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| Interview with Arnold |
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ARIADNE: Arnold , we know of an initiative of the Dutch government called ICTAL http://www.ictal.nl that aims to reduce administrative costs for businesses. Besides the ambitious target set (for this cabinet period it is a reduction of 25%), we were happily surprised by the language that is used there. Indicatively I quote from the Action Plan for reducing the administrative burden of citizens, which recognizes that “ the mania for organisation and bureaucracy has to be reduced . This mania for organisation and bureaucracy are, for instance, expressed in the administrative burdens citizens have to deal with in their contacts with the government in the form of numerous and often time-consuming obligations to provide information.”
I don't know whether we share the same feelings but this statement is quite strong and appeals to people's experiences but for me is like a turn to common sense.
What is your opinion about all these?
ARNOLD : I agree; take for example the tax declaration sheet. Many organizations, employers, banks, insurance companies, real estate registers, are required to send routinely their data, which are matched with the data, that citizens are required to fill in. Citizens have the burden to collect manually all these data from the same organizations, and then fill them in, with the risk of errors. Why not pre fill the tax declaration e-forms with the data already provided by those organizations? Gain: citizens do not have to collect all data, only fill in adjustments and additions as can be motivated. Government does not have to check data they provided themselves, only adjustments and feedback from citizens. If there are no adjustments or additions (probably more then 70% of cases) the citizen only has to digitally sign the form, and government can automatically complete the process.
ARIADNE: What I personally see is that people tend to adopt messianic approaches regarding the use of technology in their business and especially in the public sector. Instead of looking to the problems they want to solve, or – better – to the people that they need to serve or help, they transfer the problem to another domain, namely this of the technology. As if a new portal technology might make e-government possible, or a web technology increase the usage of e-services by the citizens.
I do of course not doubt the role of technologies in the improvement of our lives, but I am seriously questioning the approach that is used.
ARNOLD : I agree again; most citizens do not have the budget to follow the product life cycle of the so-called ICT-innovation. Just an example: In 1988, I spent significant amount of money to buy a PC with a.o. text-processing software. After some upgrades I reached around 1993 the point beyond which any subsequent investments in text-processing have been a waste of money. Any additional functionality was offset by the need to relearn the same skills on different tools. As my learning curve didn't keep pace with the so-called advances in technology, I now find myself to be a less experienced user than back in 1994. I have been forced to follow, as later products used different (and incompatible) document formats. I am not claiming that today's software is useless, but I have never had compelling personal reason to upgrade beyond the 1993 version.
ARIADNE: After your experiences in working with customers from the public sector, what are their biggest problems? Or the sources of their problems? My own experiences come from the business world, and I can for sure see the difference between how a small company operates with the ways that a bigger one does. It is more impersonal, and there is the processes-mania that appears in every corner. And I also see how difficult it is for people to stand for their visions, at the end it is difficult to have a vision at all. On the other hand, the European Commission sets agendas and goals that seem to ignore the reality that is faced today in our countries, our companies and our homes. This has some positive sides as it provides us with some look forward, on the other hand, it seems as if the people that design the future don't have any interface with the reality.
What is your view on the above?
ARNOLD : Process orientation without proper business architecture creates management overhead, alienation, and for the 2 nd generation of employees, the inability to correct errors. Errors offset the improvement obtained by process orientation by many orders of magnitude.
ARIADNE: Learning is an essential part in our lives. However, and with much regret, I see that people don't want to learn from others or from their life. For the research world, I have experiences with people starting to engineer a solution without having sufficiently investigated the problem. And this comes in everything. They want to develop a new technology, a new platform or a new toolkit, that after it has been developed, they see that it is difficult to apply as it works only under special conditions and settings. And then, instead of admitting the problem, their problem, they develop guides on how to make the transition towards these special conditions, so that their solution fits you. In the past, when money seemed to be no problem, many governments might have been willing to spend resources to these “administrative burdens” – now, luckily this situation seems to reverse.
What do you think on this?
ARNOLD : Again I agree; SAP being a typical example of a systemsuite that requires an organization to adapt to the system, and another organization to customize the system. However there is another side to this: “You never have the time to do things right, but you always get the time to do things again.” People only tend to learn from their very own errors, and not from errors made by others. Unless you create opportunity for people to make errors and correct them, they will never learn, and “best practices” can never be developed.
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