"I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.”
Those words still sting in a province that vividly remembers the NEP and the GST.
But there are people in our governments, at all levels, who really do want to serve the public in an efficient, cost-effective way.
That’s why a number of them got together recently to hear Janet Caldow, the director of IBM Corporation’s Institute for Electronic Government. She painted a rosy future where citizens all have cheap, high-speed Internet access and deal with their governments online.
She praised a little town called Naestved in Denmark for having “an impressive series of integrated e-community initiatives.”
You can get ferry schedules, fill out government forms, even take online education from any PC. Naestved has created special centres to serve the physically impaired, senior citizens and the unemployed.
While there was certainly enthusiasm for Caldow’s vision of the future, there was also a healthy dose of skepticism.
Most people, if they’ve thought about e-government at all, assume it means delivering existing government services using technology. So maybe you can renew your dog licence online from your home computer.
In fact you can do just that, right now, right here in Calgary. But this tiny example illustrates one of e-government’s biggest problems: How do you find that service in the first place?
Let’s try a little experiment. Most people use search engines, so let’s do a Google search on the terms “dog licence” and “Calgary.” Also please note that spelling counts, “licence” is the way the City of Calgary spells the word.
Hooray, the very first link that comes up is an official City of Calgary Web site: www.gov.calgary.ab.ca/animalservices/onlineapp.html
Sadly, it leads you into the cyberwasteland of “URL not found on this server.”
Now, if you look real hard, you might find the correct link (shown below in Web watch) buried in there. But Joe Public is liable to have given up by now and either bought the dog licence in person or decided to take the risk of letting Rover be a scofflaw.
So Lesson 1 of e-government is that they have to make it very, very easy for consumers to find and use the sites.
In fairness, if you do what the City of Calgary would like you to do, and go to its spiffy homepage, www.gov.calgary.ab.ca, you’ll get to the dog licensing page in a few clicks.
But, and here’s another experiment, take $50 and go out and offer $5 each to the first 10 people you meet if they can recite that Web address correctly. Even if you stand in front of City Hall, I guarantee you’ll still have enough money left for a decent lunch.
Lesson 2 is that a certain percentage of the populace is never going to visit an e-government Web site, no matter how nice and pretty it is. So, to be any kind of self-respecting government, you’re still going to need telephone and walk-in service.
This is where the politicians start to get heartburn. “You mean we have to spend all this money on new technology and still keep all the old stuff going?”
Yes and no. Eventually, if everybody has a convenient access to the correct Web sites, most will start renewing their dog licences online, just as many of us would rather pay a utility bill from the Web than trudge out in a snowstorm.
This is especially true if you give them an incentive, such as the Government of Canada’s tactic of sending your tax refund faster if you file electronically The banks understand this trend and are pushing out more ATMs and Web banking, with fewer branches and human tellers.
But the few banks that have tried to be “Internet only” have had to backpedal. ING Direct, for example, now has ATMs in Canadian Tire stores. When it’s 8 p.m. and you really need that $100 . . . you want your bank to be there for you.
So for a long time, governments will be supporting electronic services as well as more traditional ones.
Caldow has more news for us. “Don’t think PCs. In a couple of years more than half of all transactions will be done on non-PC devices.”
She’s thinking of PalmPilots, Web-enabled phones and gizmos not yet invented. She says this is already true in Japan.
She also predicts that bandwidth, the ability to send data over wires, will be going up by a factor of 150 in the next five years. If this happens, you might be able to have a videophone conversation with a government representative from the comfort of your home. And, of course, many of the ideas that are being pioneered in the private sector, like buttons on Web sites that connect you to a person, are also applicable to the public sector.
Calgary is actually in the vanguard of e-government, with some advanced systems already in place. For example, if you want to know how much your neighbour’s house is worth, just type the address into www.fairshare.gov.calgary.ab.ca
You can also get the time of the next bus that’s coming by your stop at Calgary Transit’s Web site (except during labour disputes). And there’s lots more in the works.
The Gartner group estimates that worldwide sales of e-government services will reach $60 billion US by the year 2005.
Some day, interested citizens will automatically be notified if the government is thinking of changing a law or policy that concerns them. Their ideas will be gathered electronically and used as thoughtful input. Government will be open and transparent — and more efficient. We will have the technology for e-government. The big question is . . . will our politicians be up to the challenge?
Web Watch:
www.ieg.ibm.com
www.naeskom.dk (hope you can read Danish!) www.strategicprofitsinc.com/calgary/doglicense.php3
www.fairshare.gov.calgary.ab.ca
www.calgarytransit.com
