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This first issue of the Ariadne newsletter coincides with the launch of the OneStopGov project in which ALTEC is participating.
Therefore we devote a first informative article for OneStopGov, though within 2006 we shall dedicate an entire issue on this project, covering both research and technology aspects as well as issues related to the uptake of the project outcomes in the real world environment of Public Administrations in the enlarged Europe.
What comes into our minds when we read about “ 24 hour, single point access to public services that are integrated around citizens needs”?
To me, this is a reminder for a 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week reality: people or services that ‘work' around the clock to help me as a citizen.
I now draw a comparison with the reality I face each time I am visiting a public administration in my country and make the following thought: “I wish they were serving my need only when I needed them – and this does not necessarily need them to work 24 hours a day or 7 days a week… But for sure, the underlying idea and the metaphor is powerful – the government and the entire administration should be at the people's disposal.
What does “online one-stop government” mean? OK, online is to me obvious what it means, but the quest for one-stop? How relevant is it?
In the past, we were referring to one-stop-shops – this picture was highly sacred – the shopping paradigm for government services. Did this help us resolve some basic weaknesses of the government services in Europe? I'm no life-events expert. But I do know bad public administration habits when I see them. And a lot of what they are spending badly has to do with the new information technologies and infrastructures.
If we want to have the best possible results in areas such as these identified in the past as key eEurope services , we need to talk not only about technology reform but also about mentality, culture and attitude reform .
We envisage Europe becoming the world leader in research spending. But the problem is not really too much or too little spending as such, but how the money gets allocated. In other words, the problem is politics.
In the OneStopGov project synopsis, we were correctly in my opinion making a statement:
“Currently however, online one-stop government projects do not care about citizens needs and do not provide integrated services from different back-offices.”
“provide integrated services from different back-offices”… Hmmmm… OK, let’s take the issue of interoperability, for instance. Paraphrasing Paul Jacob, an acclaimed U.S. commentator, you would think that if government officials even within the same country or even within the same political party agree that this or that institution is no longer necessary, government would rush to close it and that the money would be better allocated elsewhere. Instead, politicians and policy-makers often act as if the point of the information infrastructures was to provide employment to voters in their district, not to serve the people.
As already said, I am not an expert in life-events therefore I thought it would be worth to make a small investigation to see the reality of the situation-as-is picture in Greece. I had called or emailed several people that I know and either work for the government or in projects that dealt with government organisations as customers. They all agreed that the most important assets that are currently missing concern soft skills – and especially a lack of collective intelligence.
We all know about the reality of the two pictures that are surrounding us: the reality we face in slideshows during conferences or workshops or when reading some blue-sky articles that report on the “progress” that takes place in the e-government field, and the other reality we face when we have to contact and interface as citizens with a public administration.
OneStopGov project builds and validates a life-event oriented platform for the European online one-stop government. What we shall try is not only to put some emphasis on the research and technical development activities but also look at those aspects that are considered as soft and may positively or negatively affect the uptake potential and the ultimate success of the project.
Being part of the 4th Call Strategic Objective for “Strengthening the Integration of the ICT research effort in an enlarged Europe” OneStopGov shall deploy fully functional services in three new Member States namely Slovenia, Hungary and Poland and in one accession country, Romania. (The platform will be used for modelling, implementing and deploying 16 life-events. The consortium includes two organisations responsible for eGovernment at national level (Slovenian ministry of Public Administration and the company owned by the Hungarian Prime Minister’s Office), one at regional level (the region that includes Bucharest), and one at local level (Polish municipality) thus ensuring maximum visibility and take-up of the project’s results.)
We hope that we shall be able to learn more from them – the truth is that a usual mistake that is made in research projects has to do that nobody listens to the Users – nor makes them talk. Starting from the solution in search of a problem is a well-learned technique in the academic and the business world. We shall have 30 months to show that OneStopGov was not such a project.
The next issue of this newsletter shall appear in about 3 months. Till the next issue, we welcome your views and ideas,
Adamantios Koumpis
PS By the time I was writing the first draft of this editorial, I received an email by the Help-Desk of a big multinational consumer electronics company – actually their branch in Greece. I had asked them by noon time of 23 February a simple question (which miniDV camcorders they have with a USB 2.0 port), and they answered to me by 13 March (afternoon). It took 19 days plus some hours for them to come back to me. And it is a private business. Are you still thinking that it is a technology problem?
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