Week 6: More about One-Stop-Government

Time flies and a week is a blink sometimes, for example at the midterm time.

This week I really don’t know what I have learned for EA or anything else.

Project does not go any further in my view. Clients provide little useful things.

A little depressive, isn’t it? But anyway, still should cheer up and face the next, right?

Before I met the client I searched a lot on One-Stop-eGov and shared on the wiki of our group.

Besides SA, I also looked for OSG of other countries and cities, and the following are some examples I regard as great.

Singapore
HongKong
New Zealand 
UK 
Canada 


Among them the most impressive one for me is the Singapore website, concise and elegant, remember me the famous Einstein quote, "As simple as possible, but not simpler ". Therefore I looked deeper on Singapore‘s eGov2015, released at June 2011.
There are three visions which I would recommend for every Government planning to build a One-Stop Portal.

• Co-creating For Greater Value
• Connecting For Active Participation
• Catalysing Whole-of-Government Transformation

In its vision they define the role of Government as Service and Platform Provider, providing consulting to public, inviting ideas from them, and serves as catalyst in transforming public sectors.


There are various programs Singapore Government running. Among them is one called Whole-of-Government Enterprise Architecture (WOG EA), with objective to optimise ICT assets by rigorously analysing and identifying strategic opportunities from its various lines of businesses, business information, software applications and technology investments.
I somehow was wondering why One-Stop Portal has something to do with EA. Here as far as I understand that OSP is a seamless utility of asset, enhancing synergy and efficiency. By  sharing systems that can be used by multiple government agencies, the Government minimizes duplicative efforts. Therefore the whole OSG thing is a EA (Altough not that confident whether it is right), aiming to minimize the duplicative efforts between departments of Government.
So I think the goal here is back to caculate EA's revenue over cost.

I would like to mention two reports of Accenture searching on eGovs all over the world and gave some directions on evaluation of eGov Realization. 1, 2.
According to it, there are certain rules any eGovernment should follow:

• eGovernment is being viewed as just one of the tools that can be applied to meet the many challenges faced by governments.
•  eGovernment must deliver real benefits to the citizen
• Online services must be marketed to drive take up
• Whole transactions must be completed online to drive cost down
• The citizen is at the center of the vision, but other key stakeholders are also considered
• Connected government requires a connected vision
• Outcomes must be clearly defined and progress measured  
• Collaboration with the private sector is a stated goal

As Accenture seen, the key Measurement Criterias of a eGovernement are its Service Maturity, defining as the level to which a government had developed an online presence, and Delivery Maturity, defining as  the sophistication of delivery mechanisms such as single point of entry,
design by customer intentions, customer relationship management techniques, portal capability and the additional value-added services.

As mentioned in the second report,

The emergence of government portals is the most significant development observed in this round of research.

There used to be a plethora of websites, many with only published information about the agency and its services, delivering limited value to citizens. But this website proliferation has not made it any easier for people to do business with government, as agencies have simply replicated industrial age organisation structures online, without any attempt to consider how the user will behave online as opposed to when they were in-line. 

Government portals are now emerging as the means of bringing some order and citizen-centred functionality to government online.

This report, leased at a early year, far-sightedly describe the development of One-Stop Government, and provide the maturity curve of general government Websites.

However it did not provide methods  to caculate the benefit.

Here is another paper pay more attention from a user's perspective.

According to it the benefit of government website should be:

Providing services to the public through the Web may lead to faster and more convenient access to government services with fewer errors. It also means that government units may realize increased efficiencies, cost reductions, and potentially better customer service.  

 Also as it mentioned: 

this type of benefits are based upon the scale of use, the more people use it, the more potential efficiency and cost reduction will be obtained. 

As it suggest, to caculate the realization of our SEPO project, a big factor should be how many people use it. And also the performance of the citizens information seeking activities can be used as a measure of performance for an e-government Web based service. So the most key elements here are "information user, information problem and information pool", representing citizens,their tasks and the government.