Incis aftermath hobbling NZ's technology drive

Post-Incis wariness over spending money on IT systems could further slow New Zealand's adoption of e-government, says Matthew Hitch, of Deloitte Consulting.

A Deloitte report, Through the Portal: Enterprise Transformation for e-government, says leading Government agencies worldwide are moving beyond information-only websites to setting up full-service web portals.

Because such portals can give citizens a single point to access services and information from all departments, a new sort of Government enterprise is emerging.

Mr Hitch, who is the firm's public sector practice leader, says the recently formed e-government unit within the State Services Commission has started drafting an e-government policy, but compared with Australia and America, we are considerably behind.

"Everything they are talking about in the Government now seems to be about electronic procurement, which is almost irrelevant as e-procurement is pretty basic if you look at the Government spend on supplies," he said.

"That's B2B [business-to-business] stuff, automating manual processes, not B2C [business-to-consumer]. What we are talking about is the interaction of government with the population."

He said the Government did see the importance of being customer-centric, as shown by the number of call centres being set up by departments. But it still had not shown that it appreciated how critical merging services in a portal could be - or its wider implications for government.

He said some Government agencies overseas had built expensive websites or portals, and then been unable to develop them further.

"That's why we're promoting the idea of a self-funding portal. One of our concerns about the e-government unit is how much teeth it will have being in the SSC rather than in Treasury.

"The first thing which will stop progress is lack of money. At the moment we are seeing a lack of Government investment money for IT - people are scared to do anything which could turn into an Incis, [the police information systems project].

A study by the National Information Consortium, an organisation which builds portals for US Government agencies, found people were willing to pay a little extra to do things like renew licences or access valuation data online.

Mr Hitch said the self-funding model might suit the New Zealand situation, where the relatively small population meant the savings that come from volume transactions were not available.

"The concept of self-funding, revenue-generating portals solves the age-old Government problem of limited funds, differing funding cycles and political uncertainty."

Once portals are up and running, Deloitte Consulting said they would change the nature of Government.



Mr Hitch said the new technologies and processes were key to breaking down silo structures within Government, and in allowing Government entities to communicate and cooperate.

"This poses a significant challenge to New Zealand Government departments who face the tough task of integrating disparate back office systems to enable real time data sharing."

He said New Zealand should avoid going down the path of the state of Michigan, which was going through a massive reengineering of its back end systems.

Rather it could achieve similar results with data extraction tools and technologies like XML (extensible mark-up language), which, if it lived up to its potential, would help bridge the gaps between incongruous systems, data and document formats, making the need for standardisation less pressing.

Examples of portal projects included in the Deloitte report include the state of New Hampshire's Wizard system (www.state.nh.us). When citizens enter their individual or family data. Wizard calculates their eligibility for 110 state programmes that provide cash assistance.

Users save time by only entering their details once, and department staff can make more accurate referrals.

The Netherlands' Government's Municipal Records Database, which automatically enrolls every 18-year-old on a register, transmits any changes of address or other information automatically to 300 other Government agencies.

In Finland, the census is now completed with information from existing databases.

The Commonwealth of Virginia has a "VipNet" feature on its site (www.state.va.us) that allows users to customise the portal so they only see the services they want.

Singapore's eCitizen Central portal (www.ecitizen.gov.sg) displays Government services according to stages of citizens' lives, from birth registration through to job seeking, starting businesses and retirement.

In Sweden, electronic vehicle registration has allowed the Swedish Vehicle registry to cut its satellite offices from 24 to one, while demand for its service has grown 20 per cent.

The Canadian Federal Government is building a procurement portal for more than 100 departments and agencies with a combines annual spend of C$8 billion ($1.2 billion).

The site provides automated purchasing and payment, and includes an exchange where intermediaries can bring Government buyers and suppliers together.

For example, the US Army Communications Electronics Command (Cecom) saved more than 50 per cent off the retail price by running an online reverse auction when it made a large purchase of laptop computers.