Effective e-Government Government 2.0 in South Africa
Written by Ivo Vegter
SPECIAL FOCUS: WEB 2.0
South Africa’s low internet penetration will influence how Government can exploit web 2.0 technologies.
The demands on government are growing rapidly. Several converging trends are the cause. On one hand, the regulatory state is in the ascendancy. Perceived failures in global markets have prompted intervention on a scale seldom seen before. With stimulatory spending programmes and corporate bailouts comes a growing demand for regulatory compliance, which adds layers of complexity to the functions of government.
On the other hand, citizens are increasingly expecting simple yet sophisticated ways to engage with and influence the companies and agencies with which they interact. Social networks, peer-to-peer messaging systems, user-generated content, collaborative information repositories and popular rating and review mechanisms are mushrooming online.
Companies are slowly responding to the growth, largely outside of their control, of Web 2.0. Governments likewise need to respond, and not only because citizens expect to interact with agencies in ways to which they’ve become accustomed.
Participatory government
The notion of participatory government and direct democracy is on the rise worldwide. It is also enshrined in South Africa’s constitution. It expects Parliament, the National Council of Provinces as well as provincial legislatures to “make rules and orders concerning its business, with due regard to representative and participatory democracy, accountability, transparency and public involvement”.
In a recent University of the Western Cape report on participatory government, entitled, “Inviting Failure: Public Participation and Local Governance in South Africa”, Laurence Piper and Bettina Von Lieres analyse the institutional structures implemented in response to this constitutional mandate. They find that by and large, public participation in government is limited to local level, and suffer from “low levels of participation, the unrepresentative nature of participants, and insignificant impact on decision-making”.
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TEN KEY FEATURES OF WEB 2.0 1. Lack of central control over content and communication |
To paraphrase the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal US Senator, citizen participation turned out to be a device whereby public officials induce non-public individuals to act in a way the officials desire. This problem is clearly not unique to South Africa. Many governments stand accused of more style than substance in their efforts to engage citizens. Most still rely on occasional public participation events, grassroots committees, public information campaigns, specific requests for comment, or periodic statistical surveys, in order to communicate with the governed.
The promise of Web 2.0
Encouraged by the successful use of Web 2.0 as a platform during last year’s presidential election in the USA, during which Barack Obama’s campaign was notable for its embrace of online technologies and forums to engage potential voters, governments worldwide have been prompted to investigate and utilise the Internet in new ways.
Says Sean Shine, managing director of the Public Service, Systems Integration & Technology division of business consultancy Accenture: “Clearly, there is a future for Web 2.0 technologies in connecting agencies with their citizen constituencies, and in connecting citizens with each other to deliver timely information and better service. And yet, as always, governments must spend public money wisely – identifying intended results while mitigating risks.”
He adds that Web 2.0 technologies not only support an evolution in public service, but a new relationship with government that is about genuine engagement of people in their own governance. “Web 2.0 uses exciting technologies, but it’s important to remember that the technologies themselves are not what matters most. What matters is the potential for these technologies to break down silos, improve citizen service, unleash better collaboration within and among agencies, and foster broader participation by the citizens themselves.”
Many governments are using Web 2.0 to engage with citizens. Services range from the mundane, such as delivering traffic updates via Twitter, to the very complex and ambitious, such as France’s portal with wikis and forums to support debate and solicit ideas about the countries digital strategy from the people it will affect most.
Representivity requires connectivity
A key obstacle in South Africa is the low level of Internet penetration, and its high costs. Its global connectivity ranking has plummeted from its highs in the mid-1990s – today, several
African countries can boast more Internet users than South Africa. Estimates of the extent of desktop connectivity, in which a PC-based browser is connected to the Internet, remain below five million of the population. By contrast, more than 80% of South African households either have, or have access to, a mobile phone. Rick Joubert of Vodafone estimates that over 10 million people now access the Internet using at least WAP, or some more sophisticated mobile access technology.
