential to be
be argued that all biometric traits share physical and behavioral aspects. deployed on a larger scale by governments.
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4) Technology trend: Ubiquitous seamless connectivity
Cellular coverage in Europe is almost ubiquitous. Picocells, initially serving data traffic and then also voice traffic, may provide a significant increase in capacity and increase connectivity options. Connectivity
may really become a commodity. However, this will not come for free. Technologies only can be seamless connected if they are interoperable. Systems, units, or forces have to be able to provide services to
and accept services from other systems, units or forces and to use the services so exchanged to enable them to operate effectively together.
WiFi  This is an existing technology that is highly deployed by some EU
Wi-Fi (also WiFi, Wi-fi, Wifi, or wifi) is a brand originally licensed by the Wi-Fi Alliance to describe the underlying technology of governments.
wireless local area networks (WLAN) based on the IEEE 802.11 specifications. Wi-Fi is now so pervasive, and the term so  It strengthens mobility, the access to information and services and
generic, that the brand is no longer protected and it appears in Webster's dictionary. therefore could result in new products, new market players and new
processes.
 The technology is mature and has the potential to be deployed on a
larger scale by EU governments for business process, service
delivery and monitoring purposes.
WiMax  This is an emerging technology which is still mainly deployed in
WiMAX is defined as Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access by the WiMAX Forum, formed in April 2001 to promote trials.
conformance and interoperability of the standard IEEE 802.16, also known as WirelessMAN. The Forum describes WiMAX as "a  It potentially strengthens mobility, the access to information and
standards-based technology enabling the delivery of last mile wireless broadband access as an alternative to cable and DSL." services and therefore could result in new products, new market
players and new processes.
The WiMAX Forum is "the exclusive organization dedicated to certifying the interoperability of BWA products, the WiMAX Forum  The technology is maturing and has the potential to be deployed on
defines and conducts conformance and interoperability testing to ensure that different vendor systems work seamlessly with one a larger scale.
another." Those that pass conformance and interoperability testing achieve the ―WiMAX Forum Certified‖ designation and
display this mark on their products and marketing materials. Vendors claiming their equipment is ―WiMAX-ready,‖ "WiMAX-
compliant,‖ or "pre-WiMAX," are not WiMAX Forum Certified, according to the Forum
Broadband  This is an existing technology that is highly deployed by some EU
Broadband in general electronics and telecommunications is a term which refers to a signal or circuit which includes or governments.
handles a relatively wide range of frequencies. Broadband is always a relative term, understood according to its context. The  It strengthens mobility, the access to information and services and
wider the bandwidth, the more information can be carried. In radio, for example, a very narrowband signal will carry Morse therefore could result in new products, new market players and new
code; a broader band will carry speech; a yet broader band is required to carry music without losing the high audio frequencies processes.
required for realistic sound reproduction. A television antenna described as "normal" may be capable of receiving a certain  The technology is mature and has the potential to be deployed on an
range of channels; one described as "broadband" will receive more channels. In data communications a modem will transmit a even larger scale by EU governments for business process, service
bandwidth of 64 kilobits per seconds (kbit/s) over a telephone line; over the same telephone line a bandwidth of several delivery and monitoring purposes.
megabits per second can be handled by ADSL, which is described as broadband (relative to a modem over a telephone line,
although much less than can be achieved over a fibre optic circuit, for example).
5) Technology trend: Commodity devices for open innovation

