Over the past few months, I reviewed a range of (but by no means all) national eGIFs, charted out some of the resulting data and shared it at a workshop at the FutureGov2009 conference in Indonesia. What jumped off the page at me? First, the review suggests that policymakers are focusing too much on technical interoperability, which although significant a decade ago, have increasingly been worked out. Governments (and consultants) are often turning to policy tools that are largely modeled on what the UK did in 2000 (largely focused on the technical domain), to the detriment of much more substantial semantic and organizational issues that today are the main barriers to eGovernment interoperability. It’s not hard to see the common ancestry that many of these technically-oriented eGIFs share. Just one example is the so-called “8µ Law” standard, a non-existent standard that initially appeared on the UK list and then somehow wound up under consideration in at least 7 other countries in the context of their eGIF. The existence of this “standard” across so many other countries raises some important questions about the utility and effectiveness of these policy tools, nearly a decade after they were first rolled out.

Even more intriguing, one of the most touted benefits of these technical focused frameworks– that they give governments a mechanism to mandate specific technical standards which in turn result in better interoperability– doesn’t appear supported by the data. Instead, the data appear to present a case of “the tail wagging the dog.” Rather than dictating the standards that will lead to better interoperability, these standards lists largely capture the commonly used standards that the market has already embraced and agreed to use for interoperability purposes. If you look at the group of standards that are shared across roughly 80% of the standards lists (a dozen or so standards), you don’t find many surprises. What you find are core networking and interconnection standards (HTML, HTTP, XML, etc) that have long been supported by any product that wants to have any chance at achieving widespread marketshare. While there are some interesting questions raised by the many, many other standards that appear on only one or two lists, there is little evidence that eGIFs were/are being used by governments to drive adoption and use (through requirements or mandates) of various standards, with an aim toward improving technical interoperability. It’s possible that the technically-focused approach contributed a whole lot less to improvements in eGovernment interoperability over the last decade than some governments and practitioners believe.

There is a ton of work to be done in the next decade to make eGovernment work better. It is critical as we start out the next decade that we make sure we have the right mix of policy tools at hand. My preliminary look back suggests that we need to take a more thoughtful look at whether the current incarnation of eGIFs is the right starting point for the next decade.

The government enterprise may need to reorganize to eliminate barriers to collaboration. Enterprises may need to reform the organizational structures, management hierarchy, mission statements, rules and leadership guidance to implement changes to information management, workflow and business processes. For example, historically, business processes were designed to meet needs internal to the enterprise.  Today, an enterprise must start with the service being consumed by the end user – the citizen, small business, industry or other government agency – and design business processes to provide the service most efficiently.  Similarly, the enterprise may need to redesign their information management to achieve the proper degrees of information sharing and privacy protection.

Individuals, whether staff or senior managers, need to adapt. As business processes and practices are altered or eliminated – managers may have to identify new means to measure productivity, transition the old revenue streams and methodologies to new processes and organizational structure, or identify new revenue streams.  Workers at any level of the administrative hierarchy may feel threatened by new interconnectedness.  Trust, norms, and networks central to social capital are fluid and could be threatened by reorganization.  Change in job content, loss of status or power, changes in interpersonal relationships, changes in the decision-making approach, and job insecurity are common reasons employees resist new technologies. A worker may perceive a threat to their “ownership” of information — their influence, or social stature — that may have accrued over many years of service. One method to avoid some of these problems is to include the workforce in the design of the eGovernment initiative from the outset. Their input could lead to innovations otherwise lost.  Workers may not have the skills to effectively undertake the imperatives of an eGovernment strategy and do their job within a new organizational structure with new processes and systems.  The government must make it a priority to develop proper training for, and achieve “buy-in” by, all who manage and work for the enterprise, these are the people who will or will not implement the eGovernment strategy.