With Liberty & E-Gov for All

Five years ago, Taylor would have considered technology to be the hardest part of e-government. Now she's convinced it's the easy bit. Not surprisingly, issues like security and privacy raise their heads, especially in the more personal types of transactions. However, the biggest challenge Taylor finds is getting government agencies to work together, to start thinking outside their silos and to focus on the customer as a customer of government as opposed to a customer of their agencies.

Local governments may not face the problems of fragmentation or silo mentality to such a degree as their state and federal counterparts, but it's also early days for them in terms of e-government (see"Six Stages of Success" page 17).

Nevertheless, there is progress. Wollongong City Council's Web site currently only publishes and disseminates information; however, the council plans to offer a full range of transaction-based services through the site, eventually enabling businesses and individuals to pay rates and lodge applications online, for example. To this end, the council has purchased mySAP.com Local Government Solution, a product developed by SAP Australia and Deloitte Consulting based on mySAP.com, and which SAP claims supports the full range of local government requirements.

"The city is a thriving and growing area; we are no longer a ‘roads, rates and rubbish' council," says Rod Oxley, general manager, Wollongong City Council."We want to promote ourselves as 24x7, so to speak. We'll never get away from face-to-face contact altogether, but a lot of businesses these days operate at varying times and we want to be able to provide a service that allows them to do so."

Oxley anticipates a modest uptake of online transactions initially, and primarily among businesses. However, he believes the take-up rate will increase substantially, especially among the broader community, as people become familiar with the system and come to appreciate its virtues.

This in turn, he says, will have significant benefits in customer service and cost. Like Taylor in Tasmania, he plans to actively market the system and promote it to the community once it's up and running. However, he admits that the rapidly changing nature of technology and educating the community are hurdles the council has to overcome in the e-government process.

Victoria embarked on its e-government initiative with great gusto as far back as 1993-94 and throughout the 1990s was generally considered to be leading the pack in Australia. The then government of Jeff Kennett set as a priority the electronic delivery of all government services by 2001. According to Randall Straw, executive director, Multimedia Victoria, the state is 70 per cent there and still a model of e-government.

"Most governments have similar policies [to ours], but we got going and had a head start," Straw says."Every project waxes and wanes, but ours has certainly not stalled and Victoria is still the leading light in Australia."

Graeme Simsion, managing director of consultants Simsion Bowles & Associates, which has been involved in government Internet initiatives for several years, thinks that in the early stages of online delivery, in both the public and private sectors, not enough thought was given to the business case for online services.

This was especially true where governments' approach to online delivery was ideology-based. The correct reason for delivering services online is to make government more efficient, Simsion believes. Sadly, he says, it is, in fact, usually the lesser driving force behind the simple fervour of the Internet as a new channel and the desire to be seen as a modern, tech-savvy place that will attract investment.

Simsion also finds that governments are often unimaginative in that they seek to just put existing services online and automate"what is" rather than try and improve processes. Governments need to think more about what the Internet can enable them to do that they couldn't do before, he says.

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Tasmania is arguably leading the way in inter-governmental cooperation with its Tigers (Trials of Innovative Government Electronic Regional Services) program. Commonwealth-funded to the tune of $10 million out of the sale of the second tranche of Telstra, Tigers aims to bring together services offered across the three levels of government that sit around a particular event or transaction.

"Parents are required to register the birth of a child with the state government, for example," explains Tigers program manager, Jill Taylor, who reports directly to a steering committee comprising commonwealth, state and local government representatives and the local IT industry council."Then if they require financial assistance, Centrelink offers that at the federal level. In addition, local government provides immunisation services."

Tigers was announced in mid-1999 and is due for completion in December 2002. The online component, which Taylor says is not yet up and running, is one of three service delivery channels in the program, the other two being over-the-counter and the telephone. However, most of the money and effort is going into electronic service delivery - the centrepiece of the program, as Taylor puts it.

