The future

The future of e-government in New Zealand is an exciting prospect. The transformation of government operations through the Internet by 2010 will mean that policy development, service design and delivery, democratic and political processes will undergo significant changes as e-government facilitates greater participation in government. There has already been a gradual increase in the use of the Internet to invite input during the policy development; the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology has actively used e-consultation as one of several channels to invite participation from the public, as has the Online Authentication programme. Concurrent with the expected increase in levels of participation, will be the emergence of more demand-oriented initiatives. Increasing pressures for all-of-government solutions to policy and service issues will likely see an increasing public expectation to participate in the way that government policies and services are designed and delivered. Government will need to be more responsive, more customer-centric and more of a seamless experience for New Zealanders.

One of the more important initiatives in this transformation is the delivery of linked services. This means that a member of the public will be able to accomplish a variety of different interactions with multiple government departments in one online transaction.

Someone wishing to open a business, for example, could go to a business portal and fill out one online form that would be dispatched to the various central and local government departments requiring documentation for this process. Someone lodging a change-of-address form online could have it routed to NZ Post, Inland Revenue, Land Information New Zealand and the relevant councils. E-government is about networking people, information and services so that New Zealanders experience the most efficient, effective and responsive government that we can deliver.

The challenges presented by this level of interoperability and cooperation between departments, while not insurmountable, will certainly require great leaps in both the application of technology and management strategies. There are lessons to be learned from the experience of overseas jurisdictions; complex and costly implementations, high support costs and difficulties with interdepartmental interoperability. These problems have been compounded by limited citizen take-up, either because the wrong services were delivered or because the software and hardware requirements were insufficiently intuitive for users to comfortably adopt.

New Zealand has some distinct advantages in having a relatively compact, single tiered central government, a solid foundation of e-government standards developed over the last four or five years, a collaborative management ethos across the Public Services, and a populace who are both Internet savvy and early adopters of new technologies. But delivering on the e-government mission for 2007 will require a sea-change in the way government departments view service delivery: from a supply-based model to a demand-based model centred on the customer. To facilitate this transformation, effective organizational, governance and funding models for shared infrastructures will need to be developed and implemented. This is the next phase of e-government in New Zealand.