9 - Recommendations: Working on iGovernment

Summary

Government must become aware that it has developed from an eGovernment into an iGovernment. That awareness is essential if it hopes to meet the challenges of unremitting digitization and to use digitization to exploit the benefits of innovation. A rationale based on iGovernment self-awareness will require government to look beyond technology and individual applications and shift its view to a broader perspective on information. That broader perspective means focusing on the information flows that result from the many different applications and the connections between them. In particular, it also means considering the consequences for society and policymaking of the ongoing expansion and specific dynamic of iGovernment.

It is tempting to assign the task of accomplishing the necessary transformation and related measures to a particular ministry, organisation or official, i.e. to assign responsibility to a single entity or person with an overall view of iGovernment. That is largely impractical, however, given the scale, complexity and multifarious implications of ICT for the relationship between government and the citizen. This book cannot provide a comprehensive strategy or blueprint for arriving at an evenly balanced development of iGovernment, nor do the authors expect ‘government’, understood as a single entity, to do so. iGovernment self-awareness and the consequences of that awareness will have to sink down through the many levels and institutions that make up government, i.e. the ministries, agencies, local authorities, police, regulatory bodies, citizens, and – last but not least – politicians. iGovernment has evolved in many different places within government, and awareness of its consequences will have to do so as well. Be that as it may, it is naturally also true that, as George Orwell put it, “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The current chapter will suggest a number of organisations to take on the responsibility of promoting this awareness and guiding the evolution of iGovernment in the right direction. These ‘duties’ should be viewed as the organisational side of an agenda of government transformation. The transition from eGovernment to iGovernment requires a paradigm shift that can be detected in the real-life developments described in previous chapters, but that must now, crucially, be embedded in the institutions of government and their thinking. That transformative agenda is much more important than any specific suggestions relating to the institutions themselves.