I never comment on the political situation in the UK, but this quote in the Sunday Times caught my eye … “I can see this going to Armageddon,” Cameron said. “Chief fire officers are shaking in their boots because Bain has unearthed things that the likes of Richard Branson would have done away with 25 years ago”. This comes from an “independent” fireman who, I think, has come up with the right analogy. Government still does things that the big corporates stopped doing years or even decades ago – can you imagine Stelios running a business this way? (you’ll need to have an account with the Sunday Times to read the whole article).

John Gotze’s done it again … he was first with the govblog (ok, so I was first with the egovblog), first with the XML feed and now he’s got an XFML feed. I read what he said and then the links he refers to, I’m not sure I get it yet. Today I wrote to Dave Winer to ask him some questions on RSS. I want to know if I can use RSS to pull up “definitive” content from another site – say I want to find out exactly what “Disability Living Allowance” is, could I use RSS with some parameter or other to a “definitions site” to get the right words? Could I also extend that to delivering personalised content, based on a few keywords, from sites around government in a single consistent thread – i.e. not just links or teasers but the whole text presented in a seamless way? I’m hoping he’ll fill in some gaps in my knowledge.

Just so you know, what got me thinking about the first post I put up today – getting a bunch of smart people in a room to work through the e-government issues – was this article from Jon Udell. He links to Brent (the more expensive the content management system, the crappier the URLs), Phil Windley (on finding data amidst the government morass) and others … we need to harness all those links!

A while ago (October 12th) I noted that things in the USA had a chance to progress quite dramatically if the CIO that they were talking about appointing was given the authority and the money to get things done. Well, the House has passed the first stage of the bill to set that up. $50 million for each of the next 2 years looks in the bag – not a bad pot for a central organisation. Now, if along with that comes authority and the ability to stop others spending money where they shouln’t, then the ante is upped for sure.

I’m going to get to my point via a fairly roundabout route, so forgive me.

What does a perfect e-government service look like? Nowhere in the world is take-up running at dramatic levels – that is, levels where anyone could reasonably say that they have transformed their government, delivered something to their citizens that they never had before or mammothly reduced costs the way that we expect businesses to do every day. So, what would a service look like that would achieve that kind of take-up? A perfect service.

It must be:

– Easy to find – hunting for a service by trawling through hundreds of websites or by entering obscure terms into a search engine shouldn’t be the rule. So that means it’s either on a simple website (www.gov.uk?) or available through someone else’s service that you are using (bank, insurance agent, pension provider).

– Personal – the service needs to know who you are, so there must be a simple and effective way for it to know who you are and what rights you have over the service. That might be a digital certificate or it might be a userid/password or it might be a token that you already have (like a travelpass, entitlement card or identity card).

– Relevant to you at the time – the service must be wrapped in information that you need at the time that you need it. That means that the service needs to know a little about you, either because you’ve just told it, you told it last time or it can intuit enough based on the path you took to get to it. So entering data that you’ve entered elsewhere is out.

– Proactive – the service needs to tell you when something has progressed with your application or request; or it needs to tell you when something has changed in the process or in your interaction with it. So the service needs to know how to reach you by the way that you want to be reached (so mobile phone text messages, email alerts).

– Reliable – when you need to use the service it needs to be there, it needs to work quickly and efficiently and it needs to do it on the system, device or gadget that you are using.

So, if it needs to be all those things, how do we get to a service that might look like that. Well, one way (and I’m finally getting to my point) that occurred to me has to do with the authors of the weblogs that I read. Over on the left of this page you’ll see the main ones – and there are others that I read less regularly and still others that I am sure that I would read if I could find them (back to that easy to find thing). The issue is that they write in their space, I write in mine – and we all wonder about each other’s ideas and we try and interact, but it’s all a bit remote.

