Messaging

We had a lively discussion about e-government in my political science class the other day. My students looked at government portals of countries that were pretty well advanced in their e-government efforts.

The portals did not only offer information to their citizens. In many countries, citizens transact with their governments on-line. They not only access services, but participate in referendums and even vote using government portals.

They then compared this with some of our government portals. They observed that there was no consolidated portal for communicating with our government. Most of the government departments had photos of the secretaries on the main page and the agency’s latest press release.

My students wondered why e-government seems so stunted in our own case. I explained that e-government is not just about setting up web pages for our agencies. E-government involves a change in the entire paradigm of governance in the direction of being client-driven.

Our government departments have not changed their mindset. That reflects in the portals they maintain. They use communications technologies to talk to the people, not to enable them to better transact with their government.

In the past, government maintained a hierarchical mindset in relation to the governed. The new mindset required to reinvent government aims to empower the people.

The old bureaucracy cannot remain in its old form complemented by information technology. The bureaucracy must be flattened, the hubs of decision-making need to be dispersed and, by way of information technology, government itself must be more interactive.

Then, too, for citizens to access services from government and for government to properly partner with its citizens, there needs to be a reliable system for identifying their clients. On this aspect, in the absence of a national identification system and a citizen database, the path to mature e-governance is blocked.

Many governments have installed the equivalent of what mature corporate structures call the Chief Information Officer (CIO). The CIO does not just talk to the public on behalf of the corporate entity he represents. The CIO maintains the information system of the corporation, ensuring the reliability of information and the interactivity of all the computer networks. The same information system must enable the larger public to interact with the various segments of the corporation.

The goal ultimately is not just to superimpose information technology on the old structure but to evolve the corporate structure itself to become more efficient in interacting with clients. There ought to be as little information asymmetry as possible across the various components of the organization and the various segments of the public it serves.

The whole of government is, in the last analysis, a provider of services. The ordinary citizens are the beneficiaries of those services. The purpose of e-government is to make services delivery more reliable and more susceptible to client feedback.

We do have a commission of some sort tasked with overseeing the development of e-government. But it is not properly empowered. Its head does not enjoy the status of Chief Information Officer. It certainly does not have the authority to reform the bureaucracy to realize the potentials of new technologies in improving governance.

The past few weeks, the new administration had been trying to put together what it calls a “communications group.” An entire platoon of media talents is being assembled to compose this group. According to the grapevine, factional infighting has delayed the formal announcement of this group.

From the people rumored to compose this communications group, it seems the team will be more adept in using new media to reach out to the public. That is good. But that is not enough.

From the scarce information released about this group, we are told that it will be concerned principally with “messaging” — which is efficiently communicating to the public what the administration deems important to communicate. There is a thin line that separates that from “massaging” public attitudes.

Without a more encompassing program for evolving e-governance, such a communications group can only be a more competent propaganda unit. It must not only deliver impressions but also help in the reinvention of government so that information does not only flow from the top down, but circulate laterally within government and between government and the citizens.

In his inaugural, President Aquino III spoke of the people being the boss. That is a good applause line. But it will become a meaningful vision only if the new President puts the evolution of e-governance as the centerpiece of this administration. Only when government becomes truly client-driven through modern information technology can the citizens become truly the boss.

There is much to be done to achieve e-governance for our people — and yet nothing has so far been said about it. Perhaps it is because e-government can progress only on the basis of bureaucratic reform. That, to be sure, is the more difficult thing to accomplish.

Changing our economic policies is easy. Revolutionizing our electoral system through automation is easy. But reforming our bureaucracy will surely require a supreme exercise of leadership.

The thing we have to realize is that it is not enough to bring in new gadgets to cause a new style of government. The entire bureaucratic structure must evolve for government to be client-driven. We must re-imagine the democratic project in terms of reengineering the bureaucracy and deploying information technology for genuine people empowerment.