The eaGov blog

Recently I read the blog entry from Nick Jones on the Gartner site. I dont know him, havnt read anything that he wrote before. The titel was “UK Politicians still don’t get Technology” and the title refered to a heated debate, on free internet ..or not, based on the file-sharing discussion; should the state provide free and non-restricted internet to its citizens?

Well, I have my thoughts on this, but will revert back and look into the title “(UK) politicians still don’t get technology” (with out the UK) I find this much more interesting that a debate on free internet. Perhaps the question is, as the title of this blot headline states: – do they have to?? I think not, of course it would be convenient if the knew all aspects and all technologies – or, heck, if the were Enterprise Architects, that would be nice. But I see no specific value here. I see that there should be a layer underneath the political layer that are officer of the state and possesses  the relevant knowledge on technology etc.

It  seems that there’s a (digital divide) gap between this layer and the politicians, since the public offices have an immense job to communicate what they see as a right path to venture into. In some ways I see a similarity to the “digital divide” paradigm, since it’s all about a gap that isn’t bridged and therefor creates problems. So, in conclusion, I dont see why the politicians should concern themselves about technologies, standards etc. but if they did,by accident, it probably wouldn’t hurt. – In addition to this, the next layer, being the public (IT-)officers, probably ought to  posses communication skills, understand politics/the game, a bit of economics, efficiency  etc. .. and do they do that now? There’s the headline for a new blog entry.

Im in my office at ITU working on an assignment about New Public Management (NPM), being the current governance paradigme of many states. NPM is a notion that the known bureaucratic hierarci has slowed the every decision and, basically that the departements of the government is not efficient enough. The answer to these prayers is NPM, creating a quasi market, by putting great parts of the public sector to be managed by private companies, hens the public sector, being unproductive (not my take), should learn  to manage in a marked oriented way. Many authors (Dunleavy etc.) proclaim this not to be the case, since we are in a Internet age, where new paradigmes are the law of the land. 

Of course my optics are eGovernment, and I will be observing this from that angle, asking if NPM is the right way to make eGovernment. As of today i’ll be looking at interviewing a few with knowledge in the area of NPM and eGovernment 

If you have relevant insights on this topic or related, I’ll be pleased to hear from you!!

Friday the 25.th was the day where I were to present my ODF/OOXML/B103 assignment at an oral exam. The paper is quite good and I’m really happy with the result, eventhough it doesn’t bring forward new groundbreaking  material. But I guess  there has been a need for some new insights on the whole “game” – though, working for IBM probably biases the complete situation a bit. On the contrary, I feel the paper is balanced evenly out. Well, the result of the exam was an 10.      UPDATE: The paper is not online  yet and I don’t know if it will be, since it is in danish and is mostly about the danish scene. Furthermore it was made in 4 quick weeks.

I finished a paper about web2.0 for Government with my boss Soren Duus Ostergaard IBM, proclaming this to be overseen in the current danish strategy .. as apparently also in other countries around the globe. The real question is why this is the case. Could it be the fact that web 2.0 being FaceBook, YouTube, Myspace and others, seems to posess a teen-glow, well, the governments doesn’t spend time with emerging technologies before having been proven great succeses. Nicholas Carr urged organizations to “follow don’t lead” and announced the there is no link between great it-spendings and huge revenues. 

Well I’ll argue that its time for the governments to wake up to the reality of web 2.0, which can provide powerfull and cheap tools for a technology-craving governments with the declining size in population.

The paper has been submitted to a few conferences this spring/summer ’08.

This morning, on the danish radio P1 there was a short interview with Margrethe Elf from the Danish Digital Taskforce – and a conversation about the “Borger.dk” site and the upcoming “Min side” (My Page) appearing in the sprin of 2008. As many allready know, the Taskforce work with personas in search of creating a real user centric, approach.The most interesting about this short interview + a presentation beforehand, was not the talk about personas etc. but more the fact that this story surfaces in the public radio (eventhough P1 Morning). I admit that Im fairly new to eGov, but I have no memory of stories from the eGov-world, in the making,. Seems that it is only it professionals who have the chance to look into the lab. Very positive if the Digital Taskfoce (or others) can get the public to understand that there is a modernization in the making, and that everybody will benefit from it. Positive in the way, that it need to be a project that the end users should embrace in order to get the businessvalue.