Digital Government

Managing Public Sector Reform in the Digital Era

Miriam Lips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317222903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Government & Business
• Index: Business

Digital Government: Managing Public Sector Reform in the Digital Era presents a public management perspective on digital government and technology-enabled change in the public sector. It incorporates theoretical and empirical insights to provide students with a broader and deeper understanding of the complex and multidisciplinary nature of digital government initiatives, impacts and implications.

The rise of digital government and its increasingly integral role in many government processes and activities, including overseeing fundamental changes at various levels across government, means that it is no longer perceived as just a technology issue. In this book Miriam Lips provides students with practical approaches and perspectives to better understand digital government. The text also explores emerging issues and barriers as well as strategies to more effectively manage digital government and technology-enabled change in the public sector.

Digital Government is the ideal book for postgraduate students on courses in public administration, public management, public policy, political science and international relations, and e-government. It is also suitable for public service managers who are experiencing the impact of digital technology and data in the public sector.

Part I
Introduction

1 Introducing and positioning digital government

Learning objectives

By the end of this chapter you should:

• Be clear about the approach and scope of this book;
• Understand the important emphasis on digital government as an integrated, socio-technical phenomenon in the broader context of government; and
• Have developed clear objectives for your own learning.

Key points of this chapter

• The unique nature of government, which influences the context and outcomes of digital government and its relationships with citizens;
• The highly complex socio-technical phenomenon of digital government and its influence on and overlap with the digital economy and digital society;
• Digital government developments started before governments’ adoption of the Internet;
• Digital government is an evolving and dynamic concept, which likely will be just “government” in the future; and
• The importance of understanding both the digital aspects and the government aspects of digital government in a comprehensive, multidisciplinary and empirical way.

Key terms

• Digital government: the introduction, application and use of digital technologies and data in government and its external relationships (including citizens, businesses, civil society and international organizations) and the democratic, governmental and managerial implications.
• Electronic government or e-government: the term used before “digital government.” Although a dynamic and evolving concept, e-government usually refers to the introduction, management and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as the Internet, in government and its external relationships (Lips & Schuppan, 2009).
• Electronic democracy or e-democracy: a term that was used for an area of study and experimentation around innovative, Internet-enabled forms of democracy. This e-democracy concept later merged with the concept of e-government to become digital government.
• Legacy systems: the operation and use of existing older digital technologies, data and ICT systems in government.

Introduction

Governments around the world are becoming increasingly digital governments. Fast-moving developments in the area of digital technologies, such as the Internet, social media, mobile technologies and devices, smart technologies and, more recently, also robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), offer governments a wide range of innovative opportunities to fundamentally change their core functions, structures, operations, processes, activities and relationships with external stakeholders, including citizens, businesses and civil society. Moreover, another fast-moving technological development enabled by smart technologies and devices in particular is the creation of large volumes of data, which are further adding to the enormous reinvention potential available to governments in the digital age (e.g. Gil-Garcia, Pardo & Nam, 2016; Meijer & Bolivar, 2016; Borgman, 2015; Kitchin, 2014; van Zoonen, 2016).

Governments are seizing these various innovative opportunities in the digital age and, as a result, are changing. Many believe that digital government will be revolutionary, transformational and a completely new type of government compared to its paper-based past: in that respect, some scholars and practitioners refer to a new “government 2.0” or, in Korea for example, even “government 3.0” (e.g. Mergel, 2013; Nam, 2016; O’Reilly, 2010). Such a fundamental reinvention is also what society seems to expect from government: namely, not to lag behind in the digital age. For example, why would government not be able to reap the benefits of the digital age as commercial organizations do, such as in areas like online shopping and banking, booking air flights directly without the need to speak to a travel agent, using integrated data to make better decisions, engaging with citizens and businesses via their preferred social media platforms and using robots for various mechanical tasks? Moreover, a study conducted by McKinsey & Company (Dilmegani, Korkmaz & Lundqvist, 2014) suggests that capturing the full potential of digital government reform could free up to US$1 trillion annually in economic value worldwide, through improved cost and operational performance. Unfortunately, fundamentally changing governments by introducing digital technologies and data is not as easy as it may seem.

In this book, we explore the unique nature and context of digital government, which dominantly shape the outcomes of technology- and data-enabled changes in the public sector and its external relationships. Although governments have important relationships with a variety of external stakeholders, such as private sector organizations, we primarily focus in this book on governments’ relationships with citizens. In so doing, we mainly explore the relationships between citizens and the executive parts of government and therefore will not consider in great detail the impact and implications of digital technologies and data in citizens’ relationships with political representatives or political parties.

We also need to take into consideration in our discussions that digital government is not completely designed from scratch: in other words, governments haven’t stopped their operations and activities in order to undertake a complete “reset” in the digital age. Governments are adopting digital technologies and new forms of data use whilst they are dealing with BAU: business as usual. Moreover, as the costs involved with digital government changes and initiatives are so significant, many governments are reluctant to take on large-scale government technology projects that will have a major impact on their structures, functioning and external relationships. Needless to say, there are substantial risks involved for governments in becoming digital governments, which are not attractive from a political leadership point of view, for example.

These kinds of issues suggest a highly complex environment for governments in which they want to become, or are becoming, digital governments. In this book, we explore various areas where governments are introducing digital technologies and innovative data uses to realise public sector reform, such as in the area of public service provision, around open and transparent government, governments wanting to become “smart” and in promoting new participatory and collaborative forms of public engagement. In looking at each of these areas more in depth, we discuss what governments’ reform ambitions are, the types and extent of changes that are happening both in government organizations and in relationships with citizens, what the emerging issues and barriers are for governments in their technology- and data-related reform ambitions and particularly what the social, ethical, democratic and governmental implications are.

In all of this it is vital that we observe these complex changes in the context of digital government and its relationships with citizens comprehensively, empirically and robustly. This is of particular importance because if we are able to look at this complex world of digital government in depth, it will help us to ask the right questions. And if we are able to ask the right questions, it will help us to identify solutions and strategies for managing these complexities in digital government and its relationships with citizens. In Part 2 of this book, we discuss different theoretical and analytical perspectives on the roles of digital technologies and data and the extent to which they are contributing to societal change. Also, we discuss nine dominant perspectives that are often used by both scholars and practitioners to observe or “see” changes in the context of digital government and its relationships with citizens. Each of these nine perspectives helps us not only to understand how changes in the context of digital government are differently observed, but also how the deployment of that perspective leads to narrow and restricted observations, which, of course, have direct consequences for the actions and activities guided by those observations. We also explore an alternative, complex public management perspective that helps us to understand and analyse digital government more comprehensively and empirically.

But before we do so, it is important to get some more insights into the phenomenon we will be further exploring and discussing in this book: digital government. In the next sections, we briefly explore the origins of digital government as a concept, as well as some concepts closely related to digital government, such as e-government and e-democracy. We look at a short historical overview of government computing and information technology (IT) developments in the public sector prior to the adoption of the Internet and propose a working definition for digital government to date. Also, we position digital government in close connection and interaction with two other major societal domains: namely, the digital economy and the digital society.

Furthermore, two dominant focus areas in digital government which are often more or less separated from each other in scholarly work are discussed: i.e. the “digital” aspects of digital government and the “government” aspects of digital government. In this book we use a comprehensive and combined perspective in order to better explore digital government as a socio-technical phenomenon and identify a number of the complexities around digital government. And finally, the need for a multidisciplinary, if not interdisciplinary, approach towards digital government and its relationships with citizens is discussed in order to more fully understand and explain this complex, socio-technical phenomenon.

What is digital government?

A short history of digital government as a concept

Digital government as a concept did not exist until the late 1990s. “Electronic government,” a concept that was introduced shortly after the arrival of the public Internet in the early 1990s, preceded it. When the first e-commerce applications were launched on the World Wide Web (WWW), governments, too, became interested in using this new Internet technology in similar ways for e-government. Consequently, in 1993, the US federal government was the first government to present a vision on how the Internet could create the government of the future: this e-government could overcome barriers of time and distance to provide citizens with 24/7 access to public information and services regardless of their location (see also Chapter 2).

As this first vision of the government of the future demonstrates and similar to the first e-commerce applications, e-government initially was associated with a radically different way of providing public services to customers. This early conceptualisation of digital government became popular at the time that new public management (NPM) thinking was influencing governments around the world: many governments saw a strategic alignment to using e-government in order to achieve the NPM objectives of improving customer orientation in government and delivering more efficient and effective public services (Homburg, 2004; Homburg, 2008). As e-government was more narrowly associated with Internet-enabled public service provision at the time, scholars and practitioners saw an additional opportunity to study or experiment with a range of new democratic innovations enabled by the Internet under the term “electronic democracy” or “e-democracy.” E-democracy research interests around that time covered topics such as online discussion groups and communities, the Internet as public sphere, electronic city halls, digital cities, technology-enabled support for political representatives, enhanced forms of citizen participation and deliberation, improved voter turnout in elections and new forms of direct democracy (Raab et al, 1996; Schalken, 1998; Ward & Vedel, 2006; Norris & Reddick, 2013; Grӧnlund, 2001).

In 1999, the US National Science Foundation adopted the term “digital government” as a new umbrella concept to cover aspects of both e-government and e-democracy, including the use of digital technologies to provide public services, support public policy, improve government operations, and engage citizens (Dawes, 2008). Since then, scholars have argued that digital government should be understood as a wider concept, covering all government functions and activities as well as relationships with all external stakeholders, including citizens, businesses and civil society (Garson, 2006; Dawes, 2008). Some scholars also use the term “e-governance” to make a clear distinction between the early, more narrow concept of e-government and the acknowledgement of the need for a wider, democratic reform conception (Garson, 2006; Dawes, 2008).

In the last two decades, the digital government concept has further expanded as new digital technology developments, including mobile technologies, smart technologies, AI and robotics, have become of interest to governments for adoption. Moreover, as a result of rapid developments around innovative data use, governments around the world are seizing new public-sector reform opportunities to become open and transparent governments (see Chapter 5) or smart governments (see Chapter 6).

A short history of digital government before the Internet

Although digital government commonly is observed as a development that started with governments’ adoption ...