If we were to setup a forum that had Phil Windley with his views on authentication, Dave Winer with his technology ideas (and developments in RSS), Jon Udell just because he knows lots of stuff, John Gotze because he set up the first government-related weblog and also because he understands the issues that face government, Simon Moores because he’s been around the block on this stuff for a while, James Crabtree and Bill Thompson because they are Vox Politics and probably Vox People. And there are others too I am sure. So if we put them all in a “room”, virtual or otherwise, and had them map out the things that are needed to deliver services that have the features that I outlined above, could we solve all of the problems that we face, deliver services that people want and see, finally, transformed government? Just a thought.

For a while I lost the little XML icon that denoted my RSS feed, or was it the RSS icon that denoted my XML feed? Anyway, it’s back now.

And John Perry Barlow talking at the “Beyond the Backlash” conference (best covered by Voxpolitics), comes out with another good quote “If we design [e-government] to serve existing models of business and government and to follow short-term goals we will be bad ancestors,” he said. “Do not, I beg you, be bad ancestors.” And that is absolutely true. Leafletsonline.gov.uk is not a model for 6 months out, let alone 6 years or more.

Definitely the week for e-government stories – this one even gets to quote C.K. Prahalad, Agile Is As Agile Does. C.K. says “all organizational change has at its root the insight of a single individual” and the article then links that with “the vision of these individuals has lead to real progress that gives palpable life to the notion of E-government”. But another favourite quote from Ron Miller at the FEMA, “my biggest worry every morning is whether we’re doing all we can to use technology the best we can”. I’m nearly on that page. My biggest fear is that we’re going to have to use more technology to get what we want, whereas I’d like to retrench with what we’ve got, make it secure, make it reliable, make it do the job. I’m not yet convinced that all of this stuff is ready for prime-time, mission critical status. And I think we’re a long way from that readiness.

E-government seems to be getting a little more mainstream coverage, as evidenced by this feature in the online Business Week. I was a little startled to see this quote from someone at IBM … “e-government has four levels. The first is slapping information up on the Web, something that has already happened. Next is organizing that information into more useful forms — such as wizards that answer common questions in place of long lists of hyperlinks that readers have to search through to find answers. Third is transactions …”. About 18 months ago I put up a slide at a conference in London that talked through the “four levels” and how every time a new level was aimed at, there were a huge number of technical issues to cross (digital signatures, content management systems, more robust systems, access to back end databases and so on). Since then I’ve seen versions of the slide all over the place, including an almost exact clone delivered by another vendor in Romania.

The article also shows that online tax is hard, even in an area such as Washintgon … “More than 250,000 people have used Washington State’s Revenue Dept. site to pay taxes, and 500 more start doing so each month. By yearend, the department will serve an estimated 18% of its 220,700 monthly and quarterly filers online. This will free staffers to spend more time on customer service and other tasks”. You would have thought that the home of Microsoft and Amazon to name but two tech companies there would have a much higher take-up. 18% is, of course, still higher than the UK. Mark Forman delivers the same quote that he gave in my previous post today, “We are the most Web-savvy government in the world”. Beg to disagree Mark. 180 million pages online across more than 30,000 websites does not make you web-savvy, it makes you web-heavy.

And the ray of hope at the end? “That’s a sign that the irresistible force — the Internet — is nudging government beyond its paperbound roots and into a more flexible, more responsive, and ulimately, more efficient era”. I hope so, for everyone, everywhere.

Here’s an interview with Mark Forman, the USA e-envoy equivalent talking shop about e-government. I don’t think I’ve come across an interview with him before. Best quote? Easy. “We had 22,000-plus Web sites, and more than 30 million documents and Web pages. Now, it’s up to 180 million documents and pages. We’re online, but the issue is how effective and efficient the federal government is in serving the citizens.” A week ago in Romania I guessed that there were 30,000 sites at a Federal level and perhaps 100,000 including state and local government. Looks like I might have been conservative. This is government’s biggest problem. We still think like government when we talk to people – and noone takes the citizen’s view. We need people who are going to champion the view of the people and lay it on the line to make sure that the services that are delivered are important for the citizen, not important for government.