Beyond E-Government

t's easy to figure out where electronic government is going next. Just visit the Web sites of any of the online companies renowned for their online customer service-Dell Computer Corp., Charles Schwab & Co. or Cisco Systems, for example. Don't pay attention to what kind of customer service they can provide, although that's pretty impressive. Notice what they can't provide. The best of them can guide you to information, sell you a product, answer specific questions or hand you off to a person when the technology has reached its limit.

What they can't do, in automated form, is help you define your problem and then solve it by giving you just the right information you need at every stage of your problem-solving process. In other words, there is lots of electronic commerce out there today, but few truly solutions-based e-services. Coming soon to fill the void will be sophisticated digital guides (also called assistants, advisers, advocates or wizards) that will lead customers and citizens through problem resolution automatically. Those at the leading edge of electronic services refer to the creation of digital guides as the "holy grail," and they are working overtime to accomplish it. In the public sector, the first wave of interactive government services has emerged under the banner of e-government. But most of these are shallow e-commerce applications and portals overlaid as a thin veneer on top of massive, outdated organizations and aging information technology systems. They all too often fail to transform a way of doing business or to deliver outstanding return on investment.

What's more, citizens and customers of federal agencies rapidly are coming to expect more from government on the Web. "The days of browsing government Web sites for fun are clearly over," says Tom Davenport, director of the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change. "Highly pragmatic and utilitarian net usage is what prevails now." Federal agencies risk obsolescence if they fail to note the rising expectations for e-government and make changes that anticipate their customers' needs. "E-government has evolved from information presentation to some transactions," says James Flyzik, chief information officer at the Treasury Department. "The next evolution will be to view everything from the citizen's point of view."

As the next wave of technological and organizational change breaks, the only relevant questions for citizens interacting with agencies online will be: Have you solved the right problem and have you helped me solve it well? "People just don't have the time or patience to suffer through information overload anymore," says Davenport. That's where digital guides come in.

For example, let's say a business owner wants to incorporate her new enterprise. This is a problem encountered by tens of thousands of business owners every year, if not more, considering that the growth of small business is one of the primary engines of the U.S. economy. This business owner starts by considering her options in the context of her business goals: A limited liability corporation? A partnership? A "C" or an "S" corporation? What are the pros and cons? As she works through the process, she'll proceed through perhaps 20 or 25 different steps, talk to experts, download documents, fill out forms and pay fees. She'll have to interact with both local and state governments and many private sector service providers. At its best, and with the help of a skilled intermediary, the whole process can take weeks.

The question is, how much of this could be done online?

Today, with the current state of e-business and e-government, attempting to incorporate a business online would involve dozens of searches, several telephone calls, visits to many different Web sites and, if you're lucky, filling out a few online forms. You will have gotten some help, but you're still likely to be a long way from resolving the problem.

For example, if you go to the first place most people would think of, the Small Business Administration's Web site, what will you find? (Lest readers accuse me of picking on SBA, not many other federal sites are any better). The morass of e-government hits you in the face and quickly drags you down. There are dozens of home page menu choices, links to 70 different resource home pages, 45 one-stop gateways, 23 federal business resources (ranging from the Labor Department's Office of Small Business Programs to the Veterans Affairs Department's business links) and seven different search options.

Coming to the site as a business owner myself, I'm immediately overwhelmed with the complexity of many government organizations. Agencies appear more interested in linking to one another and passing me around like a hot potato than in directly and quickly identifying my problem and interactively solving it. Even SBA's "Business Advisor," which pays lip service to the idea behind this article, steers you into a laundry list of topics that quickly leaves you floundering. As Accenture's Davenport notes, "It's easy to build large repositories of knowledge. The scarce resource is enabling people to make sense of [information]." In SBA's case, like so many others, finding anything relevant to incorporating a business is very difficult. And if you can find anything, it's superficial information rather than something that helps solve the problem.

From the individual's perspective, there's also a level-of-government bias. "The breakthroughs in new levels of services are likely to take place at the local and state level, closer to the citizen," observes Craig Holt, a former CIO with Oregon's Transportation Department and now a senior government services manager with consulting firm Andersen. But despite the key roles played by state and local agencies, especially in promoting and regulating business, most of the emphasis on the SBA site is federal.

