I have been meeting clients in several countries during the past two months, and the discussions about the future of citizen-centric services and e-government in general have been remarkably similar. Whether in Australia or Oman, Singapore or Quebec, Belgium or Ohio, the role and value of portals, the need to better leverage the goldmine of public information that governments sit on, and the constant pressure toward consolidation and rationalization of infrastructure and applications are common themes everywhere.

On several occasions I had the pleasure to give our new presentation, "The Future of Government Is No Government", which was first unveiled at the Gartner Spring Symposium in Barcelona. At every session since then, I have had the most attentive crowd ever, and very enlightening discussions afterward.

The main assumption in the presentation is that by 2013, more than 70% of citizen-centric (or e-government or transformational) government strategies will fail. Several examples already point to how traditional approaches to e-government are failing, including the retirement of some high-profile portals and the uneven nature of e-service uptake figures, as well as the emergence of social networks that rate government services in areas like healthcare, education and human services. In a little animation that opens the presentation, we show the "blurring boundary" phenomenon that I mentioned in a previous post, illustrating the role of social networks in replacing government online channels as well as influencing policy-making processes, the emergence of shared IT services to replace individual agency IT services, the role of external data stores for citizen information (such as Google Health or Microsoft HealthVault), the emergence of cloud-based services (such as storage and e-mail), which compete with agency-owned or government-wide shared services.

Two questions keep recurring. The first concerns data protection and privacy issues and whether governments should even consider external intermediaries to have any sort of access to its services, as this may require personal data to be transferred beyond the boundaries of government. While this is a valid point, it misses an important change of perspective: People will be willing to have more-direct control of their own data by selecting who will manage it. Recent data loss cases in the U.K. and U.S., as well as taxpayer data publication in Italy, suggest that citizen are likely to trust other entities more than government when it comes to their own data. Banks would be a suitable alternative, as would insurance companies and a variety of new "personal data vault" services that vendors and communities will make available.

The second question concerns whether or not intermediation and integration of government services and information with others may change and indeed increase liability. A client observed that, if a choice of a particular government service (for example, a child care option or a specific medical practice for a treatment) were to be influenced by a social network by means of peer exchange and service rating, government would most certainly be sued, should anything go wrong with child care or treatment. This risk varies according to the relevant legal system in the jurisdiction and to the attitude toward litigation. However, I would argue that limiting the government role of providing up-to-date, accessible and easily integrated information, as well as granular, self-contained and easily composed services should contain rather than increase such risk.

While the jury is still out about how fast and to what extent the "blurring boundary" effect will influence government operations and IT, it is important to start exploring the emergence of social networks in each jurisdiction and domain, and critically reviewing current interoperability frameworks and enterprise architectures in view of the need to interoperate with a diverse set of intermediaries and service providers in the not-so-distant future.

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Very provocative. Government = MyGovData provider. Via something like OAuth, I can then enable interface providers to offer professional services on top. Seems plausible, plus the new service providers will do a better job in general than gov with the interface design which is better for citizens. You will be able to download a totally open-source lightweight client with x amount of protection to view you medical data or some heavier health portal thing with loadsa banners everywhere which pays you for your medical history,etc.

Gonna raise your points at a BarCampGov tommorrow in Amsterdam

Very interesting but I'm left wondering if you mean 70% of only past e-Govt. and transformational projects or also those that will occur between now and 2013 will fail?

The paradigm is changing. With the advent of more powerful identity and access security tools and the concept of federated access security (to name just one empowering technology)it is not necessary to consider outsourcing information storage to an external location in its entirety. Rather it becomes possible for each owner of information to share relevant and approved pieces with others who are also approved for the purpose. Thus personalized information can be shared with a patient's approved medical staff but only depersonalized health information with pharmaceutical researchers. Third party service providers could also access data and augment it with their own to provide new services, for example, which locations have proven to provide the best environments (medical, environmental, transport-wise etc) to aid recovery of which diseases. Which treatments are more effective for which population groups etc.

A good example of this can be found in the geospatial information area. Many government groups collect pieces of relevant data. Often they fund the collection themselves and are loathe to share it until its pointed out that they can both maintain control of their own information and share pieces of it for the good of their citizens. New services then start to appear; some provided by government agencies some by third parties. The challenge is deciding who can access which information and what they should contribute or pay for it.

Using this approach Landgate, a government agency in Western Australia has developed a significant and growing service to provide geospatial products to a wide variety of citizen and business constituents. They have yet to integrate these services with social networking capabilities (as far as I know but the potential for value-add is huge. Social networking would not be used to enquire about and support the needs of the constituents but to leverage their knowledge and resources in adding to the sum of data that can be shared. Adding image data, reviews, historical facts and much more would considerably enhance the significant information already available to house buyers on previous owners, purchase prices, taxes, titles, etc. for example.

In this new environment the role of government does not disappear, rather it becomes a steward of change, fostering the development of new services and providing the appropriate governance structures. There are still many privacy and practical issues to solve but the role of government might then become "governance" rather than service provision, which is after all, what "government" means.

Andrea - the start point is the failure will be more social than technical. They'll fail because they're not yet citizen centric. They're personal-data centric, which is very different. And we dont want banks to look after our personal data - that's the Sir James Crosby fallacy. We'll look after it ourselves. That's why the Google-Cleveland/MS Healthvault/IBM-Hippat model will prevail, no just in health but across the board. WH