Factors to Consider for E-government

Good Afternoon Everyone,

Last week when I first blogged, I began by touching on what e-governance is, the important contributions of e-government services, and its relation to enhancing law enforcement services.

I also discussed how law enforcement got from the age of "snail mail" to the creation of more advanced services, but also how objections to those services were eventually overcome.  Today, I want to touch on the important factors to consider to get an efficient and awesome law enforcement e-government service up and running; not so much from the information technology side such as coding and programming, but from the "what do we need to have in place ideology wise to kick this thing off" aspect.

As a point of reference, I will be referring to Dr. Ali Faharani's lecture on establishing an E-government framework in 2011 while he was an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California (click for lecture).  One of the most important things I learned from the lecture is that technology is not inherently democratic and it can even bring about exclusion.

Dr. Ali Faharani
University of Southern California

Normally when we think of exclusion, we might think of income inequality or race relations within the United States.  However, within the realm of technology, there is also a more subtle exclusion with regards to information and access to information.  There is, if you will, the "have and have nots" of technology and information.  This factor should be important to law enforcement agencies as any implementation of an e-government service must consider the clientele using such services.  For example, if an agency has a jurisdiction that has 60% of the population living below the poverty level, then there will likely be limited access to many e-government services.  For the purpose of this blog, we will assume that our agency has a significant enough portion of the population living above the poverty line to implement our e-government services.

So where to begin you ask?  Dr. Faharani indicates there are actually three things to first consider before our IT department hits the first keystroke of code.  First will be the democracy of our service.  This means who can participate and how do we get people to participate in government?  The second, rationalization, refers to the efficiency of our systems and how stuff will actually work.  The third is service which means what will we actually provide to our customers or stakeholders?  There are two very important goals in relation to these objectives that our agency must reach.  The first goal is setting a reasonable expectation of services.  We do not want to over promise and under deliver.  For example, if we have an online service that allows a citizen to file a complaint to the Police Chief, our service might indicate that the chief does not read each and every complaint and will get back to the complainant in 10 minutes!  The second goal is TRANSPARENCY!!!!!  Dr. Faharani suggests, and I completely agree, that e-government merely opens the door to transparency, but the agency must still strive to achieve it and not give the false appearance of transparency.  Who here has ever walked into a clear sliding glass door when it was closed?  Not only is it embarrassing, but it is quite painful!  It appeared to be open, but we found out the hard way it is just an illusion.  Law enforcement agencies have to make an extra effort to make sure that sliding glass door is really open and not just appear to be open.

Now here is where our agency must consider how people will have access to our systems.  Remember, we still have privacy concerns and legal issues always at play which we will discuss in more detail in future blogs.  If our system is limited and does not provide transparency, we will not "e-mpower" our citizens…..you like what I did there!

Jane Caldow of IBM back in 2004 developed an e-democracy model for providing services.  What she reasoned is the more passive and asynchronous a service, such as those in quadrant one like searching and viewing documents, the less engagement and influence the customer has.  Conversely, in quadrant four, services become interactive and strategic such as petitioning and consultation, allowing for citizens to have the greatest engagement and influence.  A word of caution.  Remember, we are creating e-services for a law enforcement agency, and as such, influence over our agency may be governed by case law and security concerns.  Each service provided must be evaluated accordingly.

The thing that we must take away from this phase of our implementation of e-governance is that we are providing a service.  However, factors such as our infrastructure, costs, clientele, and available resources must be considered.  Even though we are not competing for customers as you would find in the private sector, we are competing for the support, confidence, and trust of our citizens.  If we run a shoddy program that excludes many, or it does not provide any usable features, the broken trust and confidence translates into negative support at the ballot box!  That is all for this week.  Next week, I will delve further into setting up our e-government and I will start looking at various law enforcement agencies to use as comparison.  Thank you for reading, until next time!

Gary