E-Government in Europe: Uniform solutions for all countries?

Abstract

In many respects, E-Government is just a new name for the informatisation of the public sector, which has been going on for several decades now [6]. The use of IT in public administration and in other branches of government (including parliaments and the judiciary) has attained a high level in many countries of the industrialised world. But until recently, there was hardly any political interest in this ongoing and almost invisible process of modernising government. With the announcement of a National Information Infrastructure by US Vice President Al Gore in 1993, this situation changed fundamentally. Gore heralded not only the potential for a renewal of society which an “Information Society” holds. Unlike his follower in Europe, EU Commissioner Martin Bangemann who pursued an agenda of economic liberalisation and of cutting back public services, he related this potential directly to the goal of improving the performance of the public sector. The renewed “Information Society” rhetoric of the last decade and the modernisation of public administration and public policymaking thus seemed to join forces. Yet an insistence on E-Government in a fairly narrow sense distracted many efforts from effectively harnessing IT and the modernisation of the public sector. Despite many efforts at introducing a “New” Public Management, this modernisation does not progress quickly enough to match societal changes and changing governance structures in Europe. In the new rhetoric of E-Government, the earlier stages of “informatisation” (e.g. process automation, data banks, decision support systems) were often disregarded in favour of bringing as many “services” as possible to the Internet. A focus on the Internet, hence on the improvement of communication, overshadowed the potential of IT to store and retrieve data, to organise workflows, to support human decision-making, to name but the most relevant fields where IT can either automate production processes or serve as a prosthesis for human actors. The modernisation agenda, which is now feasible with E-Government concepts and tools, is much broader than is often acknowledged [9]. A still prevailing view of E-Government stresses the external relationships of government agencies with their suppliers, their addressees (citizens, customers, constituencies) as well as with other government agencies. This view has its merits in that it opens up the predominantly inward-looking structures of IT in government towards a focus on services rendered and on results. Yet it has rightly been observed that E-Government resembles an iceberg. The nine tenths of its volume below the water surface are as important as the top. To grasp the potential of IT for the modernisation of public administration and of public governance, at least four different perspectives have to be combined [10]: