What information means for the public sector: from eGovernment to iGovernment.

Several weeks ago, I had a training about what information management means for the public sector in the Netherlands, like the Dutch government. In this blog I want to discuss the growing importance and impact of information for governments and countries themselves in the digitizing society. An example of a leading country in information based society is Estonia. I will write my next blogpost about Estonia and their strategy on information. In the blog, I will first explain the differences between the two variants of digital goverments: the eGovernment and the ‘brand new’ iGovernment. Then, I will further elaborate on the pros and cons for the two latter types of governments. I will conclude in a forecast of what I expect governments will look like in the future. Before the training, I had actually never heard of a thing such as eGovernment. Off course, I knew that in the Netherlands we use an electronic resident number DigID to arrange stuff online, such as study financing, taxes, et cetera. But, what’s more? Is there a model behind that? I never thought about that.

The first variant of the digital governement is an eGovernment, or eGov. An eGov is an abbreviation for electronic government. This is a government which uses stand-alone applications, like a public transport ID card and an Electronic Health Record. This government thinks, discusses and handles based on those applications. This e-government mostly uses digitalization for the sake of improving their services. The European Union defines eGovernment as: “The carrying out of government business transactions electronically, usually over the Internet, but including all the related real-world processes. In our information society, customers increasingly expect government to be accessible and convenient. As customers’ expectations increase, governments must adopt eGovernment strategies”. The emergence of the eGov is highly correlated with the modernisation of the public sector. This is already on the political and policymakers’ agenda for more than two decades. The term eGovernment arose in the nineties. So, the eGov is not new at all. How come that we still don’t know it?

Next and in overlap to the eGovernment, we have the iGovernment (iGov). This is an abbreviation of information government. This government lies centrally in and uses a network of information, and uses flows of information on the back-end of all those applications that the eGov uses. This variant of digital government focusses on information flows. Numerous information flows are created by the usage of the applications coming from the eGov. In the future, other applications and devices will even further increase the amount of information flows. Think of the internet of things that can develop and send even more information continuously into the cloud that might be useful for governments too. The iGov passes boundaries of policy domains and even further. This sets some new subjects for the political agenda of a lot of countries: how do they cope with it and with the vulnerabilities arising (e.g. privacy concerns). Isn’t the eGov good enough, shouldn’t countries exploit that option first?

What do you think? Are politicians in countries aware of the existence of iGovernments? Should governments and policymakers that now focus on eGovernments, consider to quickly switch to the iGovernment model? What happens if countries fail to deal with the innumerable information flows that the digitization brings?
Let me know through commenting on this blogpost.

Thank you for reading :).

References:

WRR (2015) iGovernement [Online] http://www.wrr.nl/fileadmin/en/publicaties/PDF-samenvattingen/iGovernment.pdf

European Commission (2012) eGovernment Benchmark Report [Online] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/sites/digital-agenda/files/eGovernment%20Benchmarking%20method%20paper%20published%20version_0.pdf

Bootcamp Information Management Course (2016) at PBLQ The Hague (www.pblq.nl)