ICTlogy

ai-see-TEE-lo-gee

Notes from the IPID ICT4D PG symposium 2008, Mekrijärvi Research Station, Joensuu University, Finland. 8 and 9 September, 2008.

Edephonce N. Nfuka, Stockholm University: A Holistic Approach for IT Governance in the Public sector Organizations in a Developing Country: A Case Study of Tanzania

What is IT Governance? Business support, IT risks, performance, delivery time, service cost, service quality, etc. Basically, business people have to be aligned with IT people.

A holistic approach covering the following areas of improvement:

• Leadership
• Effective coordination mechanisms
• Reasonable IT investment

Research question: how could IT Governance in the public sector in a developing country be streamlined in order to improve public services delivery? A framework for effective governance:

• ITG Context
• ITG Mechanisms
• ITG Key Decisions
• ITG Maturity
• ITG Problems & Consequences

More info

• Edephonce N. Nfuka A1 and Lazar Rusu Management of IT-enabled change in a public organisation in Tanzania

Marilla Palmen, University of Kuopio: How to develop participatory research methods to assess health information management needs of families with small babies?

Participatory action research approach to help health care workers to improve their work. “My Wellbeing” is an e-health tool (actually in conceptualization phase) for families and individuals to monitor their own health.

Challenges: how to know the user needs? how to know the best way to fit them?

Some approaches to conceptualize this “my wellbeing”

• Health services development
• Information needs assessment, information behaviour, information seeking behaviour, information practices
• Personal information management

Evelyn Kigozi Kahiigi, DSV-Stockholm University: E-learning in the developing country context: Adoption and Utilization at the University Level in Uganda

Ugandan framework for ICT and Education

• ICt acquisition liberalization (1996)
• Rolling out a National Data Backbone
• Growth of the ICT Sector
• Integration of ICT into the curriculum of primary and secondary education
• Integration of ICT in teaching and research in Higher Education
• SchoolNet Uganda, Uganda Connect, Research Network of Uganda

BUT the reality is that there are ICT acceptance issues and limited utilization of ICTs for education: e-mail, LMS to upload notes, and powerpoint presentations to teach. Maybe due to limited access, maybe due to a lack of awareness in the educational framework.

Instead, there is a growing informal e-learning in Uganda: Internet, chats, e-content, mailing lists and chats… This informal e-learning should be exploited.

[this reminds me of Ivan Illich, Sugata Mitra and others about deschooling society and being confident about the ability of children to self-teach themselves when an appropriate framework is provided.]

Niels Peter Nielsen, University of London: Mobile Technology in African Rural Development

Main issues:

• Need for active policies to spread ICTs in rural areas and the benefits of investing in agriculture.
• How does access to mobile technology influence the rural residents bargaining power in the market place?
• How do mobile technologies fulfil social functions in the marketing process? How are issues discussed including and beyond “pure” price negotiations?

Based on action research.

Third Annual ICT4D Postgraduate Symposium related posts

Notes from the 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress.
Session V

Keynote speech

Helen Margetts

Government on the Web

A shift of paradigm in Government

Dunleavy, Margetts (2006) Digital Era Governance: the dominant paradigm of public governance reform (new public management) is dead. The digital-era governance is nigh… or just happening.

What happened during the New Public Management?

• Disaggregation, into tiny decentralized government and quasi-government agencies
• Competition within the daily tasks of government, its relationships with suppliers, outsourcing, financing, etc.
• Incentivization: via privatization, performance related pay, charging, etc.

What are we likely to see during the Digital-era governance?

• Reintegration, going the way back of atomization that the New Public Management achieved adn that showed not being always efficient
• Needs-based Holism, focusing on the client and client structures, including co-creation and co-production. This can lead to government doing less and citizens doing more.
• Digitalization, of documents, of deliveries, of processes, of communications, etc.

But things are happening slowly: e-government lags behind e-commerce, web-based provision still weak, low interaction at the G2B and G2C levels.

Government on the Web

www.governmentontheweb.org

While most government sites are roughly steady in the amount of visitors they have, Directgov, the global, cross-level, cross-government, portal for e-Government in the UK has a huge increase, which brings interesting reflections both about the successful strategies and also the related threats. Directgov, for instance, as an impressive amount of inbound links, even if outbound links are not much higher than other Government sites. Reasons are many, but an accuracy to define a profile and links from other countries and initiatives are two of the most important. On the other hand, Directgov is one of the smallest (in number of pages and documents) sites of all, being the tax agency and the education department on the other end. A correct strategy would be for these heavy sites to bring their content — or links — to Directgov, acting the latter as a hub and the former ones as the store.

Generally, the cross-government site got and retained more users looking for specific content (15 questions on a survey) than search engines.

