Agencies prepare to leap into e-world

By ADAM GIFFORD

The biggest task for all Government agencies over the next year will be e-government, creating electronic channels to deal with citizens and other Government agencies.

Despite some spending in the Budget for this - most notably in the allocation for the State Services Commission, which has been given the overall coordination role - it is a task for which departments will have to reallocate resources.

It is similar to the Y2K readiness work, where Government agencies were told they were expected to take Y2K seriously, but not allocated additional money.

The big picture was set out last month by Acting Information Technology Minister Trevor Mallard, when he announced the cabinet had signed off on the concept.

"Our e-government vision is to use information and communications technologies to provide better Government services and information electronically, and to build a closer relationship between Government and citizens," Mr Mallard said.

He said e-government would restore trust in Government and help provide strong social services by increasing collaboration between Government organisations and enabling them to deliver more effective and efficient services to the public at lower cost.

The first step is creating the e-government unit in the commission to develop the overarching strategy, including such details as common system and data management policies, standards and guidelines.

Given that state sector IT has gone down a multitude of separate paths since the demise of the Government Computing Service, the promise of some common standards will be welcomed by the people who have to put the politicians' programmes into action.

Deputy State Services Commissioner Ross Tanner said more than 200 people had applied to head the e-government unit.

One of its tasks will be to take over the www.govt.nz web portal, now managed by Internal Affairs.

Mr Tanner said other key projects on the go were attempts to define the technology needed to give the level of security Government departments required, and an electronic procurement initiative to encourage departments to buy their supplies online.

"There are going to be a lot of small, bite-sized projects," said Mr Tanner.

The Government is also drafting an Electronic Transactions Bill, which will bring definitions of transactions into the electronic age.

However, drafting is running behind schedule and a bill is unlikely to be passed before the end of the year.

At the same time that it is getting its own house in order, the Government wants to encourage greater adoption of e-commerce.

Already the signs are that New Zealand is getting left behind, with many businesses unwilling to put in the investment needed.

A draft e-commerce strategy is not due until August, and a promised electronic commerce summit, likely to be held in Auckland, has slipped from August to November because of problems scheduling ministers to attend.

Mr Mallard said one of the aims of the summit was to demonstrate that the Government was serious about e-commerce, and that it wanted to work with the private sector to implement its strategy.

"This e-commerce strategy is vital," he said. "It will be an important component in achieving our goals to promote an inclusive, innovative economy for the benefit of all New Zealanders."

A study made public this week by Deloitte Consulting found New Zealand lagging behind Australia and many other countries in the adoption of e-government.

It also found little confidence among New Zealanders that the public sector would deliver services online.

Deloitte's New Zealand public sector leader, Paul Gadd, said Government agencies must adopt a more customer-focused approach.

He said the issue was not just technology but redesigning processes and changing the culture of agencies to allow new ways of working.

The Deloitte report said agencies that took a customer-centric approach were likely to significantly improve access to their services, increase service volume, get better information on their operations, reduce employee complaints, cut the amount of time employees spent on non-customer activities and improve their own image.

"E-government is not just another way of doing things. It is a transformation on a scale that will fundamentally alter the way public services are delivered and managed."

Former chief statistician Len Cook, who chaired a committee of chief executives looking at IT issues, said the real challenge for the public sector was leveraging the huge investment in information technology by the top 10 spending departments such as Work and Income, and Health.

While some Government organisations, such as the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, had already moved a lot of their customer interactions to the internet, others, including Winz, had woefully limited sites.

Mr Cook said many Government computing projects started during the 1990s "were huge and we were also computerising very complex processes."

While some huge projects were still going on, such as the $150 million Landonline scheme, e-commerce projects were likely to be a lot cheaper and faster to deliver.

The work Mr Cook did at Statistics New Zealand is a model for the sort of thing that can be expected.

Statistics got rid of its mainframe and adapted out-of-the-box solutions running on NT servers. It put the emphasis on project management rather than technology.

"We saw real strengths in the integration of common tools," said Mr Cook.

Statistics NZ uses tools like Lotus Notes to work collaboratively, including working with the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

It is also able to make far more information available through its web site than was available through paper-based distribution methods.

That raised questions of pricing, which other departments will also have to wrestle with.

The user-pays climate of the 1990s, when all sorts of taxpayer-funded information were turned into a saleable commodities, clashes with expectations that on the internet information should be free.

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