Managing Digital Governance

Issues, Challenges, and Solutions

Yu-Che Chen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781439890912
• eBook ISBN: 9781351801348
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Managing Digital Governance provides public administrators with a comprehensive, integrated framework and specific techniques for making the most of digital innovation to advance public values. The book focuses on the core issues that public administrators face when using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to produce and deliver public service, and to facilitate democratic governance, including efficiency, effectiveness, transparency, and accountability.

Offering insight into effectively managing growing complexity and fragmentation in digital technology, this book provides practical management strategies to address external and internal challenges of digital governance. External challenges include digital inclusiveness, open government, and citizen-centric government; internal ones include information and knowledge management, risk management for digital security and privacy, and performance management of information technologies. Unique in its firm grounding in public administration and management literature and its synergistic combination of theory and practice, Managing Digital Governance identifies future trends and ways to develop corresponding capacity while offering enduring lessons and time-tested digital governance management strategies. This book will serve as an invaluable resource for students, scholars, and practitioners in public administration, management, and governance who aspire to become leaders equipped to leverage digital technologies to advance public governance.

1 Introduction

The Rise of Digital Governance

The rise of digital governance is fundamentally powered by the new capabilities introduced by advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as social networking platforms and services, smart phones/devices, internet of things (IoT), big data, and artificial intelligence. Citizens and governments around the world are witnessing an unprecedented level of connectedness, user involvement, mobility, usability, and personal computing power. The confluence of citizens’ increasing demand to interact with government via a growing array of digital channels and governments’ efforts to provide citizen-centric online services raises challenges to 21st-century public managers. The question is no longer whether we will engage in digital governance or not; the challenge is how modern public managers can best create public values via the implementation of strategic digital governance initiatives. Public managers need to first understand the context of digital governance as the initial step in addressing that challenge.

Transformational Development: Web 1.0, Web 2.0 (Social Networking Platforms), and Web 3.0 and Other Emerging Technologies

The rapid growth of the internet in the 1990s ushered in Web 1.0 to make information and service available to anyone with internet access. Participation on the internet has moved from the privilege of the few to a vast majority of populations in the developed world and a majority of the population in the developing world. In the United States, internet use among adults rose from 14 percent in 1995 to 72 percent by the end of 2005. This is a change from a one-in-six minority to a leading majority of 72 percent within a decade. The decade of 2005 to 2015 has continued to see a steady increase from 72 percent to 87 percent.¹ Since 2008, China has become the country with the biggest internet population with a total number of 384 million internet users reported in 2009.² By the end of 2010, the number climbed to 457 million according to statistics from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).³ Within five years, China has added another 200 million-plus internet users to reach 688 million internet users by the end of 2015 (CNNIC 2016). That is twice the total U.S. population. Globally, internet use has risen from less than 1 percent of the world population (0.4 percent) in 1995 to 14.7 percent in 2005. That constitutes an increase of 30 times in a decade. The second decade of 2006–15 has witnessed a move from 15 percent to close to half of the world population (47.5 percent).⁴

Starting in the latter part of the first decade in the new millennium, there has been a significant shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, particularly marked by the growth of Facebook. Facebook, as the premium social networking site serving the United States and the world (with the exception of China), has seen exponential growth since 2006. In the United States alone, the number of active Facebook users jumped from approximately ten million in 2007 (The Economist 2010, 2015) to 168 million in 2012,⁵ which is more than a ten-fold increase in a five-year period. In 2016, the number has continued to climb to 191 million and has been projected to experience slight annual increases to 2021.⁶ Facebook has reached the vast majority of the population in the United States with a total population of approximately 320 million in 2015 as estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau.⁷

The number of registered Facebook users outside the United States exceeded those in the United States as early as 2007 (The Economist 2010, 2015) and became five times as large as the number of active users in the United States in 2012 based on information from a Facebook press release (Facebook 2012) and online statistics on users in other countries.⁸ The count of active Facebook users passed the one billion mark as of September 2012 (Facebook 2012). In 2015, the number of active Facebook users exceeded 1.5 billion, which is close to five times the U.S. population (The Economist 2016a).

The social networking platforms in China have also experienced a phenomenal growth. The exclusion of Facebook from China warrants a separate discussion. According to the report from the CNNIC (CNNIC 2012), the number of registered users for social networking sites reached 244 million (more than all the Facebook users in the United States at the time) by the end of 2011. The number of Chinese users on social networking sites grew by 60 million from 2009 to 2011 (CNNIC 2012). More recently, the development and growth of WeChat, since its birth in 2011, have introduced two important features into social network sites: mobile dominant and all-inclusive service platforms. WeChat has grown from zero to over 700 million active users in less than five years. More impressive is its ability to offer all-inclusive features including advertising, e-commerce, digital content, online-to-offline services, and finance (The Economist 2016b, 50).

User-generated content is a main feature introduced in Web 2.0 that barely existed in the Web 1.0 world. In Web 1.0, web content was created by staff members of the organizations behind the official websites. News items, pictures, and documents were posted by the organization. The growth of Web 2.0 has allowed users to generate and post comments on a blog or a Facebook page. Moreover, peer reviews and rankings have also become popular with products and services such as those seen at Amazon.com, Yelp.com, Angie’s List, and various travel websites. In the realm of forming online communities, the Web 2.0 era has offered many free or low-cost tools for individuals to organize and promote awareness of shared concerns. This increasingly user-driven online participation has profound implications for digital governance where the scope, speed, and nature of citizen participation have changed significantly.

Interactivity is another defining feature of Web 2.0. Our social and professional interactions have reached a new level of interactivity given the convenience and pervasiveness of social media as well as smart mobile devices. Facebook users have generated 1.13 trillion “Likes,” stamps of approval on online posts of others, since the launch of this feature in February 2009 (Facebook 2012). Users can get Facebook updates through e-mails that are available on their phones. The acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 further expanded Facebook’s capability to perform as a social network platform that allows a single sign-on for an array of services and integrated user experiences (The Economist 2016a). There are newer possibilities for people to interact with one another through an integrated slew of media (texts, instant messages, photos, videos, etc).

Two of the newer possibilities for interaction are Twitter and Linkedln. Twitter—with over 100 million active users reported in 2012⁹—can promote interactivity even more instantaneously because Twitter feeds are usually real-time responses to events. The spread of tweets usually follows a subscribed network of interested people who interact with one another. Twitter saw a 300 percent increase over a three-year period, with approximately 300 million active users in 2015.¹⁰ People are increasingly connected professionally with networking sites such as Linkedln. At the beginning of 2012, LinkedIn had over 150 million registered users.¹¹ Within a four-year period, the number of active users has doubled to 350 million based on a press release by LinkedIn in 2016 (Linkedln 2016). Professionals tend to enjoy the ability to search for and connect with their colleagues, with the social network sites providing both connection recommendations and the ability to mobilize a network of professionals. Some people have coined this phenomenon as “hyper-connectivity.” For more avid users of social media, the challenge is to keep up with the increasing speed and flow of information and growing expectations for social connectivity.

Both the amount of user-generated content and the level of interactivity are further fueled by the availability of smart mobile devices with a network or internet connection. The abilities of a smart phone to generate a post, take a picture, and shoot a video have continued to be improved. People with smart phones can easily make Facebook posts and upload pictures. Moreover, the ability to share among friends in the same social circle and colleagues belonging to the same professional network has also increased dramatically with the ease of use of social/professional networking sites. An individual can interact with hundreds or thousands of people via Twitter feeds and Facebook posts. Mobility further feeds into interactivity. As of September 2012, Facebook had 600 million mobile users out of one billion active registered users (Facebook 2012). That accounted for 60 percent of active users. By the end of 2015, the number of active monthly mobile users had exceeded 1.4 billion, accounting for over 90 percent of all active Facebook users.¹² That is a 30 percent increase over (approximately) a three-year period.