Some conclusions

• Sites are well rated and quality has improved, but the design and heavy-text makes can make them being near obsolete in the short run
• Despite the amount of money spent, more should be put in improving the existing information
• Centralization strategy seems to be working

Digital Era Governance

Main characteristics:

• Risk: adding up to the creation of a super-state that the New Public Management began
• Risk: setting up a chaotic, poorly designed, digital strategy that is built on the run
• Use of pervasive information
• De-coupling information analysis from control
• Customer orientation and segmentation
• Proactive
• Isocratic government: help citizens do it themselves
• Co-production: the government sets the frame, the citizen fills it
• Co-creation: government provides capacity or facility, citizens design own projects using it
• Peer production: government benefits from social production
• The change of the public management regime increases the autonomy of the citizen and the level of social problem-solving.
• If the government does not provide the information and services, people would find it anyway

e-Government 2.0

• Rich information and content
• Highly specific “deep” search
• Giving information back to the users about their own use of the service
• Creating part-finished products
• Co-production leading to co-creation
• Customer segmentation
• Broadening the amount of stakeholders implied
• Para-organizations can blossom, where users are into front office

e-Health 2.0

• Performance data freely available
• Managers can be customer oriented
• Direct voice for patients
• Co-production, co-creation
• Patient input replaces controls

Risks of remaining in e-Government 1.0

• Ignore young people
• Text-only communications is under-investment
• People go where they want to go
• Loss of visibility, loss of nodality for not being there

Q&A

Me: Does Web 2.0 poses a threat to representative democracy? Why should I be engaged if it is really comfortable, efficient, to be represented? HM: Engagement has now less costs, and the impact of being engaged is now higher, so the net balance of engagement is much higher, as costs are lower and benefits are higher.

Eduard Aibar: What happens if all skills and human capital is placed at the private sector? where is the limit of outsourcing public services? HM: Is is a threat to the enforcement of the social contract. The Government has a need for public-private partnerships, but should leverage the learnings in its own benefit and also be aware of imbalances.

Eben Moglen: what happens with data security, citizen privacy, spending on privative software, etc.? What happens with the politics of public services? Maybe Google will always be superior to any e-strategy from the UK Government. HM: Incompetence adds to politics in this case, and sometimes personal agendas — Eben Moglen absolutely disagrees.

Mònica Vilasau: is the citizen more concerned about security or privacy when he addresses a government website than when he uses e-commerce? HM: Normally yet, people are more concerned of giving their data away to governments than to private services, maybe because they’re unaware of the benefits of the public service and the government (cleverly, responsibly) using their data.

Michael Jensen: Implications of the process of co-production and co-creation. HM: The citizenry are creating with their searches, with their comments… they are whatever they do. So the Government should not permit himself being set aside from this conversation.

Me: what’s the risk of mashups and websites run by para-governmental organizations? who’s liable for the quality of the information? who’s to assess its accuracy? HM: Of course there’s a risk, but if the Government is publishing the right, correct, needed, information for the citizen, good practices will be more than the bad ones. And these sites put pressure on the Government to issue its official and original information to the wide public in an easy, quick and accessible way. On the other hand, we should distinguish about websites with low level of identification with high level ones, where more “important” transactions take place.

Rosa Borge: What makes Directgov so different? How can these metrics be developed?. HM: Metrics were gathered by coding brand new free software for the research project. The big difference of Directgov it is that it was brand new in many ways, especially the concept. But its main problem is that it is really centralized, and that central office could not now everything about the UK Government. This is being corrected, and is shifting towards a more Web 2.0 approach.

David Osimo: Quite often we see “cool but useless” sites from governments, that are reluctant to give away their information or “power”. What to do about this? HM: There’s a need for a cultural change inside institutions, where they realize that they have to innovate in this area, and begin to listen, and aim towards (an unwanted) change.

4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress

If you need to cite this article in a formal way (i.e. for bibliographical purposes) I dare suggest:

From 2005 to 2007, good friend Francisco Lupiáñez took part in a Manuel Castells’s project entitled Technological Modernisation, Organisational Change and Service Delivery in the Catalan Public Health System (aka PIC Salut).

His main findings in the Public Health system related with the adoption of ICTs are really similar to the ones I pointed at — there related to the Educational system — in my conference Opening Session: Digital Citizens vs. Analogue Institutions (indeed partly based on data from a brother project, L’Escola a la Societat Xarxa: Internet a l’Educació Primària i Secundària, also led by Castells and belonging both of them to a framework project about ICT adoption in Catalonia, Spain).

These findings can be summarized as follows:

• ICTs are broadly considered as a promising tool among physicists and nurses, health care professionals at large (managers, the pharmaceutical sector, etc.) and patients.
• Internet and intranets are widely used to get Health information.
• But e-health management and service delivery systems, even if in a growing trend, they are far from being mainstream and are quite often rare.
• ICT used is mainly focused to interprofessional use, while patients (or the direct use with the customer) are excluded from the equation.
• Productivity, efficiency and quality don’t seem to be affected because of lack of accompanying measures in habits, procedures, strategies, policies, etc. at all levels.

Put short: information and some professional interaction, but almost total lack of communication. e-Health 2.0? No way. Interactivity does not exist and, actually, the “reputation factor” still plays a very important role that the Internet has not solved yet (i.e. who do you trust?).

More details about the results of the project can be accessed here and here.

For those who can read Catalan, this is a very interesting presentation:

On the other hand, there’s a conference at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park on Thursday 15th May 2008 just about this subject. Please find here more information about the programme.

If you need to cite this article in a formal way (i.e. for bibliographical purposes) I dare suggest: