Hello
My name is Laurence Millar, and I am the New Zealand Government CIO. This, my first post, is going to be some thoughts about what a transformed Government could look like.
Technology, by its very nature, has always been a disruptive force, changing the established way of doing things, whether it was the printing press, the railroad, the car, radio, television, the freezer ship, air travel, or the container. All of these “technologies” have made significant change to the way the world works.
A large part of Government is in the basis of processing information – ensuring that records of individuals’ earnings are correctly recorded to collect the right level of tax, processing information to allow goods to be exported to destinations overseas, providing information for learners to develop their knowledge and skills, collecting information from the individual and known medical facts so the health professional can provide appropriate diagnosis, providing information on GDP, balance of payments, CPI and other statistics … the list is endless. It is not surprising therefore that information and technology can be a catalyst for change in government and this has been the theme of successive e-government strategy documents (http://www.e.govt.nz/about-egovt/strategy/) since the first was released in 2001.
There is an increasing expectation of individual New Zealanders for instant access to government information and services in the same way as from the private sector. Recent Nielsen research shows that out of every 100 people in New Zealand, 84 have access to the Internet and 71 use the Internet at least once a month. Of internet users, 68% used online banking in the last month, 57% used online banking in the last week, 44% used the Internet to buy airline tickets, 33% had bought books, 29% had bought clothing, accessories or shoes and 29% had bought event tickets. By contrast, only 7% of people’s last interaction with government was online. So we have a population ready to use online government.
How would information be managed in a transformed Government?
Firstly, transformed Government is designed around the New Zealander. This means that you are able to provide information once to Government and it is used wherever it is needed to be used, subject to privacy and legislative constraints. A classic example of this would be a change of address which would be applied to all Government systems where there is information stored about you. In the business world, this means providing standard business reporting to government so that agencies such as ACC, Department of Labour, Inland Revenue and Statistics New Zealand, can use the information they need from the standard information supplied by the business. This provides convenience and satisfaction to the New Zealander and streamlines the operation of government by reducing the amount of work that needs to be done, and increasing the accuracy of the data held.
Secondly, value for money from our expenditure on information systems can be improved . This can be by using the same systems across multiple government departments – build once, use often. It can also be achieved by changing government systems so that information is accessed from the single authoritative source within government. A register of company directors, or building practitioners or eligible students – all can be used to improve the quality and reduce the amount of effort to maintain the same data in different agencies.
Thirdly, we can increase trust in government by using technology to enable more effective dialogue between policy makers and New Zealanders. This can use a variety of emerging techniques including collaborative authoring, wikis, and electronic consultation.
The broad parameters of a transformed government are laid out in the Development Goals for State Services (http://www.ssc.govt.nz/development-goals). We have identified three indicators of success for our management of information:
- grouping of services that apply technology to allow an individual – from one place at the same time - to access multiple programmes
- channel synchronisation of government transactions within an agency or across government
- the extent to which technology supports a user having to give the same information to government only once.
By using these indicators to design new or replacement services, we can use technology as a critical enabler to achieve a transformed government.
10 Comments
Great to see “In Development” off and running and to get a glimpse of a CIOs thoughts on the future… Your quick sketch of what ‘transformed government’ would look like hits all the right points, but misses out what to my mind could be the most tranformational of all. Namely the potential to leverage the creative power of ‘voice’ by listening to users/citizens/people and not simply offering them ‘choice’ (i.e. convenience, fewer transactions with government etc). Rather than simply asking people to pick from a fixed price menu of existing government services, we could ask them to come into the kitchen and start creating new dishes. Rather than asking them to react to pre-cooked policy options we could involve them upstream in defining the policy problem and scoping potential solutions.
The latest NZ egovernment strategy goes a long way towards this and offers us a mouth-watering vision: “By 2020, people’s engagement with the government will have been transformed, as increasing and innovative use is made of the opportunities offered by network technologies.” Several bold steps have already been taken in this direction (e.g. the NZ Police Wiki, the SSC Guide to Online Participation). What we need now is to mainstream this experimental “haute cuisine” into our daily government kai.
But I don’t want to come into the government kitchen. Web 2.0 is about making the basic ingredients (data) available, and I’ll make my own mashup in my own community. Then we’ll see things like http://data.octo.dc.gov/ and http://www.everyblock.com/ and http://www.epa.gov/enviro/wme/.
Web 2.0 is like teaching a man to fish: “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime”
Hi Mike,
Thanks very much for your comment. I’m very intersted in the metaphors and similies that people use to describe Web 2.0 and its applications, so I’ll definitely be adding the fishing man to my lists! Your links are also really interesting, and it’s good to hear what it is that you want from the government - we’ll do our best to come up with ways to make that data available for you.
Joanne,
The original post included reference to citizen engagement:
“.. we can increase trust in government by using technology to enable more effective dialogue between policy makers and New Zealanders. This can use a variety of emerging techniques including collaborative authoring, wikis, and electronic consultation.”
Mike,
A lot of people are happy to come into the government kitchen, and we need to ensure that we cater for them, as well as for the more adverturous. Others again are happy to go into someone else’s kitchen (theyworkforyou.org.nz).
Tags, metadata, widgets and microformats all have their place, but they are an extension of, rather than a replacement for, more traditional methods of distribution of government information and services.
Laurence, you mention some people “are happy to go into someone else’s kitchen (theyworkforyou.org.nz)”. Only 8% of visitors to TheyWorkForYou.co.nz go there directly. The majority, over 80%, arrive via Google search results. Do you use the web with a purpose in mind, and start with a Google search? How much attention do you pay when you click on the search results?