In contrast to this bewildering information jungle, intelligent digital guides or Web service providers can help you solve your problems online. You quickly identify a role that specifies who you are-a business owner in this case-and the problem you're trying to solve-here, incorporation. Then the guide or service walks you seamlessly through the process of solving your problem. All the different organizations that might contribute solutions will be in the background, called up by the digital guide only in the right context and at the right time. As John Flynn, CEO of TechEd Strategies and former CIO of Massachusetts and California says, "the citizen doesn't care which government entity is responsible. They just want the dead cat off the street." Or, in this case, they want their businesses incorporated the right way. In the new era of e-government, a business owner's online interaction with government will end not just with getting a piece of information or getting a question answered, but with getting good choices made, key documentation completed, fees paid and legal corporate status achieved. In other words, with something accomplished.

Digital guides will embody the expertise of hundreds of skilled business owners, public advocates and legal experts. As they get their problems solved, citizens will come across products and services from government, business and the nonprofit sector presented in small, efficient sets of solutions, not large, unwieldy search results. Whatever is needed to solve a problem online will be there: human experts on call, software, research reports, database queries, online forms, documents and checklists. In one place, on the Web, you'll be able to do in hours what took days or weeks before. But the technology and business architecture will be hidden.

Digital guides will not be focused on products or services per se, but on a well-designed mix of both, customized to target constituencies.

The best solutions-based Web services will apply human expertise and Web technology to help users the same way trusted professionals help to arrange vacations or choose colleges for one's children. But instead of serving a dozen people a day, these e-services will serve thousands or even millions per day. Over time, this new layer of services will get deeper, with a greater variety of embedded solutions from providers of software and content.

While I used incorporating a small business as an example, many other problems are so important, complex and crosscutting that they will drive the creation of digital guides. Pick a major government constituency, such as the elderly, and think about their key life events and problems-arranging long-term care and assessing and collecting benefits, for example. Or consider the head of a family who wants to pay taxes, move, and buy a home or a car. Take young people making decisions about where to go to college. In each case, digital guides will help these people solve problems through the Web without suffering from information overload.

In these areas, and many others, current players who can't keep up with the move toward digital guides will fall into the background, while new players that can orchestrate these solutions-based e-services for important constituencies will move into the foreground. It's not going to be enough for the Small Business Administration to offer people information and advice, or links to valuable resources, for example. And it's not going to be enough for private sector companies to offer their usual assistance to entrepreneurs. Whether it is a public agency or a private company, some organization will take the lead in defining the common, important problems that citizens encounter, and then orchestrate the resolution of those problems online. As the next wave of e-government breaks, organizations will have to be able to show they are tackling the right problems, delivering the solutions and achieving results.

If your agency isn't doing it, another organization will. But many agencies are headed down the wrong path.

For example, the Health and Human Services Department, like most agencies, is trying to find a solution that integrates Web sites and hundreds of different Web servers related to Medicare. At another level, the new head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget is focusing on the same type of integrated interface, but at the governmentwide level, to emphasize efficiency and economies of scale.

Both are missing the point, because their thinking starts with the enterprise and its information instead of customers' problems. "Current offerings and processes are driven by dedicated funding streams," says Andersen's Holt. "Fiefdoms within agencies battle for who's really in charge between levels of government, and the citizen is the loser." Until agencies put citizens and consumers and their problems first, they won't even get close to solutions-based services and digital guides. As General Accounting Office Chief Scientist Keith Rhodes says, "to create a brilliant digital advocate, leadership is going to have to develop some brilliant visions of citizen service to know what to build toward. Government executives are going to have to study their constituencies and then throw down the gauntlet and say, 'This is where we are headed.'"

No Silver Bullet

There isn't yet a single silver bullet technology to drive this sea change in the way services are delivered over the Web. Instead, many different technologies are being combined in novel ways. As a government executive, you and your CIO should already be planning how to draw upon the following advances as you test prototypes and plan your next generation of enterprise systems:

• Understanding and learning. Computer systems are comprehending more of what humans do and say and learning faster on their own. Technologies range from natural language processing that allows understanding of human speech and writing, to automated learning that allows systems to get smarter each time they're used.
• Smart searching and solving. Building on search engines, a new wave of context, decision and service engines will take what a human is looking for-an answer to a question, help in a decision or assistance in solving a problem-and quickly and accurately return the most useful solution in context.
• Next generation data and knowledge management. Data-mining, business intelligence and knowledge management tools make large volumes of data available for new search and problem-solving engines in a way that helps reduce overload. More and more information is produced, stored and exchanged using XML (the emerging standard for Internet-based data exchange).
• Packaged expertise and interaction. There are new, efficient ways to engineer human expertise into intelligent online assistants and make their interactions with users nearly human in quality: preference-engineering (the ability to encode human expertise into computer systems), advisory services (technologies that mimic the ways humans give one another advice), and sophisticated design and implementation of human-computer interactions.
• Secure, modular Web-based systems and services. Web security has a long way to go, but everyone from Silicon Valley firms to the CIA is conducting research in secure, Web-based systems that have commercial potential. The more security is available, the more possible it will be to provide complete solution-based services by offering the electronic signatures, data integrity and security required.
• Collaboration and communication. Collaboration tools and knowledge hubs will allow larger groups of people spread across different locations, levels of government, industries and specialties to work together to solve a problem or to serve someone. It is only a matter of time before someone creates the unique blend that pulls all these evolving tools together in a packaged, marketable fashion as a true digital guide.

As with any disruptive new generation of technology, digital guides will add new value, add new costs, confront real barriers, create new risks and demand new types of relationships. Grappling with the new configuration of services will change fundamental aspects of government.

Digital guides promise great value to the public. Focusing all the players involved in solving a single problem-for example, helping victims of diabetes diagnose and treat themselves-will create greater efficiencies and reduce the time expended by people in getting things done. Service will be improved as government employees and other citizens use these new technologies. The productivity of people and information technology will increase, giving stakeholders a better return on their investments in both. Perhaps most importantly, digital guides will improve automatically, becoming "smarter" as they are used more.

There also will be intangible benefits. As the new information systems capture more human expertise and apply it, people will gradually move from working alone on small-scale problems to working collaboratively in larger groups on bigger, thornier issues. On the other hand, overburdened employees will be relieved of repetitive service work, but some will lose jobs.

Creating this new generation of solutions-based services will require investments, many of them large investments over time. However, the nature of these new services will also change the mode of investment. Instead of massive modernization programs, executives and stakeholders should start with small-scale problems and then chart incremental paths to large-scale solutions. Any organization proposing that Congress approve massive investments without a clear goal of providing solutions-based e-services should be stopped in their tracks.

The new services not only will require new investments, but they will entail many unpredictable costs. The cost not just of buying new systems, but also of keeping them operating and adding new components will be only dimly understood at the beginning, as happened with the introduction of PCs. The big difference with these new solutions will be that maintenance will not rely primarily on technical support. Highly collaborative business and technology support will be needed to handle the evolution of existing systems. For instance, a customer service expert at the Small Business Administration who understands how to navigate incorporating a business will have to work with a software engineer to diagnose problems or develop enhancements to debug and improve a digital guide. This sort of collaboration will require difficult organizational, cultural and process changes. The biggest barriers to implementation of solutions-based services will be political and personal, not technical. As Andersen's Holt puts it, "technology is not the problem anymore. The problem is getting the community of government leaders and employees to believe this can be done."

Political barriers will show up in the private sector, but especially in the public sector as existing organizations refuse to give up their historical identity and power.They will obstruct new players or aggressively compete for the new territory. According to TechEd's Flynn, the need for cooperation and the barriers of turf protection will be so significant that "the only way government executives will succeed is if they make it clear to their people that those who don't collaborate across organizational boundaries will be history." National defense and intelligence, will be effectively walled off from competition. But most civilian areas in government will have to compete with businesses and nonprofit organizations. If the private sector can build solutions-based services for small businesses first, why continue to have anything except a dramatically downsized Small Business Administration? To do otherwise would be wasting public money on an outdated concept. By the time most government executives figure out that they are being threatened, it will be too late and they'll have lost their edge in budget battles, becoming vulnerable to downsizing.

Personal barriers will emerge as concerns about privacy and data security slow down the inevitable centralization, standardization and integration of data and information. The answer here is to use technology to its fullest and to deploy public investment to increase access to available data and secure solutions. The world is going to change from one where citizens think they've got privacy but underestimate how much information has been collected about them, to one where they are offered more choices about the degree of privacy they want and spend more time making sure those choices are executed accurately. As people evolve toward solutions-based e-services, the increased integration, transparency, accountability and performance citizens and customers demand from solution providers will generate new risks that will require careful managing.

