New School of Thought: Interview Halo 4

Åke Grönlund is (full) Professor of Informatics at Örebro University (Sweden), also affiliated to the Dept of Informatics at Umeå University (Sweden) and Agder University (Norway). Åke has been doing research in the field of Electronic Government since the early 1990s as an important specialization of a more general concern with information systems: coordination of organizations and networks using ICT, including electronic service delivery, organizational redesign, electronic information infrastructures, and ICT-enabled coordination of work. A particular focus is developing countries, “ICT4D” which currently includes efforts to use mobile technology for different purposes, with a particular focus on the "D", development, meaning changes to people's lives. Other keywords that reflect projects undertaken past and present include eParticipation and eLearning. Åke is chair of SIG eGovernment within the Association of Information Systems (sigegov.org) .More Info

1. Your fairly recent paper on e-government “Next Step eGovernment in Developing Countries ”, you stated that “administrative maturity rather than technical innovation is the key to enduring success in operation, never try to remedy a poor organization with more IT”. Most of the time developing countries try to remedy a poor government organization with more IT. Have you seen any improvements if not who should lead this change in the government?

What I wanted to say was that IT implementation most often must be accompanied by a real organizational change to have a positive impact. A problem is that much engagement stops at the point of the implementation of a system. Getting that far can for sure be a challenge, but even so it is not enough. It is the use of the system that is the really important thing.

There are many stakeholders that can, and should, play a role here. First, there is no either-or. You cannot first fix a government and then all IT projects will go well. But for each project it is important to try to set up an environment that is conducive to sustainability beyond the implementation of some system. This is true in any country, but in the industrialized world there is often already a business context available where the system fits in, so it is easier. If government cannot provide this environment, for one reason or the other, it should be the role of donors to push in the right direction. Unfortunately, donors often have a very short time perspective. Once a system is installed they feel they have done their part and leave, which often means systems stay unused. In fact also many academics stop the review at that point. But a project completed in time is not necessarily the same as development. Development means real change in people’s lives.

A new trend among donors is sector support which means they give money to a sector budget and don’t bother about the management of individual projects. I guess this can be seen as an improvement, but there are also risks. While it is intended as a more comprehensive and focused support – indeed aiming at long-term engagement rather than focus on individual projects – it also seems to mean, in practice, less of day-to-day monitoring and more of post-hoc evaluation. Post-hoc evaluation is a good thing if the receiving country has good ability to manage projects but if not it will in practice mean it takes longer time to detect that the development is not going well.

2. Can you tell us about the e-government masters program at the Örebro University? Is the program designed for students from developing or developed countries and what has been your experience with the program so far?

We are currently recruiting the 3rd batch of students for start this Fall. The program has so far attracted mainly students from developing countries in Africa and Asia, although we have students from four continents. The program is designed to be for students from any country, but clearly the interest has been biggest from developing countries. I like to think this is because eGovernment is an important thing in developing countries at this time and our students hope to find a job in their home country after graduating. Our first students are just about to graduate so we don’t really know yet, but I know that at least a few of them seem to have such jobs coming up. From my personal experiences of developing countries I am quite convinced that there is a great need for people that both know eGovernment and the actual country to help make both aid programs and other development work.

Our experiences of the program so far are positive. As concerns the students, they have been very ambitious. Many of them do their thesis fieldwork in their home countries which is interesting for us as we get a lot of new knowledge, but most of all, I trust, useful for them and their countries as they actually engage in important issues there. For example we have one student trying to improve information to farmers in Cameroon in cooperation with an NGO, another working with public-private partnerships in Ghana, and a third with ICT-enhanced process improvements in the Cameroon Parliament. We hope many of them will move to a job in their home country after graduating. Student evaluations of our program are positive. So far the program is young, the first batch is graduating late May this year, so we are doing a thorough review right now to see what changes we should make. One of the changes will probably include IT preparatory courses; we accept students not only from IT/IS disciplines but also from other, e.g. management, as we are interested not only in IT but also changes in government business and indeed in social life. This means our students have varied IS/IT knowledge and we probably need to compensate for that a bit.

Another thing is that starting this year we have a small but hopefully growing scholarship program. There are different financiers for that, one is the SPIDER program (Swedish Program for IT in Developing Regions; www.spider-center.org) which is an affiliate of Sida (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency). This will make our program even more attractive, we believe. One particular feature of the SPIDER support is that it is coupled to cooperation with universities in developing countries. This means students who take our program on a SPIDER grant will have a 2-year job in her/his home country after graduation. From our point of view that is really good as these people can make much difference.

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

If I were to name just three things I would say focus on measurements, development – i.e. effects – and mobile technology. A major global trend, which I’m sure will become even stronger, is trying to assess the effects of eGov. In the industrialized world this is sometimes called benefits management; in the developing countries it is typically called “development”. A major problem for eGovernment is that while costs are tangible – come in real money – many benefits do not. At least not if you go beyond government organizations and look to improvements in people’s lives, societal development, and indeed qualities of government such as transparency, openness, trust, and accountability. Or indeed synergies between government departments – not even that is often measured. Benefits are often seen as straight-forward earnings or saving for individual government agencies or departments. This is both a theoretical and a practical problem. Models have been developed to cover all types of values (economic, social and political) but are so far little used, for many reasons. One is problems with measurements, another is that the way government operates may mean that to achieve some benefit in one organization investment has to be made in another. And that is very, very hard to do in practice.