The NZ public sector often uses “someone else’s kitchen”. The Interim Website of New Zealand Legislation has been hosted by Brookers, no doubt at a huge cost. To view NZ parliamentary debates prior to 2003 online, you have to pay a license to a private company (The Knowledge Basket Ltd). Since their pages aren’t public, Google can’t index them.
TheyWorkForYou.co.nz is a cheap and fair kitchen in comparison. It only costs me $1,300 a year for hosting. I only use free open source software to produce the site, so there is no money wasted on proprietary software licensing fees. The site is public on the web, with permanent URLs linking to distinct resources, the way Google likes it.
When do you think government will be comfortable talking about free open source software when it discusses improvements to “value for money from our expenditure on information systems”? Free software is good enough for Google and the New Zealand stock exchange, maybe the government can publicly consider its merits over proprietary software?
@Mike
Those are some awesome links. The everyblock one looks to me like a mashup of the Stats NZ mesh block data and local government initiatives (http://wellingtonista.com/council-e-petitions)
I (think I) understand what Laurence is getting at though. At some point you would have to go the government “kitchen” (sorry I’m going to extend the metaphor) because if you don’t they can’t put out anything for you to mash-up.
Thanks Rob. The government makes plenty of use of open source software. In 2003 the State Services Commission provided a briefing to the Minister for State Services on the potential for the use of open source software within government, and any associated risks or limitations. As a result of the briefing, it was:
@Rob, sort of, but it’s a general comment…
Well, this site is running open source Wordpress, PHP, MySQL, Apache, and Debian Etch. The main e.govt.nz site runs the open source Plone CMS. As you say, a website aggregates disparate data and services and similarly governments aggregate disparate data and services. I think the main problem in providing access to the underlying data and services is that most of the time it’s been considered an unnecessary abstraction (read: unnecessary additional work). In software however the tools are getting better at publishing these abstractions, so providing public reuse and internal reuse within government it’s now much easier than it was.
The most obvious thing to me is the rise of XML and XML standards that make it easier to expose the building blocks of data and services. Imagine if one had the task of complying with a law that read “for any table of data that appears in a PDF there must also be an equivalent web service API”. In the past this would have involved manually keeping the PDF in sync with the data, but now we can (much more easily) auto-generate PDFs from the same data source and it’s all to do with XML publishing. We’re now got great tech like XProc, W3C XSLT, W3C XSL-FO, RelaxNG, XTM, XSL-FO and DocBook (hopefully we programmers are phasing out bad XML tech like W3C Schema and SOAP). There have been a lot of technical barriers to publishing these underlying data and services, but to me it seems that it’s now about putting these modern XML tools to use.
Unless there’s a proprietary advantage in keeping data closed then to me it makes sense for most sites to publish more of their underlying data so that others can build upon it. This is especially the case for government as they’re often the sole source of data or services. One reason for not publishing that I have occasionally heard from some people in the NZ public sector that they’re waiting for perfectly fitting data standards before they publish. This appreciation of standards is admirable (anyone who knows me will know my how I value quality standards) but I think a lack of standards here shouldn’t slow them down. When there aren’t yet standards for this then governments should be (in my opinion) a little bolder in designing their own schemas to release more structured data. All database schemas and web service APIs are custom in this way, and so when data lacks a standard it’s better to have it available than not at all.
The “single authoritative source within government” line to me implies internal government web services, so I suppose it would be good to consider designing these for public access too.
Cheers,
Just to expand on Edwin and Matthew’s comments. The new NZ Government Portal is going to be released under the GPL.
The Ministry of Justice has a policy on using FOSS which goes much further than anything I have seen from Government. MSD has an open source development team, TEC has provided seed funding for a proposal for the “Open Source Learning Laboratory” proposal, and there are plenty other initiatives bubbling away.
To me a key issue going forward is how best to utilise NZ suppliers so that headlines like this week’s “Growth of New Zealand’s ICT industry falls sharply” become a thing of the past. It is crazy that we have been talking up a “knowledge economy” for 15 years and this is the outcome.
If the Digital Strategy and Government “transformation” don’t have this concern as a central tenant then we are condemning the NZ economy to continue on its path of price taking primary production. If you think that is alright then I suggest you ignore diary for minute and go and talk to a lamb grower. I think that folks developing Government’s “Knowledge Economy” policy, particularly at MED and MFAT, have failed. They still seem to think about software in terms of lumps of cheese, something to commoditise and flog off in 1kg packets. That’s wrong. Software *is* a service. The Indians and Chinese understand this and have done for donkeys years.
So it is very encouraging to see Laurence Millar, his team, and other far sighted Government agencies take a leading role here and to seek to consult as well as to take a lead.
I firmly believe that FOSS has a large role to play. By encouraging its use NZ gets to pick and chose the best of what the whole world can offer whilst at the same time encouraging a super smart development industry focused on adding real value to software rather than simply on providing integration services for overseas suppliers.
I would like to see a revision to the Open Source Policy which is based on the 2003 briefing to the Minister of State Services
The policy states that open source software should be assessed based on cost, functionality, interoperability and security.
I propose that a fifth criteria be added: economic impact (on New Zealand).
A central theme at the “OSS in the State Sector Workshop” in Adelaide last month was the potential for government to support and stimulate the OSS sector to achieve positive economic impact. Don’s comment illustrates this thinking exactly.
The just released Australian Open Source Industry Community Report 2008 says “…conservative projection of earnings suggests that the Open Source industry generates $500 million in revenue each year, with over 50% of that being directly related to Open Source.” It goes on to say “…around half of the Open Source industry respondents service export markets (45%).”
Research e-Labs has links to Australian Open Source Industry Community Report and the latest version of the Ministry of Justice Open Source Adoption paper.