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03 InFocus
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This issue of BFM is focused on "Business Perspective on E-government": how to ensure that your organization maximizes the benefits deriving from e-government, while understanding its impact on your way of doing business.
Since end 1990s, various initiatives organized at the national or sponsored by international organizations set their focus on extending the "new economy" benefits also to government.
After first adopting a technological focus, side-effects were asssessed, eventually reaching an international consensus on:
- assuming that e-government delivers a chance to dramatically innovate forms, methods, processes and structures to manage the relationship between citizens and government
- joining e-government with on-going initiatives to harmonize legislation, at least for industrialized countries that are member of organizations and institutions as OECD and EU, to allow the improved governance of market economy.
As defined by the OECD in its March 2003 issue of "Observer", e-government is more about ìgovernmentî than about the ìe-î: technology has to be seen as a just an enabler toward a common trend on streamlining the interaction between government and citizens (public and corporate).
Historically, states consolidated government control through harmonization: defining regulations and enforcing them was a mean to an end, i.e. defining acceptable behaviours and sanctioning by law the penalties associated with violation of said rules.
Since WWII, the increasing development of market economy accelerated the pace of these harmonization activities, moving the scope beyond the mere national level.
Our approach to e-government is quite simple: e-government should be seen as part of a common trend toward creating common and shared rules, as demanded by market economy.
E-government inherently streamlines administrative management processes and increases transparency; if correctly managed, it will deliver more benefits to smaller organizations (both public and private), that will obtain at a lower cost the capability to deliver products and services with a level playing field with larger organizations.
Why this side-effect? Because it is to be assumed that all the e-government-related issues of the approach adopted by various government, that to ensure a widespread use of the new services started delivering free supporto using Internet-based applications.
Consider e-government as part of your own business development activities, adopting a ìmonitoringî approach, also in smaller organizations; this approach could extend into lobbying, instead of simply reacting to e-government.
As it was the case for the previous issue on business continuity governance, a proper introduction should begin by identifying the characteristics of the organization processes and corporate culture; only introducing approaches that ensure that the information will be constantly updated will allow the governance of e-government integration inside your organization.
Anyway, consider that e-government will be like ERP and similar ìvertical/horizontal process-replacement schemesî: if you drop your own processes and replace them with external ones, you will lose your own uniqueness, and ìcustomizationî is not an option with e-government.
The section ìCoverStoryî describes the suggested process to manage the introduction of the operational changes related to e-government both initially and whenever changes to the applicable laws and regulations will arise, all while controlling the integration costs by applying our knowledge-based cost-control principles.
Furthermore, the ìCoverStoryî section delivers an overview and introductory analysis on the initiatives on e-government, to help you maximize e-government benefits.
Finally, the ìMonitorî and ìPointersî sections will support your self-assessment on the level of readiness of your organization toward e-government.
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2003-2005 edition