But these new services very well may help close the digital divide. Take the example of helping the new business owner incorporate. Once the expertise of entrepreneurs and service providers has been made available through solutions-based e-services, minorities and disadvantaged groups will have new ways to acquire economic freedom and influence. In addition, barriers to learning will be reduced as solutions-based e-services provide a new way of making knowledge and expertise available to those who don't now have them.

No sector of society faces a greater challenge in meeting rising customer, supplier and competitive demands than federal and state governments, where the gaps among expectations, outcomes and service, and capability are largest; where the urgency is least; and where rates of change are slowest.

The challenge-and the opportunity-for government leaders is that the boundaries between economic sectors and levels of government are being dissolved by Web-based services. The questions are: How will new boundaries be drawn? Who will get to draw them? And who will own the resulting new territory? The winners will quickly identify the key problems affecting their core constituencies, target the sources of expertise and solutions wherever they find them, and then take the lead in orchestrating the process of engineering digital guides. GAO's Rhodes believes an "e-governance" structure must be created to enable this new environment.

Some things will never change. The core of government's democratic process and organizational structures will not change rapidly, nor will its decision-making processes. But they will be increasingly crowded out, surrounded and replaced by a layer of solutions-based services and digital guides that will intervene between the public and any organization that tries to serve them.

To illustrate, consider small business growth, one of the key drivers in our economy. As digital guides emerge, mixing the best of private, public and nonprofit in a seamless offering, government likely will lag behind.

Laggards will face pressure to downsize and consolidate. If service is being provided better elsewhere and the staff of the organization providing it can't be proved to be inherently governmental, the agency will fade away. Instead of choosing whether to collaborate in public-private partnerships, government agencies could find themselves having to justify their existence.

The past few centuries of rapid technological and social change offer some practical lessons for increasing the odds of success as the next wave of e-government crests.

• Put someone on point. Make sure you have, at a minimum, an e-government expert on your executive staff to bring you and your team up to speed on this developing wave and what it means for your organization. Even better would be a multidisciplinary advisory team drawn from across your agency, other agencies and other sectors.
• Define the problems and opportunities of your constituencies. Avoid simple mission statements with programmatic line items. You'll have to take the constituent's point of view, recognizing each person's multiple roles as citizen, consumer, neighbor and so forth. Discern the most important problems and opportunities they face. Then you can determine which organizations, technologies and resources will need to be involved in constructing a solutions-based service.
• Assess your current level of service. What are you currently offering your constituents? Is it a program? A service? A product? How well is it being delivered online and off-line? How easily could it be replicated in the private and public sector? Is it a complete solution to a well-defined problem or just a partial contribution? Only this kind of rigorous assessment of current offerings will help you determine the key gaps you need to close.
• Assess your organizational capability. Make sure your organization is practicing leadership and management fundamentals, such as doing solid strategic planning, ensuring financial accountability, making careful technology investments and husbanding human resources. Strength in the basics during times of rapid change is a key ingredient of success. Use capability maturity models and independent evaluations to increase your confidence. For example, the Software Engineering Institute capability maturity model for software development is widely used in government to assess the capability of both contractors and in-house software development organizations.
• Chart out and communicate your course. Involve and communicate with all stakeholders, old and new, so they can help you adjust your direction. Set your direction early and use the power of public office to claim new space and lead into it. There's no reason why enlightened government leaders can't play a catalyzing and facilitating role in developing solutions-based services across economic sectors.
• Build the right alliances. Once you've defined the key problems your constituencies face, scope out the allies you'll need to solve those problems with Web-based services. Allies will include businesses, agencies and nonprofit organizations, here and abroad, that can offer one or some combination of four things: expertise, infrastructure, technology and information. Building these alliances across boundaries to support creation of your services layer is one of the most important actions you can take.
• Adapt to changing conditions. Identify what you don't know, and learn about it. Scope out which technologies will affect you most. Reevaluate your vendors and private sector partners. Assess your staff expertise. In other words, do you know how to find the experts who know how to solve the problems you've defined. Can you get access to them? Manage your investment portfolio (i.e. capital, human resources, physical infrastructure and technology) explicitly, and define what success and failure will mean for your organization in solving citizens' problems.