NEWSLETTER - Breaking Barriers to eGovernment - Overcoming obstacles to improving European public services

Issue No 9. December 2006

Welcome to the ninth edition of the newsletter of the “Breaking the Barriers to eGovernment” project, funded by the European Commission’s eEurope 2005 Modinis programme. In addition to the findings from the project’s good-practice case studies and other activities, the newsletter contains news, information and resources. Our overall aim is to offer expert insights and practical advice on ways of overcoming obstacles to the growth of high-quality and innovative uses of eGovernment capabilities in Europe.

Helsinki Workshop
The Breaking Barriers project held its fourth workshop on the 22nd of November 2006 at the IST 2006 conference, Helsinki, Finland.

The workshop provided the opportunity to bring together researchers and practitioners who are exploring ways to overcome barriers to eGovernment. Ten presenters spoke at the workshop providing viewpoints both from academia and practice on addressing obstacles to eGovernment progress and how the potential of eGovernment could be realised.

In total, 41 people attended the event from academia, industry and government from Australia, Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK. A workshop report and PowerPoint slides of the presentations can be accessed here: http://www.egovbarriers.org/?view=Events&type=pastevents&EventID=4

Next Workshop
The date of our next workshop is the 9th of March 2007 at the Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona. If interested in attending, please contact: mailto:rebecca.eynon@oii.ox.ac.uk

New! Setting priorities for eGovernment in the Netherlands
On November 17th the Dutch government organised the “E-vent E-overheidnext”, an eGovernment event that brought together government organisations, civil servants, experts, politicians, citizens and representatives of businesses in order to compose a list of 5 priorities for the agenda for electronic government for the new Dutch cabinet. During this conference the OECD gave a preliminary insight into their report on eGovernment in the Netherlands. This report is to be published before the end of this year (other country reports can already be found on the OECD website: http://www.oecd.org).

The presentations, workshops and discussion during the day have led to the following points:

1. A law regarding onetime delivery of personal data - This law, foreseen in 2011, should oblige government not to ask citizens, businesses and organisations for data which are already available within the government’s basic registrations. In doing so, we come to meet the biggest complaint of citizens that they need to provide the same information to government over and over again.

2. Decrease administrative burdens - eGovernment should play a key role in the call for reduction of administrative burdens.

3. Improve service delivery - This encompasses multi-channel service delivery. Customer satisfaction should be the leading criterion in innovating and improving quality in government agencies. Measuring customer satisfaction is essential in this respect and needs to be conducted in an independent manner.

4. Information is power: the information position of citizens and businesses towards government should be strengthened - Government information should be, without restrictions, accessible to citizens and businesses. Government should be more active in sharing information with non-government organisations. Costly channels for information delivery should be replaced by cheap, digital, if possible even self-service channels. Electronic service delivery should, as much as possible, be provided free of charge.

5. Leadership and strategic direction on eGovernment - This is mainly about leadership, implementation and system responsibility behind the building structure of eGovernment. A lot of time and money is now spent on coordination. Organisational setups should be simpler, more effective and more like an ‘enterprise-architecture’. Leadership should be strengthened within, as well as between different sectors such as health care, security, education etc. This is also the main message from the OECD report regarding eGovernment in the Netherlands.

New! Free access to Gov3 eGovernment “Risk Barometer”
Are you a senior manager charged with delivering an ICT-enabled change programme in the public sector?  International evidence shows that most such programmes fail to achieve their objectives, because they fail to manage key strategic risks effectively. The Gov3 Risk Barometer is freely available online. By answering the nine questions you get a free, online assessment of the intrinsic risk level of your programme, scored on an ascending scale of risk from 0 to 100. Have a look at: http://public.gov3.net/public_pages/limited/consulting/gov3_barometer.htm

New! Publication of “Designing eGovernment”, Second Edition
Governments across the world have recognised the potential of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) to bring about fundamental renewal in not only government and public sector processes, but also their relationship with civil societal groups, the private sector, citizens, and various other actors. ICT provides enormous opportunities to increase efficiency and effectiveness in all kinds of policy sectors, and promises a real dialogue between policy makers and the public.

The second edition of Designing eGovernment, first published in 2001, includes updated texts of several chapters from the earlier edition as well as various chapters, among them a number of country reports written for the eGovernment session of the 17th World Congress of Comparative Law. In addition to visions of the concept of electronic government, it provides examples of already active electronic governance by including various chapters on developments in the United States (both federal and state), the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Italy, Denmark, and the Netherlands. It draws lessons (cross-national, between policy sectors and across administrations) from the design of electronic government and from evaluations of electronic government practice.