The unprecedented growth of smart phone ownership rate among adults in the United States and around the globe created a device platform to enable innovative social networking platforms and shared economy services. In mid-2012, nearly 45 percent of American adults owned a smart phone based on information published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.¹³ The number climbed to 65 percent in 2015, a 20 percent increase in about three years.¹⁴ Around the globe, half of the adult population owned a smart phone in 2015 (The Economist 2015). By 2020, it is estimated that approximately 80 percent of adults will have a smart phone (supercomputer) (The Economist 2015). Moreover, the growth of an ecosystem of applications as well as services geared toward mobile smart devices will continue to grow. For instance, Uber, as an example of shared economy, relies heavily on the availability and connectivity of smart phones.

Web 3.0 and emerging ICTs will continue to push the envelope of possibilities. One defining feature of Web 3.0 is a growing use of wireless access and networks. The fourth generation wireless network is capable of transmitting 1 gigabyte per second. The fifth generation wireless network will be ten times faster, reaching 10 gigabytes per second (The Economist 2016c). Coupled with the high penetration rate of smart phones, the development of the fifth generation wireless network will create an environment of mobile-first to mobile-only ways of accessing information and services. Another defining feature of Web 3.0 is the web as database. The combination of more machine-readable data available on the web with more sophisticated algorithms to process information will make the web into a database. In addition, Web 3.0 will have a growing impact on the IoT. As more and more devices are connected via the internet, Web 3.0 will continue to traffic from smart devices automatically sending information to provide service.

Emerging ICTs will continue to add value to business intelligence, personalization of service, efficiency, and decision-making. The growth of big data, along with big data analytics, is able to provide enhanced business intelligence that draws data from Web 1.0, social networking websites, and semantic web to understand the needs of clients and stakeholders. The development and utilization of apps on smart phones with their growing penetration rate is likely to reach a new level of personalized service. Technologies for data visualization and augmented reality will increasingly aid in learning, situational awareness, and decision-making. Artificial intelligence powered by supercomputers and developments in machine learning have the potential to leverage big data to power personalized service and transform business processes. Although the specific technologies will likely evolve with new innovations, the values and supporting functionalities are likely to be enduring.

The evolution from Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 (social networking platforms) to Web 3.0 with other emerging technologies gives rise to a growing portfolio of information technologies rather than a replacement of the old with the new. The shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 has not diminished the importance of websites and supporting databases and information systems in providing online information and services. Conventional websites with Web 1.0 features and backend databases are still the mainstay, as they provide a valuable service. People can find information about products, services, and basic contact information. Such websites do not require a high level of interactivity; the keys are availability and usability. These websites are also valuable in terms of online transactions, such as purchasing products and services online, powered by large information systems and databases. Despite this, semantic web (sometimes also called Web 3.0) is emerging. It is the concept of the web as databases, in which the computational power of modern software programs and algorithms can answer your questions with credible sources of information rather than giving you a large number of hits on documents for you to sift through. The emerging technologies on big data analytics and visualization all build on the quality and amount of data collected via Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 (social media platforms).

The adoption of ICTs by governments typically follows the trajectory of the private sector with a cautionary period of observation for innovative ICTs to become mature, stable, and cost-effective. After a decade of rapid growth in internet technologies and e-commerce, local governments in the United States have reached an 83 percent website adoption rate based on the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) 2000 e-government survey (Norris, Fletcher, and Holden 2001). The adoption rate continued to rise in the early 2000s to 91 percent by the end of 2004 (ICMA 2004). Although the rise in website adoption was significant in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: The Rise of Digital Governance
• 2 A Framework for Managing Digital Governance
• 3 Digital Divide, Digital Inclusion, and Digital Opportunities
• 4 Open Government in the Era of Digital Governance
• 5 Citizen-centric Digital Governance
• 6 Information and Knowledge Management for Digital Governance
• 7 Digital Privacy and Digital Security Management
• 8 Management of ICT Performance for Digital Governance
• 9 Building Management Capacity for Digital Governance
• 10 Conclusion, Trends, and Strategies of Digital Governance
• Index