She says the initial aim of the program is to bring existing content together on one site so it can be accessed from a single point. The next phase will involve identifying information gaps and plugging them as well as determining opportunities for putting transactions online. Ultimately, customers should be able to access and conduct transactions with all three levels of government from the one site.

The principal benefit to the customer of Tigers, Taylor claims, is 24x7 Internet access and ease in dealing with government. Free Internet access will also be available at Service Tasmania shops (a previous Tasmanian government initiative) for those without home or business access. She also envisages that Tigers will streamline government processes and reduce the number of enquiries.

"A lot of customers like the notion of self-help whereby they can do things at their own time. That frees agencies up to do other things and enables them to make better decisions about where their resources need to be invested. But we're coming from a customer perspective and saying that, if I'm a customer and I have to do this transaction or deal with this event, I want to do be able to do it succinctly.

"We want to make sure we have a good product so that people's first experience with it will bring them back. Internet banking is increasing at quite a significant rate because the product's good and it's there. We don't have the product, but we believe, once we get it, we're going to see a similar increase in uptake."

Taylor anticipates the take-up of Tigers will come from both businesses and the general community, depending on the nature of the service - for example whether it involves export services or recreational fishing. Once services are available online, Taylor says she will be actively promoting the benefits and will probably conduct focus groups to evaluate customer satisfaction with the system.

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According to a recent global study, E-Government Leadership: Rhetoric vs Reality - Closing the Gap by Accenture, in the past year Australia has been overtaken by Canada and Norway in the world ranking of e-government implementers, moving from third to fifth out of 22 countries surveyed. Accenture evaluated governments on the basis of"delivery maturity" and"service maturity", with the overall maturity rating used to determine categories of Innovative Leader, Visionary Follower, Steady Achiever or Platform Builder.

Australia rated above average on depth and breadth of online services but fell down on its level of sophistication. To be considered an e-government leader, the report concludes, Australia needs to embrace single entry points to access government services, build customer-focused sites and implement widespread customer relationship management processes.

"Future progress for Australia depends on a whole-of-government approach and addressing security and privacy concerns to delivering government services online," says David Hunter, global managing partner for Accenture's government practice."Australia is in an excellent position to take advantage of the next wave of e-government developments, but the challenge for the federal government still remains to ensure that vision is translated into reality."

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In its study, At the Dawn of E-Government: The Citizen as Customer, published last June, Deloitte Consulting defines six stages of e-government.

Stage One:

Information publishing/dissemination. Individual government departments set up their own Web sites that provide information about them, the region, the range of services available and contacts for further assistance.

Stage Two:

Of'ficial two-way transactions. With the help of legally valid digital signatures and secure Web sites, customers are able to submit personal information to and conduct monetary transactions with individual departments.

Stage Three:

Multi-purpose portals. At this point, customer-centric governments make a big breakthrough in service delivery. A portal allows customers to use a single point of entry to send and receive information and to process monetary transactions across multiple departments.

Stage Four:

Portal personalisation. In this stage, government puts even more power into customers' hands by allowing them to customise portals with their desired features.

Stage Five:

Clustering of common services. As customers now view once disparate services as a unified package through the portal, their perception of departments as distinct entities will begin to blur.

Stage Six:

Full integration and enterprise transformation. At this stage, old walls defining silos of services have been torn down and technology is integrated across the new enterprise to bridge the shortened gap between the front and back office. In some countries, new departments will have formed from the remains of predecessors. Others will have the same names but will look nothing like their former selves.

According to Mike Lisle-Williams, e-government principal with Deloitte Consulting's public sector practice, on a government-by-government basis, Australia is at least at stage two, going on stage three. However, he says that Australia's three levels of government are a complication not found in Hong Kong or Singapore, for example, both of which he believes have effectively reached stage four. He also thinks Australia lags behind some US states.

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Meanwhile, it seems clear one of the great remaining barriers to e-government is the disparity and fragmentation of government at state and federal level.

According to a report published last October by Deloitte Consulting, Through the Portal - Enterprise Transformation for E-Government, significant cultural and organisational changes confront Australian government agencies if they expect to go"beyond the Web site" and make all information and transactional services available through a single portal.