Aspects of eGovernment covered in the second edition include the following:

• government initiatives such as e-publication, online filing (including e-procurement and courts e-filing);
• ‘e-democracy’ features such as e-voting, e-participation, e-consultation and e-petitioning;
• Benefits of government use of such expanding technologies as global positioning systems, smart-cards, and biometrics;
• benefits to citizens services such as social security and services in the health care sector;
• applications to the judicial system and law enforcement;
• differences between developments and policy initiatives in various countries; and
• obstacles and dilemmas touching upon security, surveillance, identity fraud, liability, intellectual property, free access, national security, equality, and privacy.

Background
Juliet Lodge has worked extensively with European partners on barriers to eGovernment.  Currently, she works in two Framework Six projects that have eGovernment applications, “Challenge” and “r4eGOV
Challenge
Challenge is an inter-disciplinary project comprising over 25 universities. It focuses on the challenge of reconciling liberty and security. Juliet’s work focuses on issues of transparency and accountability, democratic legitimacy and border management. This involves analysis of biometrics tools for border management.

The data storage issues relate directly to cooperation among law and justice enforcement agencies, among others, in combating fraud and international crime, as well as in managing the automatic transmission of information for civil and criminal purposes across borders. A key concern arises from the Hague Programme principle of availability regarding law enforcement cooperation; this means that for legitimate purposes only information available in one system in one member state should be made available to counterpart administrators in other systems. Huge issues arise regarding mutual trust in the polities, personnel, ICT legacy systems, interoperability, data privacy, robustness of the ICT systems, data storage, out-sourcing etc. 

r4eGov
Similar issues feature in r4eGov: administration in the large. This project focuses on the roll-out of eGovernment in practice. The partners include ICT providers like Unisys and SAP, universities, national civil services and EU agencies. The aim is to develop tools to making eGovernment work securely and in a way that citizens will trust. Juliet’s work in this area has three key dimensions:

• Envisaging ideal scenarios for citizen mobility across borders. In this respect it examines the barriers that governments encounter. These include fraudulent documents, the nature of administering pre-entry checks outside the EU, ePassports, visas, and new requirements for university administrations in the UK. 

• Working with regional consular offices in respect of the new requirements arising from the Hague programme on them to facilitate consular service cooperation and collaboration. It is foreseen that consular posts will have a role in taking fingerprints for example as part of the EU’s commitment to having common visas and ePassports.

• The ethical aspects of security and administering the new security tools. 

Major challenges for the short-term
In the short term, major challenges include the issues of interoperability and trust. These issues are relevant at all levels of eGovernment, from local councils and services to national and international transactions and trans-border mobility. Getting the balance right between security and efficiency is difficult. The very first step is a better appreciation of the terminology. We have to unpick terms like ‘information’ to understand what it comprises and what might be done with it under systems designed to foster automatic information sharing for specified, limited and legitimate purposes.

The output is informed by citizen needs. It is clear that citizens worry about databases and ‘Big Brother’. Interoperable databases are needed for operational success, for example, in combating people trafficking, fraud, speeding up trans-border legal processes for civil and criminal matters, and accelerating citizen-centric services. 

A one-stop shop for inputting data needed for several different matters, for example when a student enrols online at University (as they do at Leeds University), saves citizens time. However, there is anxiety over data security, function creep, lack of knowledge about what happens to the data held, who can access it when and how, along with concerns over control and accountability for out-sourced data. Citizens and many administrators feel most comfortable with systems that do not rely on large data banks – those that put the data subject in charge of the release of their data.

Many governments, however, are committed to big interoperable database systems, even though their record is not always encouraging. The big and common challenge for EU member states is to work together to make their approaches interoperable and compatible with robust data protection.

Long-term challenges
We need to build trust and security now for a future in which nano-technological applications and ambient technology will be the norm. This means that eGovernance applications we create now must be based on the most secure architectures possible. They must look forward and set high standards for quality data management, data privacy and political accountability as well as credible, ethical and robust security. Out-sourcing by public authorities must be addressed. There is no efficiency gain when security is sacrificed. Short term financial savings without baked-in security do administrations and citizens a disservice.

