New School of Thought: Interview Halo 2

Professor Richard Heeks is Professor of Development Informatics at the Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester. He is the founder of the first one-year MSc programme in ICTs for Development, and has been consulting and researching on ICTs and development for more than 20 years. He has a PhD in Indian IT industry development from the Open University. His book publications include India's Software Industry (1996), Reinventing Government in the Information Age (1999), and Implementing and Managing eGovernment (2006). His research interests are IT industry development, information systems and corruption, e-government, informatics in mountain regions, and mobiles and development. His online materials are available via: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/idpm/dig, and he can be contacted at: richard.heeks@manchester.ac.uk

1. Your classic paper on e-government “Most e-Government –for-Development Projects fail. How can Risks be reduced”, you stated that 85% of e-government projects in developing countries fail out of which 35% are total failures, 50% are partial failures, and only 15% are successes. It has already been 5 years since the report came out, do you see any improvements?

The real answer is: nobody really knows. There has been much too little evaluation of e-government projects; and failures are quickly "swept under the carpet" so we rarely hear of them. My best guess would be – no, things have not got better. I say this for two reasons. First, these sort of failure rates are almost universal – not just in developing countries, but worldwide; not just for e-government, but for all types of organisational change. Second, as e-government spreads, more and more projects are being done by those who do not follow the basic guidelines for good project management.

2. You also stated that only the first half of “Think Global, Act Local” gets remembered. I have also noticed that most of the donor funded e-government projects are designed by individuals who are not aware of the challenges of implementing e-government in developing countries. Do you think that scenario has improved or is worsening? If not what do you think should be adopted by the donor agencies?

That has been improving to some extent, as there is learning among donors and the consultants and companies that they hire. A simple and apparent recommendation for success would be to say "Stop using foreign consultants; use more local consultants". As a generalisation, this may help, but we need to really understand the problem. Is this simply a question of geography – i.e. the closer in kilometres your designer is to the e-government agency, the better their design will be?

Of course this isn't necessarily so. First, the "distance" between a designer and the context of implementation is more about psychology than geography. Thus, the problem may be less to do with foreigners vs. locals, and more to do with designers coming from a technical background with a "technical psychology" that understands little about the real business of government. Hence, the reason in Manchester that our e-government training aims to train "hybrids" – those who bridge the gap between technology and government.
Second, the problem can often lie not with any individual but with the whole system of donor funding. This is a system that requires quick delivery, and will not allow designers and implementers the time to really get to know the government departments they work in.

3. What are the current global trends in e-Government and what are the opportunities and challenges of e-Government in developing countries?

It would be easy to answer this in terms of technology. For example, the growth of mobile phones and the "fork in the road" faced by many developing country government: should they continue to assume that Web-based services will be delivered via Internet-connected PCs (something that has reached only a tiny fraction of the population to date), or should they be steering around to an "m-government-centric" strategy?

But another global trend I see is that leadership in e-government is moving from industrialised to developing countries. This may sound an odd thing to say – clearly most industrialised countries have far more advanced e-government than most developing countries. But in many industrialised countries, the e-government agenda has now been subsumed within the broader reform agenda. By contrast, developing countries are putting e-government more and more clearly as a headline element. So, in this way, the baton of e-government is passing from the global North to the global South.

Probably quite rightly, too, since – as a rather large generalisation – one may say that the failures of governance are greatest in developing countries. It has thus always been one of the ironies of e-government that developing countries have been both the most challenging locations for implementation of e-government, yet also the sites in which it has the greatest potential benefits.

4. What are the change management issues in implementing e-Government projects in developing countries? How can they be overcome?

The three key change management issues for e-government in developing countries are people, politics and risk. All of which, in the end, boil down to "people". You have to understand people, their motivations, and their politics if you are to succeed in e-government. I say that the golden question every stakeholder asks is this "Why should I get involved in this e-government project: what's in it for me?". If, as an implementer, you can provide a good answer to that, most likely you will succeed. If not, most likely you will fail.

On the issue of risk, then, too often we plough ahead without recognising the great dangers of yet another e-government fiasco. Our recommendation is to build in a very simple risk assessment. We call this "design—reality gap measurement" – based on the finding that the key cause of e-government failure arises from too big a gap between what the design requires, and what is actually present in reality. There's an online guide to this located at: http://www.egov4dev.org/topic1.htm

5. What is your opinion regarding importance of publicity and awareness generation among the public about e-Government services?

