Smarter Government

From the local town council to
international collaborations, new
ways of working are underway

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$1: The cost to government of renewing a driver's license online. $8: The cost to renew it in person.

"Citizen-centric"—the evolution 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.

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.

Learn more about the "Government 2020" report

Six drivers of governmental change on a smart planet: Changing demographics; Accelerating globalization; Rising enviromental concerns; Evolving societal relationships; Growing threats to stability and order; Expanding impact of technology.

Using an IBM asset management solution, the city wastewater department of Corpus Christi, Texas, discovered that nearly a third of the department's effort was spent resolving problems at just 1.4% of customer sites, indicating the need for a focused plan for those customers.

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.

In 2008, 89% of state and Federal Web sites in the U.S. had at least one service that was fully executable online. Around the world, 50% of government Web sites offer at least one such service.

According to the Work Bank, successful e-government projects in developing countries spend about 10% of their budget on training and capacity building. Canadians who responded the 2006 census: 19% online.

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 fracilitating 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

In June 2009, IBM will host a unique gathering in Berlin. SmarterCities will explore 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—is being 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.

Relative ranking of top 10 e-government countries. Source: The Brookings Institution: Improving Technology Utilization in Electronic Government around the World, 2008.

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.

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