Tune in to hear from Dr Jennifer Robinson from the Utah University’s Center for Public Policy and Administration and Rich Olsen from Utah Interactive talk about the findings from the report, and the importance of  measuring the impact of online service delivery.

When we go to agencies, it’s really a great story to be able to say “We know times are tough, we know budgets are down, we know things are getting slashed – and it might sound a little counter-intuitive but maybe you should invest in an online service.”  The fact of the matter is, it saves money and in the long run it saves a lot of money.

About Dr. Jennifer Robinson

Jennifer Robinson serves as the Director for the Center for Public Policy & Administration at The University of Utah.  With a solid commitment to both scholarship and practice, Dr. Robinson works to ensure that research contributes to sound policy making, implementation, and administration.

Dr. Robinson is held in high regard in both the business and government communities for her work as well.  She is a member of the Salt Lake Chamber’s Capitol Club, the Utah League of Cities and Towns’ Policy Advisory Board, and the University of Utah’s Veterans Day Committee.  In the past several years, Dr. Robinson has done extensive research on elections, political participation, and governance. Dr. Robinson’s current projects include a number of research projects for local and state governments, co-editing a book with Dr. Patton on policies in the western United States, and developing a book on American Indian political behavior based upon the research completed for her dissertation.

About Rich Olsen

Rich Olsen is the General Manager of Utah Interactive, a subsidiary of NIC., the leading provider of e-government services in the USA.  He has more than 13 years of experience leading a wide-range of online service deployments on behalf of public sector entities. In his current role, Mr. Olsen leads NIC’s management of Utah.gov, including the ongoing development of Web 2.0, e-commerce and other digital solutions delivered by the State through Utah.gov.

Based in Salt Lake City, Mr. Olsen leads NIC’s team of software engineers, designers, project managers and marketing executives working solely on Internet initiatives that bring government closer to citizens. During his tenure in Utah, Utah.gov has placed first in the Center for Digital Government’s “Best of the Web” rankings, which honor outstanding government portals and Web sites based on their innovations, functionality and efficiencies, in both 2007 and 2009.

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Episode links and resources

• Utah.gov
• University of Utah’s Center for Public Policy and Administration
• Report on Financial Benefits of Online e-Government Services in Utah (pdf)
• Blog post from Utah CIO Dave Fletcher on the report: The efficiency of E-Government
• Utah Interactive

60-second snapshots

On why measuring online service delivery is important:

On lessons learned building Utah.gov:

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The pilot project will be trialing how ICT – and particularly the use of mobile – can play a role to support the traditional, human-centric tribal processes and enable greater local participation in democratic processes.

The originality of this project is that we do not aim at implementing an ICT tool without looking at the traditional role of chiefs in the local politics.  Rather, we want to incorporate these [ICT] tools within the traditions and not look at only online tools but the offline world as well.

About Kheira Belkacem

Kheira Belkacem is Assistant Programme Director at eGovlab, and is currently completing her PhD in Political Communication at the University of Leeds UK. Her experience in the European Parliament, when working closely with the Director General of the Directorate-General for Innovation and Technological Support in 2008-2009, left her with a strong expertise of parliamentary systems and adoption of new technologies in democratic institutions. She also spent a summer internship at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) on the e-Governance Programme in 2008.

In 2010, Kheira worked as a research assistant for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford and in 2010-2012, she taught modules on communication theories and new media group project as a teaching assistant at the Institute of Communications Studies. She is currently the Assistant Programme Director of Botswana Speaks and is involved in other projects run by the eGovlab.

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Episode links and resources

• Botswana Speaks website, on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
• The Parliament of Botswana
• eGovlab of Stockholm University / Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV)
• Gov2u
• Swedish Trade Council
• Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA)

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The electronic government landscape is increasingly pointing towards a diffusion of power, and an increased role and voice for citizens in public decision-making.

Tomasz Janowski from the UNU-IIST Center for Electronic Governance discusses some of the global trends that he is observing: participatory democracy, the increased regulation of new service delivery channels and the need for leadership in ICT services, challenging the notion of what “whole of government” really means in practice.

With positions of CTO, Chief Knowledge Officer, Chief Innovation Officer emerging, we also see the Government CIO as a consolidating role speaking on behalf of government information technology to other functions of government, and also to the public.

Tomasz also shares some of the recent discussions and shared experiences emerging from the W3C e-Government interest group around the use of social media in Government.

About Dr Tomasz Janowski

Tomasz Janowski is a Senior Research Fellow at the United Nations University International Institute for Software Technology in Macao, where he founded and heads the Center for Electronic Governance. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK, where he obtained PhD in Computer Science and Assistant Professor at the University of Gdansk, Poland, where he obtained MSc in Applied Mathematics. He also worked for software companies in Poland and the U.S.