Electronic devices become more and more ubiquitous. The adoption of digital video-cameras, photo-cameras, laptops, but also more specific devices like recording equipment and software to edit videos,
photos or music grows fast. An important driver for the adoptions of new devices is the decline in prices. As a result, devices and technologies are becoming an affordable commodity while in the past
technology and devices were more or less a privilege for people or organizations that could afford to pay the high prices. Because these devices in the future will be commodities - they (have) become
consumer electronics – people may take over tasks that till now have been carried out by professionals. People make their own films, write and publish their own books or blogs, write, record and bring out
their own music. At the same time, the ―innovation, production and dissemination process‖ changes. Networks of people form all over the world together create novelties (be it new music, new software or
new graphic designs). Innovation does not always take place in clear-cut (units) of organisations; moreover innovations increasingly occur in open and ad hoc networks of professionals, amateurs and anyone
else interested. The manufacturing process is moving from formal organisations to (networks) or individuals.
140
Web technology  This is an existing technology of which some functionalities are
The Internet (also known simply as the Net) is the worldwide, publicly accessible system of interconnected computer networks highly deployed by governments (information), but of which some
that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It consists of millions of smaller domestic, functionalities (communication and transaction) are not fully
academic, business, and government networks, which together carry various information and services, such as electronic deployed yet.
mail, online chat, and the interlinked Web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.  It enables the communication and creation ability of individuals and
Contrary to some common usage, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not synonymous: the Internet is a collection of groups of individuals and therefore could result in new forms or
interconnected computer networks, linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections etc.; the Web is a organisations, new processes and changes in power balances.
collection of interconnected documents, linked by hyperlinks and URLs, and is accessible using the Internet. The Internet also  The technology is mature and has the potential to be deployed in
provides many other services including e-mail, file sharing and others described below. new ways exploiting more functionalities.
Social software, social networking, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0  This is an existing technology that is mainly deployed in the private
Social software and networking enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated sphere (mySpace, Bebo, etc.)
communication and to form online communities. This encompasses both so-called Web 1.0 tools like email, instant  It enables the communication and creation ability of individuals and
messaging, web pages and discussion boards, as well as so-called Web 2.0 tools like newsfeed (RSS), podcasting and MP3 groups of individuals and therefore could result in new forms or
players, webcasting, web blogs, and wikis, mash-ups, as well as gaming and simulation applications (such as the Sims and organisations, new processes and changes in power balances.
HotDate, which were both invented or strongly modified by users),  The technology is mature and has the potential to be deployed on a
Broadly conceived, these tools also could also include older media such as mailing lists and Usenet, but some would restrict its very large scale by governments
meaning to more recent software genres such as blogs and wikis. Others suggest that the term social software is best used not
to refer to a single type of software, but rather to the use of two or more modes of computer-mediated communication that result
in community formation. In this view, people form online communities by combining one-to-one (e.g., email and instant
messaging), one-to-many (Web pages and blogs), and many-to-many (wikis) communication modes. In many online
communities, real life meetings become part of the communication repertoire. The more specific term collaborative software
applies to cooperative work systems.
Common to most definitions is the observation that some types of software seem to facilitate "bottom-up" community
development, in which membership is voluntary, reputations are earned by winning the trust of other members, and the
community's mission and governance are defined by the communities' members themselves. [3] Communities formed by "bottom-
up" processes are contrasted to the less vibrant collectivities formed by "top-down" software, in which users' roles are
determined by an external authority and circumscribed by rigidly conceived software mechanisms (such as access rights).
The term also arose in the late nineties to describe software emerging out of alliances between programmers and social groups
whose particular kinds of cultural intelligence are locked out of mainstream software. In this understanding of the term, the social
is understood to also have a political and aesthetic sense, not simply acting as a kind of glue for a collection of normatively
understood 'agents' whose inter-relations are formatted by software. What both positions share is an understanding that
particular design decisions and the grammar of interactions made possible by each piece of software is socially significant. As
the term has become more important to the computer industry, this earlier use of the term has often been edited out of memory.
Web 3.0 is a term that is used to describe various evolutions of Web usage and interaction along several paths, which could be realised in the third decade of the Web (2010-2020) when it
is suggested that several major complementary technology trends will reach new levels of maturity simultaneously including
Transformation of the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole.
ubiquitous connectivity, broadband adoption, mobile Internet access and mobile devices;
network computing, software-as-a-service business models, Web services interoperability, distributed computing, grid computing and cloud computing;
open technologies, open APIs and protocols, open data formats, open-source software platforms and open data (e.g. Creative Commons, Open Data License);
open identity, OpenID, open reputation, roaming portable identity and personal data;
the intelligent web, Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, GRDDL, in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language,
but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily
semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores;
the Geospatial Web, or the 3D web.
a distributed database, the "World Wide Database" (enabled by Semantic Web technologies); and
intelligent applications, natural language processing.[12], machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents.[13]
leveraging of artificial intelligence technologies
141
6) Technology trend: Storage, processing and sensing
The Information Society is growing and is characterized by an overwhelming presence of data and information. Due to improvements in electronic processing (microprocessors) it becomes possible to send
and receive increasingly more information, anytime, anywhere. Processing is an almost constant requirement of any service; any ambient in the future will be using and making processing available. Sensing
is the ability to recognize or detect a range of data. Nowadays sensors become cheaper and are able to detect a broader range of data, and from the increased capacity to model the environment. This is the
result of increased storage and processing capacity. Storage is a fundamental functionality in the IS. Technologies can support the storage of a variety of forms of data and information, software tools and so
on.
GRID  This is an existing technology that is predominantly used in the
Grid computing is an emerging computing model that provides the ability to perform higher throughput computing by taking research sector.
advantage of many networked computers to model a virtual computer architecture that is able to distribute process execution  It enables new forms of usage of computer resources and therefore
across a parallel infrastructure. Grids use the resources of many separate computers connected by a network (usually the could lead to new forms of organisation, processes and new
Internet) to solve large-scale computation problems. Grids provide the ability to perform computations on large data sets, by products.
breaking them down into many smaller ones, or provide the ability to perform many more computations at once than would be  The technology is mature/maturing and has the potential to be
possible on a single computer, by modeling a parallel division of labour between processes. Today resource allocation in a grid deployed on a larger scale by governments.
is done in accordance with SLAs.
Semantic technologies  This is an existing technology enabling new processes, new
Semantic technology encode meanings separately from data and content files; and separately from application code. This products, services and organisational forms, but is so far mainly
enables machines as well as people to understand, share and reason with them at execution time. With semantic technologies, deployed in the private sector.
adding, changing and implementing new relationships or interconnecting programs in a different way can be just as simple as  It enhances the information position of individuals and organisations
changing the external model that these programs share. and new power balances.
With information technology, on the other hand, meanings and relationships must be predefined and ―hard wired‖ into data  The technology is maturing and has the potential to be deployed on
formats and the application program code at design time. This means that when something changes, or we want exchange a larger scale by governments.
information we hadn‘t previously, or two programs need to interoperate in a new way, the humans must get involved.
Off-line, the parties must define and communicate between them the knowledge needed to make the change, and then recode
the data structures and program logic to accommodate it, and then apply these changes to the database and the application.
Then, and only then, can they implement the changes. Semantic technologies are ―meaning-centered.‖ They include tools for:
autorecognition of topics and concepts,
information and meaning extraction, and
categorization.
Given a question, semantic technologies can directly search topics, concepts, associations that span a vast number of sources.
Semantic technologies provide an abstraction layer above existing IT technologies that enables bridging and interconnection of
data, content, and processes. Second, from the portal perspective, semantic technologies can be thought of as a new level of
depth that provides far more intelligent, capable, relevant, and responsive interaction than with information technologies alone.
7) Technology trend: Converging technologies

