Introduction

E-government is both a driver and enabler of collaboration between government agencies. Agencies will increasingly find themselves collaborating in both the front-office provision of services, and the shared use of information and technology in the back office.

This paper presents an approach to deciding how to govern shared activities that agencies should find helpful when they come to share information and technology. It emphasises the importance of effective allocation of decision rights among partners in shared activities. The two broad options identified for allocating decision rights are:

• a club model, in which the agencies participating in the activity are part of a collective governance environment;
• a unitary model, in which a single decision-maker governs the input.

The approach recognises that there may be hybrid arrangements between the two pure cases.

It should be noted that the approach is aimed at governance of shared activities once they are in operation. It is assumed that, while they are under development, the development project will be governed using standard approaches to managing inter-agency projects.

A shared activity could include:

• Inputs:
  • common technical infrastructure
  • common policy, protocol and standards
  • common business applications/tools
  • common data
  • common delivery channels.
• Outputs:
  • integrated services
  • integrated information
  • intermediate activities (one agency's output is another agency's input)

The parties involved in a shared activity could include government departments, Crown entities, local government, and non-government organisations. Governance approaches to shared activities need to take account of the differing internal governance arrangements affecting such entities, as well as any constitutional or legal considerations.

Why is governance important?

Governance arrangements establish decision-making roles, mechanisms, responsibilities and accountabilities that both enable and regulate the allocation, management and control of public resources, and the delivery of programs and services. At stake is a fundamental requirement that all parties to these arrangements operate within the law and manage public resources with prudence, probity and due regard to economy, efficiency and effectiveness. They must also account for the way the resources have been used.

When sharing activities, agencies interests become more intertwined than when they operate in stand-alone mode. For this type of collaboration to succeed, goals deemed to be in the collective interest of agencies participating in the shared activity (e.g. to deliver an integrated service, to achieve collective efficiency/effectiveness gains), need to be defined, agreed, and achieved. At the same time, the individual interests of the participating agencies need to be understood and balanced against the collective interest. Design of effective governance arrangements is a key to achieving this balance.

Overview - how does this approach work?

The approach is based on the following assumptions:

- allocation and exercise of decision-rights is the essence of governance;

- the process followed in allocating decision-rights is at least as important as the final allocation and exercise of those rights; and

- other aspects of governance such as accountability, funding, and design of governance processes are second-order issues largely outside the scope of this approach.

The approach is intended simply to provide agencies with some steps they can follow to determine which of two generic options for governing a shared activity best suits their purposes. Outsourced private sector provision of a shared input under a commercial contract is excluded from the approach. While a legitimate form of governance, it should be clear when it is an appropriate approach, and requires no elaboration here.

Using the approach is straightforward. All that is required is that relevant staff in agencies that are considering a shared activity come together and answer a series of questions designed to produce a weighting toward one form of governance or another. Experience in applying this approach is that the process of asking the suggested questions (or developing new questions) is at least as important as the answers they provide.