Tomasz’s research focuses on Electronic Governance (EGOV) policy and practice including foundations, education, development frameworks, models and design, measurement, etc. He directs EGOV research, transfers research results into practical instruments, and applies such instruments in government policy and practice. Under his leadership, the EGOV center developed a capacity-based EGOV development framework EGOV.*; built instruments to support the use of this framework; applied the framework in Afghanistan (EGOV.AF), Cameroon (EGOV.CM) and Macao SAR (e-Macao); and contributed to EGOV awareness- and capacity-building in Argentina, Bahrain, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Ghana, India, Jordan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Maldives, Mongolia, Nepal, Nigeria, Palestine, Philippines, Tunisia, Uganda, Vietnam and other countries.

Tomasz is the co-founder and an international speaker at the  ICEGOV 2012 conference – hear his sneak preview (5 mins) of the conference here.

Feature image courtesy UNU

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Episode links and resources

• United Nations University International Institute for Software Technology and the Center for Electronic Governance
• The Cluetrain Manifesto
• W3C eGov interest group
• W3C eGov LinkedIn group

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With the emergence of new trends like open government and open data, there is a perception by many that eGovernment is yesterday’s news, and has largely been completed.

In a candid conversation, Barbara-Chiara Ubaldi, head of the OECD’s eGovernment unit, explains that there is much work still to be done to bring eGovernment into the daily work of the public sector.

In the real world, policymakers responsible for individual areas still don’t talk to each other, don’t work together – so, we still haven’t reached that level of interoperability, integration and coordination which is indeed essential for the implementation of larger interests like open government, for instance.

Barbara also highlights the ways in which the OECD is starting to connect the dots between national eGovernment policymaking and practical implementation by both the public sector and civil society.

About Barbara-Chiara Ubaldi

Since October 2010, Barbara-Chiara Ubaldi has led the OECD E-Government Project within the Division for Public Sector Reform at the Public Governance and Territorial Development Directorate.

Ms. Ubaldi has been serving the OECD as Policy Analyst since February 2009. In this capacity, she managed a number of thematic reviews on e-government and participated in several Public Governance Reviews, which include Denmark, Greece, Mexico, Italy, Estonia, Egypt, Spain and France. Ms. Ubaldi has been co-ordinating for the past three years the OECD work on e-government indicators and the analysis on the use of new technologies – such as cloud computing and mobile technology – to enhance public sector’s agility and mobility, as well as open government.

Prior to joining the OECD she worked for more than seven years as Programme Officer at the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs in New York where she was responsible for the full scale management of technical cooperation programmes targeting e-government and ICT use in the public sector, and for developing the content of online self-assessment and capacity building tools in the area of e-government and knowledge management.

Ms. Ubaldi is also a speaker at the ICEGOV 2012 conference – hear her sneak preview (5 mins) of the conference here.

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Episode links and resources

• OECD eGovernment Unit
• OECD report on M-Government
• OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation

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In the first of Gov20 Radio’s Country Profile interviews, we look at connected government in the United Arab Emirates.

Host Allison Hornery is joined by Salem Al Shair Al Suwaidi, the Director General of Emirates eGovernment to talk about the journey of the Emirates to reach their current ranking by UNPAN’s recent eGovernment survey as #1 in the Arab region.

Mr Salem shares his candid insights into the challenges and benefits of eGovernment for federal agencies, city governments, local entrepreneurs and citizens.

When we started we had a very small team, however it was a team of highly motivated professionals and we had ‘removed the rooftop’ for creativity and innovation, and I think that’s what has put us at the forefront. We could not have achieved what we have if it wasn’t for opening the roof and having everybody chip in.

About Salem Al Shair Al Suwaidi

H. E. Salem Khamis Al Shair Al Suwaidi is the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA)’s Deputy Director General for Information and eGovernment.

In August, 2008, H. H. Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan,  President of the United Arab Emirates appointed Al Suwaidi  as Director General of the General Information Authority (which was later merged with the TRA) and tasked him with the activation of the eGovernment programme at the federal level in the UAE.

Prior to that, Al Suwaidi held the position of eServices Director at Dubai eGovernment between 2000 and 2008, where he led the e-Governance transformation in Dubai government and contributed in raising the community’s e-literacy level to facilitate a new knowledge-based society in Dubai.

Al Suwaidi’s achievements and successes were recognised by various awards and honours. In April 2009, he received The Feigenbaum Leadership Excellence Award which is dedicated to honour men and women in the Arab World for their exemplary leadership in driving their organisations to fulfil their roles in business and society.

In September 2011, Al Suwaidi was granted the Arab eGovernment Pioneer Award by the Pan Arab Internet Academy and the Arab Administrative Development Organisation.

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Episode links and resources

• Revamped UAE national portal: government.ae
• UNPAN eGovernment Survey 2012 (PDF format)
• Emirates Telecommunications Regulatory Authority website
• Emirates eGov on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/emiratesegovernment
• Emirates eGov on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Emirates.eGov
• Emirates eGov on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/egovuae

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• Tags: #UAE #egov #ae #gov20 #gov2ae #g2rUAE