The first generation of e-government projects adopted a "build it and they will come" mentality; assuming that by some mysterious magnetism users would be drawn to their Web site without any publicity campaign: perhaps by some form of telepathy! Soon, it came to be seen that government departments would have to market their e-government offerings, and draw people in.

Of course, that only works if you have a good e-gov offering. If you do, users will come back. If you don't, all your publicity is wasted.

6. What role can the public-private partnerships play in e-Government project implementation in developing countries?

Whether we like it or not, PPPs are likely to be a central part of e-government roll-out in developing countries. The private sector can provide financial inputs and expertise that the public sector cannot. But a lot depends on the nature of the relationship. PPPs are like a marriage. If they are truly a partnership of equals, then a long and happy life together is assured. But too often, the private sector partners hold "the whip hand" and dominate. The public sector needs to do all it can to avoid this – retaining contract management skills in-house; keeping contracts small; and spreading them around to ensure one or two private firms don't come to dominate. Research in industrialised countries has shown those countries – like Canada or New Zealand – which have followed this approach have done best in e-government.

7. In most cases, we have seen that e-part of e-government gets more than required attention. What are your opinions on this?

Absolutely. As you'll have seen in my response to the question about change management, we need to give much more attention to people issues. Ultimately, the success of e-government is determined more by people than by technology .

8. What do you think will be the major impact of e-government as a whole in developing and developed countries?

One major impact that e-government is NOT likely to have is reducing government expenditure and thus cutting our tax bills. At least to date, the evidence is that e-government increases rather than reduces government costs. This is particularly true in developing countries where the "automation equation" – that automation means replacing costly humans with cheap IT – is reversed. In developing countries, of course, it's the IT that is expensive, and the human labour that is cheap.

In industrialised countries, we can see that e-government helps to reduce costs for government service users. Indeed, this is a key benefit trumpeted for e-government. But, personally, I find that to be rather a trivial benefit. OK, so I may save the cost of a stamp and five minutes work if I renew my car tax by Web rather than by post … but so what?

Rather, then, I think we should look for the benefits of e-government in at least three other areas.

First, in providing reliable and honest services from government. For many citizens in developing countries, their main problem with government is that they don't know what services are available; that such services are unreliable; and that they often have to bribe to get them. e-Government is addressing this, as well as saving them money and time.

Second, e-government can provide a "procurement dividend". If – and it's sometimes a big if – contracts for e-government work can be targeted at the local IT sector, then that sector can receive a major developmental boost. Of course there are difficulties here – we already alluded to the issue of "distance" of designers; and the challenges of partnering with the private sector. But, nonetheless, there is an opportunity to be grasped.

Finally, e-government is good for attracting business investment, including foreign investment. It does that in a general sense – locations with a good e-government rating are seen as more attractive for investment. And it does that in a specific sense by using "G2B" e-government applications to cut through red tape for businesses, again encouraging them to invest.

9. Finally, are you working on any ground breaking research at the moment? If so what can we expect from it and when can we expect it?

I think I would count myself lucky if anything I did could ever be called "ground-breaking"! Setting that aside, what I'm working on the moment includes two new ideas.

The first is "social outsourcing". Based on an initiative of the State Government in Kerala, South India, this is a new business model for sourcing some of the basic building blocks of e-government – such as data entry, digitisation, and IT training. Instead of keeping this work in-house, or outsourcing it to commercial firms, the Kerala Government has taken a third route. They have facilitated the creation of hundreds of cooperative social enterprises of women from below-poverty-line families, and the work is then outsourced to those enterprises. This seems to provide a win-win. Government agencies get their work done quickly and cheaply. But at the same time, the women from poor communities are provided with a new livelihood.

The second is "ICT4D 2.0". This is based on the idea that we have had roughly one decade of experience with programmes and projects of ICTs-for-development. We can label that first decade "ICT4D 1.0". Now, what will be the new priorities and new ideas for the second decade of ICT4D; which we can call "ICT4D 2.0"? Some parts of this are obvious – for example, far greater emphasis on use of mobile telephony. But other parts are less obvious – for example, a move from seeing the poor as passive consumers of information from telecentres; to seeing them as active producers and innovators +.


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