This turns on its head the usual view of mobile content and applications as an extension of a Web site designed for the desktop browser. In South Africa, and even more so in Africa, the mobile phone is rapidly becoming the first, and often only, device through which users access the Internet.
This, according to Joubert, is an area that traditional online publishers have ignored. This suggests that governments are in a unique position to steal a march on the market by addressing this segment, designing, developing and populating Web 2.0 infrastructure designed to reach a broad mobile market. Governments have strong motives for doing so, too. If desktop connectivity is limited to the wealthy elites, any government interaction using Web 2.0 as a platform is doomed to be unrepresentative of the broader community. Mobile phones offer an exciting opportunity for government to reach, and involve, a much wider range of citizens, across income segments and social groupings.
Organisation 2.0
While the social networking angles of Web 2.0 are by far the most visible, government can also exploit the platform it offers for internal operations. Doing so is easier said than done, however, and many companies remain focused on harnessing external networks for marketing and customer interaction, rather than internalising the methods and applications that make Web 2.0 so compelling to consumers.
Using Web 2.0 platforms and collaboration internally is often hampered by a lack of adoption of relevant technologies by government employees. The reason is that while these platforms are exciting to the so-called “geeks” in the organisation, changing the way most employees perform their duties is a far bigger challenge. This resistance to change often extends to the IT departments, which have a vested interest in the existing systems and processes that were established, often at great cost and with great effort.
Consultants in the Enterprise 2.0 space (as they call this field) note that it involves not only technology, but must incorporate equal measures of organisational design, project management, ongoing business process improvement and change management. Organisations must be able to rapidly deploy and adopt new platforms and techniques, and employ people who can operate at the junction between technology, marketing and management.
A notable feature of organisations that adopt Web 2.0 platforms internally – using Twitter, collaborative tools, social networks and wikis to manage projects and information – is that instead of a few large-scale projects, operations are broken down into small, manageable projects. These offer low risk for failure, foster close co-operation, and result in a strong focus on iterative improvement in the functioning of the organisation.
Government 2.0
The agility that Web 2.0 technologies and platforms offer is what enables successful companies to compete effectively in a very rapidly changing world. It permits products to be developed and rolled out in weeks rather than months, and performance to be turned around in months rather than years.
In government, this same agility can be a transforming force. It can counteract the ossifying tendency of its large bureaucratic agencies, making them not only responsive to the citizens they service, but also to the constantly evolving demands of a fast-changing world.
It holds out the promise of effective interaction with stakeholders in policy formulation and regulation, which not only educates the public, but provides critical information to government decision-makers.
Web 2.0 can improve inter-agency co-operation and co-ordination, especially because its technology components are based on simple, light, open standards and expose their services via programming interfaces that can be easily harnessed by new technologies and services. In terms of fulfilling the constitutional mandate of South Africa’s government, exploiting the platform of Web 2.0 can increase the level of political engagement of citizens, as well as improve the transparency and accountability of government at all levels.
Service-delivery, that perennial bugbear of governments both local and national, can be made more efficient, not only by making government agencies internally more effective, but also by streamlining administrative procedures. It is usually true that customers – citizens, in this case – are often more satisfied with the very same level of service if they have a way to track and monitor the progress of administrative processes. Parcel delivery services and online retailers are famous for their demonstrations of this principle. The European Union is trying to replicate such successes by offering greater insight for citizens into public administration processes such as town planning and farm subsidies.
Another way in which service delivery stands to benefit from Web 2.0 is by increasing the opportunities for companies, individuals and non-governmental organisations to become involved, connect to government services, and provide services to government. This extends the capabilities of governments in local communities and seeds public agencies with new ideas and technologies. The Internet’s second-generation technologies can also provide support for critical communications programmes, such as those around new legislation, consumer protection, or public health, and can make government’s communication both less expensive and more effective.
Whether at the superficial level of public participation, to deep organisational design at the heart of the civil service, Web 2.0 is the only way in which government worldwide can keep up with the changing needs and demands of the citizens they are elected to serve. The South African Constitution was visionary in anticipating this need. The time has come for technology and public service management to catch up and make the vision a reality.