Shared workspace as taking advantage of an

Most of the participants in the Focus Group (but not all) saw the concept of the electronic shared policy workspace as a logical part of the opportunity that advanced technologies provide to increase time and management efficiencies in the Public Service. They indicated that for e-government to be realised, the Public Service has to embrace the technologies available, and learn to apply them to the business of government for the benefits they can provide.

This is not to say that participants thought that shared policy workspace should be implemented just because it is technically possible. In fact, there was a strong sense from the Focus Groups that the availability of technology should not be the primary driver for changes to policy development practices. Rather, they saw greater Public Service utilisation of existing, and developing, technologies as necessary for three reasons:

• To improve the quality and efficiency of government

• To complement, and keep pace with, the move to utilise advanced technologies for greater engagement between citizens, businesses and government, and

• To keep pace with international technology usage trends within governments.

In a general sense, participants saw the risk of not moving towards greater utilisation of available applications for intra-government communications and working practices, as greater than any difficulties there might be in adopting them. That is not to say that there was unanimous agreement for the implementation of shared policy workspace. People saw a number of risks and barriers associated with this particular proposal (refer pp 20-23 ). The principle of using electronic applications to work across departments was however, accepted as necessary if New Zealand is to realise the vision of e-government, and keep abreast of global moves towards information-age government.