The second UN World Public Sector Report 2003, stresses that even in today’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-rich environment, it will not be ICT by itself that redirects and re-shapes the functions of governments and makes them somehow different or better. However, ICT can certainly contribute to changes in the ways in which governments operate. More importantly, it can force us to collectively re-examine some of the fundamental building blocks of the organization of human society.
This is an important message. In the UN Millennium Declaration, Member States set out an ambitious agenda for human development. Referring to its implementation, they expressed faith in certain universal values, in better governance at the local and at the global level and in science and technology, especially in the transformative power of ICT.
As time passes and we record progress (or lack thereof) in the implementation of this agenda, it is not too soon to start considering the relative value and impact of all these factors. This includes the impact of ICT on the ways we organize ourselves as a human society for choosing and achieving goals of growth and development.
Good governance presupposes people’s participation. ICT challenges the institutions that have for centuries been considered as vehicles for assuring that participation.
Public sector administration has been built for the accumulation of resources and their distribution through hierarchic bureaucracies. ICT tends to strengthen networks more than it does hierarchies. Thus, it challenges the inherited ways of accumulating and distributing resources, including those of the public sector.
In the future, public value may increasingly be produced and delivered by the ICT savvy private sector. This would hardly be possible without renegotiating norms for behavior of public agents - public, private, corporate or individual. ICT challenges the scope of private value and its understanding by private agents who act in the public interest.
Finally, ICT - and especially ICT in the hands of governments - challenges individuals as parties to social agreements that guarantee the human right to privacy.
All these are issues that the world will have to sort out in a new way as a result of the presence of ICT in our society, including its presence in the form of e-government.
The current Report constitutes an invitation to discuss these issues and provides a UN perspective on them. We hope that the world community will read it as it has been written: as a thoughtful compendium of serious issues for serious consideration by all those who care about human development and about the role that public administrations play in it.
We put “e” in front of “government” to recognize that a public administration is in the process of transforming its internal and external relationships with the use of modern information and communication technology (ICT).
ICT is about communication among people: the quintessence of human society. We have always used communication to inform, learn, define concepts and viewpoints, deliberate and reach agreements, in private and in public life. One can put the electronic features of modern ICT into this timeless communication process and benefit from doing so. If this is done in the context of public administration, it is bound to have an impact on the creation of public value. Indeed, e-government at its best can be viewed as the
process of creating public value with the use of modern ICT.2
The notion of public value is rooted in people’s preferences, as only the public can determine what is truly of value to its members. It is also rooted in the ability of government to create things that people want. Outcomes of the development process that improve people’s quality of life, laws that are necessary and just, services that meet the people’s needs, fairness, equity, due process, trust and confidence in government that stems from perception of its overall performance are all things that people want and value. They pay for them with resources and powers that they give up and in exchange they expect the government to be instrumental in producing public value. (If proper ethical values - and especially the value of human solidarity - are in place, this trade-off does not yield to minimalist interpretation: people are known to have surrendered some of their individual liberty to promote, and benefit from, the common good.)
From this point of view, e-government is justified if it enhances the capacity of public administration to increase the supply of public value, i.e. the things that people want.
This model of inter-relationships among the people, government and public value – if applied to analysis of e-government - is simple and straightforward. People express preferences, the government uses ICT to enhance its own capacity to deliver what people want, and eventually a public value - the outcome of a high quality of life - is created.
By Alula Berhe Kidani
