e-Government
"Citizen-centric"—the evolution to e-government continues
Just as private enterprises have rediscovered their mission and business model by returning to a focus on customers, governments around the world are finding success in reorienting their structures, information technology and policies around the citizens they serve.
This can range from "one-stop shopping" for previously discrete sets of services to information sharing and collaboration across regions and borders for the benefit of both citizens and government.
At a country level, for example in the United Kingdom and Singapore, governments are educating citizens about multiple ways to obtain services and encouraging them to use the most convenient and efficient channels. At the other end of the spectrum, across an entire continent, Europe has many examples of information shared across departments and programs to deliver service and benefits to citizens. To undergird this partnership, all European Union member states are required to have national legislation in line with the EU's directive on data protection.
As local and national governments work to infuse intelligence into their transport, energy, water, telecommunications and other systems in order to stimulate economies and benefit citizens, it begs the question: can the operations of government itself become smarter?
Smarter government will do more than simply regulate the outputs of our economic and societal systems. It will be a smoothly functioning system itself, interconnecting dynamically with citizens, communities and businesses in real time to spark growth, innovation and progress.
The challenges are many—from departmental silos to process delays to lack of transparency and accountability. But governments around the world are showing real progress.
Smarter government means collaborating across departments and with communities—to become more transparent and accountable, to manage resources more effectively, and to give citizens access to information about decisions that affect their lives. In the UK, Southwest One, an innovative joint venture, is providing shared services by integrating many functions of the Somerset County Council, the Taunton Deane Borough Council, and the Avon and Somerset Police. And in Albuquerque, a business intelligence solution has improved efficiency by 2,000% in the city's ability to generate reports and keep citizens informed.
Smarter government means helping to promote economic growth by streamlining cumbersome processes and simplifying reporting requirements, which are especially burdensome to small firms.
For example, the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation has enabled online renewal of professional licenses and public verification of valid license holders. And the Belgian Crossroads Bank for Social Security has automated 42 services for employers, eliminating 50 social security declaration forms. As a result, 23 million declarations were made electronically in 2008—a major productivity benefit for Belgian businesses, saving them an estimated €1.7 billion a year.
At the most fundamental level, smarter government means making operations and services truly citizen-centric. Leading governments are integrating their service delivery, establishing offices that support multiple services and placing the most needed transactions on the Web. For example, Australia's Centrelink helps the government to provide appropriate service offerings based on citizens' life events, such as marriage, the birth of children and the need for elder care.
Kyoto, Japan, created a Web site that allows all people, regardless of their abilities or native language, to access city information.
And then there are those times when being citizen-centric with speed and accuracy may be a matter of life and death. During the recent wildfires in California, government agencies turned to Twitter to provide real-time updates on the status of the fires—directing people without power, but with mobile devices, to Google Maps for evacuation information.
In June, IBM held the first of a series of "Smarter Cities" summits in Berlin. Leaders and forward thinkers from around the world shared ideas about smart healthcare, smart traffic, smart water management, smart energy and more. And among the most promising innovations they mapped out were those they have applied to government itself.
Let's build a smarter planet.
Government 2020
This new awareness and collaboration doesn't occur merely by chance or even always by choice. Just as often, it's mandated by necessity.
In its report "Government 2020," the IBM Institute for Business Value identified six worldwide forces that were at work, driving such changes for government at every level. Together, these six forces represent a mix of opportunities and threats. Yet as universal as they are, they require unique responses suited to each nation, region or locality.
Unique solutions from collaborative platforms
In the past, unique technology would often be budgeted and created anew to replicate what might be a common service for many different departments of government, or even offices within departments. Today, common platforms and open standards are the basis for many of the unique iterations of smarter government already in evidence. Sometimes that's as simple as using social computing applications like Twitter to report the daily cash flow for the state of Rhode Island. Or it could be as complex as creating a virtual world for the training of a nation's intelligence agents.
The democratization of data
For the smartest governments, interactions with citizens are opportunities to share information and improve lives, not "merely" to dispense services, administer justice and provide a conduit for the exercise of rights and responsibilities.
Thus, in places like Ontario and Belgium, data that can be used multiple times on a citizen's behalf—such as in registering a newborn or applying for social system benefits—need be entered only once, eliminating the need for users to input data multiple times when interacting with government online.
This also works in reverse, with increased access to government information by citizens enabling a better understanding—and, ultimately, a better stewardship—of government and its resources. This can come about through a variety of means. For example, the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns in words and numbers gets powerful expression in the many individual uses—some serious, some fun, many interesting—that IBM's Many Eyes project makes possible.
In perhaps the most overt example of using technology and collaboration to affect government, even when the government would prefer not to be affected, human rights activists, journalists, dissidents and even average citizens are increasingly using Web sites and wikis to track political campaign contributions, report on censorship and crackdowns and analyze data released by government whistleblowers or uploaded as anonymous leaks.
World peace through world trade and collaboration
Just as data has begun to move more fluidly between the parts of government, and between a government and its citizens, smarter governments are participating in new kinds of collaboration and partnership up and down the different strata of government, and even across borders and around the world.
A few examples
- Canada and the United States are working to align security standards in international trade partnership programs critical to both countries. The goal is to link the various international industry partnership programs to create a unified and sustainable security standard that can assist in securing and facilitating global cargo trade.
- The Excise Movement and Control System (EMCS) monitors movements of alcoholic beverages, tobacco products and energy products (and other excise goods) between EU member states under duty suspension. The system replaces paper documentation that previously accompanied these movements. Member states are developing their own national EMCS applications, and these systems will be linked to all other member states through a common domain, maintained by the European Commission.
- Transnational and nongovernmental organizations are working to improve Internet access along the Eastern seaboard of Africa from South Africa to Sudan. When completed, high-speed cable will connect more than 20 coastal and landlocked countries in East and Southern Africa along the way.
- In 2005, IBM, the government of Canada and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) organized a massive online event to help solve urgent problems of the world's cities, setting the stage for the World Urban Forum 3 conference to be held six months later in Vancouver. For three days, 40,000 people from 158 countries took part in HABITAT Jam, making it the largest public engagement on urban issues in history.
Smarter cities on a smarter planet
IBM has held a series of "Smarter Cities" summits in key centres around the globe. Leaders and forward thinkers from around the world have shared ideas. SmarterCities explored how progressive cities are modernizing to spur economic development, drive greater innovation, transform for competitive advantage and meet the pressing demands of a more engaged and intelligent citizenry. Whether the issue is about smarter traffic management, smarter energy grids, smarter healthcare or smarter government, this gathering—and others to follow—was created to bolster economic vitality and the quality of life in cities and metropolitan areas by sparking new thinking and meaningful action across the city ecosystem—from mayors to citizens.
Now what do you really think?
By 2050, city dwellers are expected to make up 70 percent of the Earth's total population. Visit the blog asmarterplanet.com to see some of what's already been said about smarter cities and to share your reflections about the best ways to prepare and transform our cities to handle exponentially greater economic, societal and environmental complexity in the years ahead.