June 13, 2007

By Jason Deign, News@Cisco

A casual interloper at last year's Public Services Summit @ Nobel Week could have been forgiven for thinking they had stumbled on a youth conference.

Speakers at the event, co-hosted by the City of Stockholm and Cisco Systems, Inc, projected viral ads and YouTube videos onto giant screens; delegates left for guided visits of mobile-enabled shopping malls and digital arenas; and the buzz was all about blogs, Google and Instant Messenger.

But this was actually a gathering of serious civil servants, with a serious mission in mind: tackling the challenge of reengineering public services to make them fit and relevant for the citizens of the 21st Century.

In this quest, it turns out, looking at the habits of the youth is a good starting point, not least because a growing number of citizens have known nothing other than a world equipped with mobiles, browsers and digital interactions.

The platform approach, personalization capacity and level of user control found in so-called 'Web 2.0' applications favored by the youth market are also significant for the public sector in a different way, because they point to how governments may best serve their citizens in future.

Almost across the board, the biggest challenge facing delegates and speakers at the Public Services Summit was how to deliver increased value by putting citizens at the heart of their IT strategies, in the same way as has occurred with today's most successful Web businesses.

In France, for example, Christine Lagarde, Minister of Foreign Trade, pointed out how online tools are transforming public sector service delivery.

"Ten years ago, a French tax return was a long, complicated form that had to be filled in by hand and even changing address required you to notify up to 15 different government agencies," she says.

"Now 53 percent of French citizens carry out government administrative functions online and our Web services are consulted on average 2.5 times per second, all year round; 65 percent of all services available on the Internet can be completed entirely online.

"We want all administrative formalities to be available online by 2008 and by then we also plan to implement monservicepublic.fr, which will be a one-stop-shop of customized information for citizens."

Meanwhile Ken Cochrane, Chief Information Officer for the Government of Canada, told delegates his country had seen a 12 percent improvement in citizen satisfaction with public sector services between 1998 and 2005 thanks to its 'Citizens First' service improvement initiative.

"Every time a citizen has an interaction with the public sector it is a moment of truth in which trust can be built or lost depending on the quality of the treatment they get," he reminded the audience.

Even speakers that did not have to deal directly with the general public were frequently concerned with applying Web 2.0-like attributes to their systems to improve usability.

One example was Vance Hitch, who has been working since 2002 as Chief Information Officer for the United States Department of Justice to reduce the massive number of disparate systems under his department's control and make it easier for users to get at information.

The department has reduced a large number of WANs to one, the Justice Unified Telecom Network or JUTNet, and similarly is replacing seven case management systems with one and several booking systems with a single Justice Automated Booking System.

In addition, the department's infrastructure is being streamlined with the creation of linked National and Regional Data Exchange Systems which for the first time will allow law enforcement agents to carry out "Google-like" searches for details of crime across the United States.

Cisco Vice President Nick Earle ended the summit with a speech on The Rise of the Empowered Consumer, in which he highlighted the role of the network in bringing about the transition to citizen-centric services in the public sector.

"Only the network can serve as the foundation for linking together the delivery channels for public services because it touches all of them," says Earle.

Other government speakers at the event included the Vice Mayor of Stockholm, the Vice Chairman of China's Science and Technology Bureau, India's Ministry of Communication and Information Technology and the Portuguese Secretary of State for the Interior.

In addition, delegates heard from Cisco's Vice President, Public Sector, the President of the National University of Singapore, the Vice Chancellor and Principal of the University of Sydney, the Chief Information Officer of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and the Young Foundation.

Jason Deign is a freelance journalist located in Barcelona, Spain.