Nonetheless, Mike Lisle-Williams, e-government principal with Deloitte Consulting's public sector practice, is optimistic. He believes citizens in Australia can look forward to accessing a single Internet portal for government-related transactions and interactions within less than three years.

"The single portal will allow people to effectively log on to one Web site and complete all their government business at the same time. For example, if they change their home address details, they will only ever have to do this once and all relevant departments will be updated," Lisle-Williams explains.

"Convenience and ease of access will be the drawcards for the community but people will need to have choices in the way they access services. Today, many portals serve customers across certain government departments and levels. Within two to three years in Australia, those departments and levels will become less visible if government managers are serious about achieving enterprise-wide seamless multi-channel delivery to their customers.

"Many challenges lie ahead for government managers, perhaps the greatest being how best to invest to achieve genuine benefits in access and convenience for the community. Senior government executives need to consider not only the funding required to move their enterprise to the portal but also the potential changes in fiscal obligations resulting from potentially leaner operations and inter-governmental cooperation through shared services," he says.

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At the city, state and federal levels, the government's embrace of information technology is empowering citizens while at the same time driving forward the national agenda for standards, innovation and computer literacy.

Ever since government started divvying itself up into separate departments to manage different areas of administration, citizens and business have faced the age-old problem of not knowing which government department to go to for a particular service. At least since Federation, the fragmentation of Australian governments has confused the picture even further, with customers not always knowing which level of government - local, state or federal - provides what service.

The early stages of the commonwealth's e-government initiative seemed determined to replicate such offline problems in an online world, effectively putting existing services online or automating"what is", with every different department acting independently. Now John Rimmer, chief executive officer with the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE), says all is rapidly changing.

"The government has a portal strategy in which we're working on having a whole-of-government entry point and also entry points specific to particular customer groups, such as regional customers or people concerned about youth issues or health care," Rimmer says.

Cooperation between the various levels of government in this area is being achieved via the regular standing meeting of the relevant ministers, known as the Online Council. Senior officials from all the jurisdictions also meet to discuss progress, Rimmer says. As a result, he claims, the federal government's stated commitment to bring all appropriate commonwealth services online via the Internet by the end of this year is"substantially" on target.

While Rimmer concedes it's likely that some agencies won't be 100 per cent there, he predicts the most significant services and those involving large volumes of transactions will all be available via the Internet on time. In fact, he claims a variety of transactions between the federal government and businesses and individuals are already occurring online, the most notable being those related to the new tax system. Benefits, too, are flowing, says Rimmer, who's keen to accelerate the benefits available from realisation of online service delivery.

"A lot of the work has gone into the architecture, framework, standards and policies. People are now beavering away on actually delivering [the services online] and we have a heavy investment in delivering benefits in the next few months," Rimmer says.

The Prime Minister made the commitment to online services or GovernmentOnline in his Investing for Growth statement of December 1997. Rimmer says the aims of the initiative are threefold. First, to find more efficient and effective ways of delivering federal government services. Second, to provide services that are more customer-focused and that reduce customers' transaction costs. Finally, it is envisaged that government use of electronic service delivery can play an important role both symbolically and in practice in speeding up the uptake of electronic commerce in the Australian economy generally.

Australia ranks in the top 10 countries in the world in the uptake of online services, Rimmer says. However, he admits that basic concerns remain as to the availability of adequate telecommunications services in some parts of the country.

There are other pressing barriers as well, like the people who just don't see the point of using the Internet to access government services. Rimmer believes consequently more consideration needs to be given not only to questions of access but also to whether there are compelling enough applications available online.

He says that NOIE will be promoting the availability of online services and their benefits as well as conducting customer research on GovernmentOnline matters. However, he emphasises that he is not in the business of boosting the sale of gear.

"We're really trying to argue that these are important new tools that can be used to increase productivity and innovation, but that depends on intelligent use of the tool. Skills and awareness are still a big issue, both of the general population and of employees and managers," he says.