As concerns developing countries, there is a clear risk that development – that is, changes in people’s lives and for society in general – will be sacrificed for the sake of return on investment for governments. So the balance between finding clear measurements and achieving real change is delicate and should be clearly observed. This is something I think academics could help with instead of just measuring tangible things like what’s on a web site and whether or not a project was completed on time.

Another trend for developing countries, I think, is mobile technologies. Many have said this for some time but I think the time is soon ripe for this to happen on a grander scale than the experiments and prototype uses we have seen so far. The developing world has impressive mobile phone connectivity and this can be used for many things. In particular as it is not just a theoretical access, people actually use the mobile phones.

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

Perhaps somewhat paradoxically in view of what I said above, I think developing countries also have to develop some economic thinking about their systems. They must start thinking in terms of not donations but sustainably improved processes, and to do that some measurement is necessary. This is what we have done here in, for example, Sweden. Government agencies calculate investments in IT against gains as expressed both in terms of internal efficiency and national goals, such as access for all, time for delivery, administrative burden, etc. For real, sustainable change I think something similar is necessary in developing countries. It is not enough to look to “Implementation of a system”. Even if measures are incomplete they are necessary.

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

It is of course important to publicize available services, but most important is to create services that bring value to people. I think publicity channels like the Stockholm Challenge Award are important to the extent that they indeed try to promote projects that bring real change and can serve as good examples to other countries. This is important as there are so many examples of services that are too focused on technology. Promoting services to target audiences is a different matter. I think that is not so much of a real development problem, but it is a timing problem. It often takes time before people change their habits and start using electronic services and during that period many critics find time to say investments are “useless” (see the story from Sweden below). Clearly that can be a real problem in a political sense but if there is a true change agenda behind investments it can be endured. If there is not I guess it is a good idea to get one.

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

PPPs can play an important role but they have to be carefully managed. If you look around you see both failures and successes. In some countries exceptionally cheap broadband connections have been built by means of a PPP. In other the private partner has made cable use virtually unaffordable for government and citizens. So partnerships have to be clearly defined so as to add value to all partners involved. Many factors have to be addressed to achieve this, for example organisational and cultural differences between public, private and civil society sectors, attracting and sustaining participant involvement, managing expectations, building new competencies (as opposed to just building something by the help of someone else, managing inequality amongst partner, etc.

7. In most cases, we have seen that e-part of the e-government gets more than required attention. How is your opinion on this

If you mean negative attention such as number on how many percent of eGovernment projects that fail I think that although there are certainly many failures (1) no one can specify the exact percentage as no one knows the whole set of projects; (2) even though some projects clearly fail there may be at least something positive coming out of them, and (3) eGovernment is more an organizational challenge than a technical one. The last point is of course a bit deterring – if we can’t even implement a system how can we possibly make government better? But my point is that eGoverment success takes long time. Let me make Swedish example. eGov here started in the mid 1990s. After 5 years many claimed it failed as use was so small, only a few % of the population used eGov services. Then came the success stories. Today all major government agencies –the Tax Authority, the Labor Market Agency, Customs, the Student Loan Agency, you name them – have shown huge benefits. And people use the systems. But this took 10 years from investment started. And Sweden had a well working government already at that time, it was just the IT part we had to improve, and we had to reorganize to realize the benefits IT gave us the opportunity to make. Why would a developing country with a less well-organized government than Sweden be quicker to make real gains?

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

Depends on how governments manage to meet challenges. The impact of e-government will differ between countries. I am sure many governments will be able to improve their operations and provide good services to citizens. But I am also sure that many will lag behind. In Sweden we can already see major changes. I no longer have to leave my house for any business with government (except the yearly inspection of my car). Also many tasks has disappeared, for example you can do your annual income declaration by one sms. This is important for many people here as time is highly valued. In developing countries that may not be the most crucial issue, it is probably more valuable to have an efficient and reliable government, so perhaps the greatest impact eGovernment can provide is steps towards that end.

Regardless of where you start, it is important to show progress, not only in terms of implemented systems but much use and improved situations for people. Sustainability, measuring of effects in a broad sense, reorganization, and increasing professionalism in management of IT and development projects are crucial.

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

One thing I think will become very important is mobile solutions for developing countries using existing infrastructure, that is, mobile phone technology. We currently work on solutions for education, and agricultural market information, two very promising areas. We have for example developed a Learning Management System in Bangladesh which is completely accessible from a mobile phone. It is currently used at Bangladesh Open University for some 70 000 students. Simple technology, but it contains some quite useful tools, and in combination with innovative – interactive – pedagogy it works quite well. I think many things can be achieved this way, and it could happen quickly as infrastructures are there and people know how to use these technologies. Another thing we develop is an sms system for delivering market information to farmers for the purpose of making them better informed and hence able to be more in control of their situation. This is crucial in most countries. Many governments collect price information but not many have succeeded in bringing the information to the farmers. Using mobile phones for information delivery is yet more or less unexplored in practice. So far we have done some tests in Cameroon and Bangladesh and we hope to be able to do some large scale tests soon.

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