Government 2.0?
Wow its December already. 2007 has just flown by, and 2008 is looking choc-a-block full. I’ve been bouncing around the country meeting with municipalities talking to them about how they have gone about developing their indigent policies and what systems they use.
One of the key issues that keep’s popping up at each visit is the need municipalities have to cross reference their local datasets against national datasets.
This issue got me asking “what has happened to governments e-Government programme?”
There used to a great deal of talk about e-Government. A lot of that talk seems to have died down. If you visit either the DPSA or SITA website you really don’t get much of an idea as to what government has done. A quick read through the lists of contracts awarded by SITA and you’ll see a lot of money has gone to funding administrative improvement projects – these don’t help immediately speed up service delivery at the local level.
Why is it so hard for a municipality to get a simple list of who lives in its jurisdiction and what they earn is hard for me to understand, its not like that data is not there.
Maybe it’s all the skills shortages fault?
Or maybe it’s just a lack of vision at the level of programme mangers. Maybe they don’t know what can be done, maybe they don’t know who can help them, maybe they don’t know that they need to play nice with others in the public sector, and there are a lot of potential maybes.
My experience leads me to believe that a simple request like “Who lives in my jurisdiction and what do they earn”, is in fact not such a simple request.
Not because it’s technically impossible, it’s actually quiet simple – we once demonstrate how data taken from the Department of Social Developments SOCPEN database could be used to cross reference against an indigent list, it took us about two weeks to source the data and build a simple application for demonstration purposes, – but because when you ask that question you are immediately encroaching on other people’s domains. And people guard those domains.
Its not only national departments that hold on tightly and need to be poked with a big stick in order to share, I’ve come across instances where municipalities plainly refuse to share their data with national departments.
Hopefully in the not too distant future we’ll actually see a more cohesive public sector working together towards the same goals.
