I had the honor to be a guest at the UAE Government Summit in Dubai 2 weeks ago. The event was amazing. Not only because of the location, the 4000 Public Services officials and invited guests, and the quality of the speakers, ... but because it is quite unique. I do not know lots of governments around the world who organize an event to mobilize their own public services leaders to drive "innovation" in government services and to inspire the officials to re-design the way Public Services engage with citizens.
The opening speech from Prof Schwab from the World Economic Forum was spot on. "This is about the government of the future". Some will call it "smart government" or the "era of digital government", but I liked the "government 3.0" much more. The next generation ... after the government 1.0, and government 2.0. A kind of a maturity model which can be used to value the capabilities of the public services.
Government 1.0 could be described as the traditional and often bureaucratic way of looking at servicing citizens and companies. Correct and effective, but often heavy, not citizen oriented (but rather process oriented). Some government are still struggling to make this reality. But in the meantime lots of governments moved to government 2.0; often characterized by governments who try to work more efficient, by offering information on a portal, by having on-line government services, and by transacting with their "consumers" on the internet (and even gradually evolve to mobilizing their services and offer m-government), ...
The next level government (Government 3.0) is about engaging with citizens, putting the "person" (citizen, patient, student, employer, ...) in the center and building the services around the individual, citizens that actively participate, moving from pure interaction to a pro-active and predictive relationships, ... Let's not call it efficient customer services, because it goes further than that. It made me think and look at some of the customer testimonials at the event (like city of Barcelona, UK government, Finland, Korea, Singapore ...) in a different way and see some of our SAP customer projects in a 3.0 picture.
Let's think for a moment about tax management. In 1.0 we declare our taxes (on paper) to the government and they process the information correctly. In a 2.0 environment the government shares information with the citizens and offers e-capabilities to enter, simulate, process tax declarations. In a 3.0 environment government re-think its role and its processes: collects the information for the tax declaration from different sources itself (instead of asking the citizens to declare), advises people on how to optimize, creates and engagement between individuals and a personal public tax counselor, connects and integrates data from social (e.g. Temporary unemployment, sickness or child care), civil (e.g. change in family status), police (e.g. Outstanding fines) ... services and build its interactions around the citizen as an individual.
In that same context we can easily imagine e.g. a 3.0 approach for healthcare: in which we would be looking at the whole care cycle, including the preventive/pro-active/predictive aspects of healthcare and care in general, beyond registering efficiently a hospital admission/treatment/billing and administering and exchanging everything in a EMR/HER between the large number of stakeholders.
Or another example around the labor market where in a 3.0 vision we think not only about matching demand and supply, having e- and m-access to information and training/knowledge ... but also creating an engagement (and participation) between the individual "work seeker" , the counselor, the market place, the education system, ... via social media, in the cloud with mobile devices and using the (big) data to predict/prevent and pro-actively collaborate with individuals and drive towards a better "service".
We all know government 3.0 cases but we still see lots of initiatives focusing on the 1.0 or 2.0 challenges of today. A government of the future looks ahead and does not only try to solve the challenges/pain points/issues of yesterday or today with the (emerging) technologies of today (mobile, cloud, big data, social, ...).
Is your government transformation project 3.0 compliant?