Going public

I have previously addressed unified infrastructure, applications and business. Unified government systems are very similar to unified business systems, but they have a key difference in objectives.

Business is aimed at profit and staying ahead of the competition - service delivery and accountability are factors in that. In the public sector, service delivery and accountability are the primary goals. That said; it is still worthwhile to point out that government departments can learn a lot from the way private sector organisations do things.

Quick changes can't be made to systems and organisations as vast as those found in the public sector.

Andy Brauer is CTO at Business Connexion.

In terms of approach, government interactions with the citizen are typically conducted on a one-to-many basis. In an ideal world, one-to-one would be a better model - and technology is steadily making this goal more achievable.

The obvious challenge is that government is not monolithic. There are many departments with different views of the individual citizen and there are three main tiers of engagement: local, provincial and national. This, along with the global problems with legacy systems that may be incompatible, is what makes achieving truly unified government systems so difficult.

It has been suggested that a single reference number should be possible that would uniquely identify each individual citizen so that any other party they deal with can securely and verifiably communicate with them, having a 360-degree view of all the relevant details. This could be used in the private sector, but it would be even more significant in the public sector.

The country is years away from that situation, but it is getting closer to entertaining it as an option, enabled by the progress of technology.

What is close to being achieved now is what I call services-oriented government - it is both a philosophy and an architecture that determines how systems are built. The government, like many of its counterparts around the world, has a commitment to improved service delivery and better accountability. Obviously, citizens want that and, ultimately, governments must heed the demands of the democratic majority.

Services-oriented government goes a long way towards realising the ideal situation where citizens have easy, efficient access and service - and government entities have a complete view of the people they are serving.

The devil, of course, is in the detail. Massive amounts of data sit in storage systems that are not integrated with each other and may even be completely incompatible. This covers an enormous range of paper documents, mainframe tape storage and more recent hard drive storage solutions. Add to that the problem that a lot of current information is sitting on desktops at contact centres and might even not be captured to centralised storage systems.

Beyond that, legacy systems that date back to when government departments were independent and did not share any common management or purchasing guidelines need to be replaced or integrated with cumbersome, custom solutions.

What access to global networks makes possible is integration of all these systems, including central storage solutions. I have previously discussed how virtualisation of applications and storage - basically, cloud computing in some form or other - is driving the adoption of common standards and componentised applications.

For the public sector, this has even greater impact than it has already had in the private sector. The State Information Technology Agency (SITA) is playing a crucial role in setting standards that will ultimately achieve integration of all government systems. This is a long road and SITA has sensibly opened up the process for input from all parties on an ongoing basis and, specifically, through the annual GovTech events. This has included government departments, the vendors that supply them and the general public.

Quick changes can't be made to systems and organisations as vast as those found in the public sector. It is a lengthy process and one that proceeds in an organic manner. Initial planning is critical, as is the role of entities like SITA. Beyond that, there has to be the political will to make it happen and an absolute commitment to the viewpoint that the citizen is the “customer” of any public sector department. That is the area where forward-thinking departments have made great progress by adopting a citizen-centric approach that borrows on the experience and methods of the private sector.

As with any organic process, the achievements have been uneven. Some solutions have failed in their promise, while others have proved impractical. But there have been significant successes and the general trend is positive.

Flexible thinking and approaches are very much part of making unified government a reality. In this country, where people have limited access to computers, there have been world-leading solutions developed that depend on mobile phones.

The future of services-oriented government depends on using these resources as much as it depends on resolving the massive technological challenges of systems integration.