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Accenture has released its 2002 eGovernment Leadership – Realizing the Vision report, where they look at 23 countries’ work on eGovernment and their “maturity” (in termsn of Service Maturity and Customer Relationship Management). Denmark recorded strong results and was ranked 5th on Overall Maturity, one of the Visionary Challengers. In the Innovative Leaders category are Canada, Singapore and USA, the usual suspects.

Accenture found that “governments are, albeit slowly, realizing their visions. More importantly, there is a growing recognition that eGovernment is not just about technology – but about harnessing technology as just one of the tools to transform the way governments operate. Governments are learning that transformation comes not from moving services online, but from redesigning the organization and processes to put the citizen at the center, integrating across agencies to simplify interaction, reduce cost and improve service. Transformation is only possible with the right governance structure, together with the political will to drive change across the whole of government. I agree.

They also write: In 2002, several interesting patterns are emerging in eGovernment. The distance between the leaders and the followers is widening. There is a late mover advantage emerging however, as a number of countries that were late starters make exponential strides and become serious challengers. Governments that adopt Customer Relationship Management principles early in their eGovernment initiatives are improving at a much faster pace. (my emphasis)

Guess what Accenture sells … CRM-solutions.

A word of caution: the Danish case is filled with dysinformation, and really ought to be revised, so that at least the most obvious errors and misunderstandings are cleared out. Without saying too much, I think Accenture should have done a more thorough investigation and perhaps interviewed a few more actors to get the full picture.
And, by the way, the cited vision was the previous government’s, and things have changed since then …

I’m a proud member of the Working Group on E-Government in the Developing World. Our new report, Roadmap for E-government in the Developing World: 10 Questions E-Government Leaders Should Ask Themselves presents 10 questions crucial to successfully conceiving, planning, managing and measuring e-government.

From the news release: The Roadmap reflects the collective experiences of a group of officials and experts from Brazil, Chile, China, Denmark, Egypt, India, Israel, Mexico, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates and the United States. The report is the product of a two-day conference held in August 2001 in Redwood City, CA, and a continued e-mail dialogue among participants. The Working Group welcomes comments about the Roadmap and, more importantly, case studies or ‘lessons learned’ from the experiences of others in e-government.

Steven Clift, also a member of the group, commented: What makes this report so important is that it represents the lessons and a message from e-government leaders in developing countries to other developing countries. It also provides solid e-government advice for all states and countries. Put another way, e-government leaders from developing countries seem to see hype and B.S. a lot more clearly and are willing to point it out. They can’t afford to make big mistakes, so they come at this with a healthy skepticism from which we can all learn.

How do you stay up-to-date with what’s going on in the eGovernment world? Where do you go if you have a rapacious appetite for news about eGov?

Go surfing
As for dedicated, journalistic eGov news services, there aren’t a lot. But there are some:

• KableNet.com – “What’s happening in e-government and information-age public services”. UK-centric.
  
• lgcnet.com – e.gov.uk – e-government news from local government (if you can live with the poor usability/design)
  
• FCW.com brings US-centric news from Federal Computer Week.
  
• GCN.com brings US-centric news from Government Computer News.
  
• GovExec.com‘s Technology section brings daily US-news.
  
• GovTech.net – daily updates

I am sure there are more services out there (do let me know). But there is a lot to plough through. On the internet, however, there is almost always someone out there who has already themselves done some ploughing and harvesting, and offers their findings to others. So is the case for e-government:

• QuickLinks – weekly updated by Richard Swetenham.
  
• Lexis Nexis – weekly updated
  
• HillWatch.com – “News, opinion & research on E-Politics, E-Advocacy, Digital Democracy and Electronic Service Delivery in Government”.
  
• PoliticsOnline.com
  
• eGovLinks.com

Had enough already? Wait, there’s more. Much more …

• The new Goggle News Search is cool. Try a search for e-government. And try the same on Alta Vista News.
  
• There is of course also Moreover, the news portal, which sometimes gives good results for either eGovernment or e-government.
  
• … on a side note: when searching for news, the hyphen (-) sometimes constitutes a problem. Although probably not done so deliberately, Moreover used to ignore the hyphen and thus presented all results for “government”, which were of course useless (I know people today say “there no such thing as e-government – there’s just government”, but that’s another story …).

The real issue is not a lack of news. It’s finding the news you need, the stuff that’s important to you.

“Spend your time acting on information not looking for it”
That is the motto for eGovMonitor, which informs us that they have “the most powerful knowledge service on eGovernment and public sector information and communication technology markets.” I wonder how much it costs? Someone who often claims to be the ultimately most powerful knowledge provider, Gartner, is expensive. Ridicously expensive. The pricing structure these guys uses rules out most organisations. Having said that, their website actually do offer lots of good material for everyone. But it is incredibly annoying having to pay $5000 to read a report …

It’s The Northern eDimension Action Plan. The initiative for the NeDAP is based on the EU’s Northern Dimension and a decision of the Council of Baltic Sea States.

I’ll be speaking at a workshop within this prgramme, held in Stockholm on 13-14 March.

I’ll be speaking at The E-Government Europe Summit, which is “an innovative event born out of the growing demand for e-business solutions in government and associated bodies. It will deliver government best practices and examine emerging industry trends and technologies necessary for effective decision-making. Examining e-business for government, the event will cover strategic and technology solutions for government-to-government (G2G), government-to-citizen (G2C) and a government-to-business (G2B) operations.”

I’ll be doing some travels soon. In London, on March 4, I am speaking at Learning from international e-government experience – a joint FITLOG/OPM event. According to the programme, I will “examine the priorities for e-government at both national and local government levels in the two countries [Denmark and Sweden] and the lessons that have been learnt from practical experience.”