This blueprint describes an integrated, enterprise-wide approach to renewing government services through applying information technology. The objective is to transform government processes to better support program delivery to the public at a much reduced cost. It also proposes to take important steps in planning and deploying an enabling government IT infrastructure to support the re-engineering of program delivery, administrative renewal, and overall government restructuring.
Will information technology help reinvent government? It might, but only if it is correctly managed. This book provides a new model for management of information age reform, based on international case-studies drawn from the US, UK, mainland Europe, and developing countries. It offers practical guidance and analytical insights and will be of value to practitioners, students, educators and researchers in both public administration and information systems.
In the last tow decades governments have invested a great deal of time, money, and political capital in reforms to make the public sector more efficient. They have, however, invested little in evaluating the effectiveness of their efforts, accepting many of the reforms because of a belief in a particular approach to governing or an ideological commitment on the part of politicians. This collection of essays "takes stock" of these reform measures and their impact on public administration.
Advances In Digital Government presents a collection of in-depth articles that addresses a representative cross-section of the matrix of issues involved in implementing digital government systems. These articles constitute a survey of both the technical and policy dimensions related to the design, planning and deployment of digital government systems. The research and development projects within the technical dimension represent a wide range of governmental functions, including the provisioning of health and human services, management of energy information, multi-agency integration, and criminal justice applications. The technical issues dealt with in these projects include database and ontology integration, distributed architectures, scalability, and security and privacy. The human factors research emphasizes compliance with access standards for the disabled and the policy articles contain both conceptual models for developing digital government systems as well as real management experiences and results in deploying them. Advances In Digital Government presents digital government issues from the perspectives of different communities and societies. This geographic and social diversity illuminates a unique array of policy and social perspectives, exposing practitioners to new and useful ways of thinking about digital government.
In Bureaucratic Manoeuvres, John Grundy examines profound transformations in the governance of unemployment in Canada. While policy makers previously approached unemployment as a social and economic problem to be addressed through macroeconomic policies, recent labour market policy reforms have placed much more emphasis on the supposedly deficient employability of the unemployed themselves, a troubling shift that deserves close, critical attention. Tracing a behind-the-scenes history of public employment services in Canada, Bureaucratic Manoeuvres shows just how difficult it has been for administrators and frontline staff to govern unemployment as a problem of individual employability. Drawing on untapped government records, it sheds much-needed light on internal bureaucratic struggles over the direction of labour market policy in Canada and makes a key contribution to Canadian political science, economics, public administration, and sociology.
This report examines how to improve the way governments serve Canadians using case studies of five agencies of the Canadian Federal Government, including their attempts to improve service delivery and the constraints or obstacles they face as they seek to make such improvements. The agencies studied include the Canada Communication Group (formerly the Queen's Printer); the Passport Office; the Geological Survey of Canada; the Aboriginal Business Canada program in Industry Canada; and the Marketing Practices Branch of the Bureau of Competition Policy in Industry Canada. The report examines the concept of service as it relates to the theory of bureaucracy, implementation theory and the policy instrument mix, and the institutional economics of bureaucracy; the re-invention of government theory; and the four service attributes.
As the basis of wealth in developed nations shifts from natural resources and manufacturing to knowledge, achieving higher levels of popular education becomes increasingly important. In Canada, as in many other countries, there is concern that the existing education systems are not adequately meeting the challenges of the complex modern world. This concern persists, despite the fact that Canada's post-secondary enrollment rates are among the highest in the world. This paper briefly discusses the practice, responsibilities and limitations of the federal government in educational matters, and some of the major public concerns with respect to accessibility, quality and funding.
In the 1990s, many governments began to use information and communications technologies, especially Internet applications, to improve the efficiency and economy of government operations and to provide their citizens, the business community, and government officials with information and services. The goal of e-government is to become entrenched in the everyday lives of these people so that they become reliant on Internet access to government. Comparative Perspectives on E-government draws upon the expertise of its contributors, who have conducted research and policy analyses related to government information policy and e-government, and who have published previously in these areas. The focus of coverage is on five countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and topical issues such as the digital divide, the balance between access and security in the aftermath of 9-11, trust in government, the citizen's perspective on e-government, and the evaluation of government Web sites. The book addresses the need to understand the phenomenon of e-government better_its development, mission and goals, success in achieving those goals, and future plans_extending an inquiry to both developed and developing countries. An additional need for detailed cross-country analyses and comparisons, introduced here, is also addressed.