Trust in secure ICTs goes hand-in-hand with trust in public authorities. Erosion in any one sphere has negative repercussions for the others. There must be baked-in security from the outset. Bolt-on security is costly in time and money, efficiency and effectiveness. The astonishing weaknesses in ePassports illustrate this. It is inconceivable that the current generation of ePassports will be seen as secure enough to be issued in five, let alone ten years time.

Overcoming Barriers to eGovernment
In Challenge, part of our work involves producing reports, seminars and papers to inform opinion, including the European Parliament and national administrations. The Convention on the EU’s draft Constitution final report stressed that ‘citizens must be able to understand a system so that they can identify its problems, criticise it, and ultimately control it.’ In r4eGov we are working to identify and overcome the obstacles to interoperability and cooperation in policy areas of direct relevance to citizens and where the EU is committed to greater cooperation and integration.

Where identity checks for border management applications are concerned, it is easy for the impression to be created that all citizens are being potentially compromised and criminalised by the introduction of new technologies and data bases. It is also apparent that distrust is growing and that claims for ICTs are not believed. The focus on the communication of ‘security’ means that the hard work of actually making possible automatic information sharing for limited and specific purposes safe from function creep and attack is poorly understood.  

We hope to redress that and to work with stakeholders and end-users to elaborate ethical requirements and solutions that do contribute to the overall policy goals of greater individual and collective security through carefully constructed solutions embedded in trusted and secure architectures.

See the full text of the interview here (word doc)

• 17 January 2007, ICT research and standardisation: Towards FP7, Brussels, Belgium – This event is organised by COPRAS, a support action project in the EU 6th Framework Programme, aiming to improve the interfacing, cooperation and exchange between IST research projects and ICT standardisation. The conference will feature speakers from the research and standards communities, as well as from the European Commission, and will discuss various aspects of ICT research/standards interfacing in FP7. http://www.w3.org/2004/copras/meetings/open07/Overview.html

• 29 - 31 January 2007, ENGAGE Thailand 2007: European Union - Southeast Asia ICT Research Networking Event, Bangkok, Thailand - This is the third in a series of collaboration conferences organised by ENGAGE, a Specific Support Action funded by the European Commission in the framework of the IST research programme.  The event aims to bring together Southeast Asian and European policy makers, as well as researchers from academia and industry in order to establish new partnerships and promote opportunities for joint research initiatives in the ICT sector.  http://www.bangkok2007.engage-ist.org/

• 8 - 9 February 2007, @Health Brokerage Event, Madrid, Spain - This dissemination event is organised for the second time by the IST funded @Health project, a community of European and Latin American research organisations, industries and public administrations interested in eHealth technologies, innovation and applications. The event aims to improve collaboration opportunities among eHealth related organisations, institutions and companies from Europe and Latin America so that they can start new eHealth cooperation projects relevant for their countries. http://138.4.10.197:8080/athealthworkshop/

• 9 March 2007, Barriers to eGovernment Workshop, Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona. If interested in attending, please contact: mailto:rebecca.eynon@oii.ox.ac.uk

• 28 - 30 March 2007, I-ESA 2007, Funchal, Portugal - This event is one in a series of conferences about Interoperability for Enterprise Software and Applications. Enterprise Interoperability is the ability of a system or product to work with another system in order to produce goods and services rapidly and at lower cost, allowing both systems to be compatible. Participants are expected to include academic specialists from the interoperability research area as well as experts and development managers from industry working in the field of Enterprise Software Applications, system integrators, business and IT consultancies. http://www.aidima.es/iesa2007/web/index.htm

If you would like to get involved here are a few ways how:

New! Let us interview you!
The project is looking for Senior eGovernment leaders to interview for upcoming newsletters.  If you would like to express your views regarding the barriers to eGovernment (or you know someone who would), please contact Elizabeth Muller at: elizabeth.muller@gov3.net 

EC Project knowledge keeps improving
This project keeps improving and evolving. Find our continuously updated website please go to: http://www.egovbarriers.org. If you would like to contribute articles or web directory items, please contact: mailto:rebecca.eynon@oii.ox.ac.uk

Join the debate
Discuss your experiences of barriers to eGovernment; share ideas, good practice and case studies on our forum at: http://forum.egovbarriers.org/forum11.html

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This newsletter is published under contract with the European Commission, eGovernment Unit, DG Information Society and Media. It may be copied, distributed and used for educational purposes. The views expressed may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission. Neither the European Commission nor any person acting on its behalf is responsible for the use that might be made of the information provided.