Leadership in e-Government Initiatives

A little free association on the topic.

It is wonderful if the elected and appointed top officials in the government and government agencies understand and support efforts to use the power of ICT to improve government services. But what if they don't? And what if they exercise leadership to use the technology in bad ways? (As the Bush administration has sought to use the technology to increase surveillance of citizens without judiciary oversight.)

Ernie Wilson, who has just taken over as head of the Annenberg Center at USC, has written about the need for leadership from government, business, civil society and academia in advancing the Information Revolution in developing nations. That raises the question of how people in the business, civil society and academic sectors can exercise leadership in e-government initiatives.

While some politicians are really interested in the opinions of citizens and unorganized constituencies, I suspect many are not, and find the increase in contact from constituents a costly bother. (Organized constituencies hire lobbyists, and probably don't want the competition for policy makers attention.)

Similarly, some people in government are indeed government servants in the good sense, while many are bureaucrats in the bad sense. Corrupt government officials, and there are many in many countries, will not be happy about the use of technology to make government more transparent and efficient.

So I suggest that the leadership needed for useful e-government initiatives will often have to come primarily from outside government and from civil servants within the government. Indeed, their leadership will always benefit the efforts. And sometimes the appropriate leadership will be to reverse inappropriate initiatives promulgated by legitimate authorities.

Note too that there are various kinds of leadership, and many need to be present and should be coordinated. There is the leadership:

• from the technological community in selecting the right hardware and software;
• from administrators in the reengineering needed to utilize the technology;
• from political sectors to create the political support required to push the reformsl
• from the business, civil society, and other communities interfacing with the government to restructure sectors to meet and utilize the new e-government capabilities[
• from educators to prepare the human resources needed for e-government efficiency and effectiveness;
  
• etc.