Converging technologies (CTs) refer to developments where scientific and technological areas become strongly interrelated. A specific area functions as an accelerator or enabler for other areas, or even one
step further, scientific or technological areas could integrate and melt together and become so interrelated that they depend on each other and need to converge. The convergence enables different areas the
pursuit of a common goal. Because of convergence new chances for new products and processes and further scientific developments will emerge resulting even into radical innovations. Examples of
convergence are: ICT with cognitive science, biotechnology and nanotechnology.
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Research report on

Value for Citizens

Current eGovernment trends,

ICT for Government

2 Identifying key current trends and future drivers ...................... 14

3 Plural and partnership governance ......................................... 20

4 Performance governance ...................................................... 34

5 Personalised service production ............................................. 47

6 Participative policy making ................................................... 65

8 Production of ICT and technology innovation ........................... 91

9 Public value governance ..................................................... 101

10 Historical case studies ....................................................... 113

11 References ...................................................................... 127

12 Annex 1: eGovernment experts interviewed ........................... 136

13 Annex 2: Main technology trends relevant to eGovernment ....... 137

Maarten Botterman, Project Manager

Seven key 7) Public value

3) Personalised service 4) Participative policy

1.1 Background and purpose

2.2 The evolving policy goals of eGovernment

Figure 2: The evolving policy goals of eGovernment

2.3 Strategic transformations for eGovernance 2020

Figure 3: Key strategic transformations for eGovernance 2020

3) Personalised service 4) Participative policy

In summary, these seven eGovernance 2020 strategic transformations can be

3.1 Integrated and joined-up governance

Figure 4: Internal agency re-engineering

2) Front office re-engineering

1) Before re-engineering Citizens and businesses

Citizens and businesses

Front office, one-stop-shop – -- relations with customers

Office A Office B Office C Office D

Citizens and businesses

Citizens and businesses

Back office(s) – OFFICE

Figure 5: Inter-agency cooperation and integration

Fully ‟joined-up‟ government, for

3.2 Centralisation versus de-centralisation

Figure 6: ‘Goods’ and ‘bads’ of centralised and de-centralised (e)government

‘GOODS’ balance ‘BADS’

Ensures minimum standards

3.3 Networked governance

Figure 7: Networked governance

3.4 Open and porous governance

Figure 8: The government value chain

Generic model Model 1 Model 2

The line dividing

Table 1: Technology matrix for plural and partnership governance

Integrated Centralisa- Open & Business

There is a need to identify and provide the components for an appropriate

4.1 Leadership, skills and working practices

4.2 Public sector innovation and transformation

4.3 Knowledge management and organisational

4.4 Change management and capacity redeployment

4.5 Performance management and public value

Figure 9: eGEP measurement framework analytical model

4.6 ICT challenges of performance governance

Table 2: Technology matrix for performance governance

5.1 Universal personalisation

5.2 Self-directed services

5.3 Personal relations

5.4 Personalisation through intermediation