Imperatives

Economic Success
In the context of the current global recession, one of the main economic objectives for governments is to take measures to restore growth and maintain a fair society in the proper environment, where, despite the economic constraints, there is opportunity and security for all using an efficient regulatory framework. This includes tackling child and pensioner poverty, providing employment opportunities for everybody, eliminating the administrative burden to facilitate new business creation, maintaining macroeconomic stability, and keeping inflation low whilst ensuring sustainable growth. This will allow businesses to be able to focus on growth and innovation and there will also be investment in science.

Citizen -centric Services
Governments recognize that they must transform the services delivered both to meet the expectations of service users and to contain costs. Services must focus holistically on the citizen as an individual. A new proactive approach is needed to provide services aimed to guarantee citizens’ rights (health, education, and justice, amongst others) rather than obligations (tax-paying). A certain degree of service customization according to different user profiles (such as the citizen, the service user, the taxpayer) is also needed, and more effort should be dedicated to assessing public needs before designing public policies. The key concept is that government is able to anticipate citizen needs.

Administrative Modernization
The modernization concept is not limited to eGovernment, nor to the use of new technologies. It should also suppose true cultural change. Modernization aims for public management improvement and democratic quality advance, looking for an administration that is more effective and efficient (computerized, with streamlined processes and organizations), more transparent (especially with capturing, evaluating, and measures results), more professional (reliable and clear of mind), and provides higher quality of services, with more citizen participation and interaction, and with fewer but more encompassing regulations.

Secure Transfer of Data
The recent spate of high-profile incidents where information has been lost or stolen has turned attention to ensuring appropriate levels of security between government departments and between government and clients for transferring data. A balance has to be struck between the appropriate level of security and the cost-effectiveness and convenience of the solution. Government departments themselves must be able to articulate the appropriate level of security to clients.

Business trends

Citizens and businesses are seeking better value for money and greater convenience from the services they receive. The new service economy is much slicker, more immediate, and more convenient whilst less intrusive on the busy citizen’s time. The focus is increasingly on the totality of the citizen relationship across the whole of government.

In line with this, some services have become a commodity for citizenship that governments tend to actuate automatically, rather than on citizen demand. The provision of services without previous petition saves time and helps the citizen to manage their rights and obligations with public administration.

Differences between the level of service delivered by the public and private sectors are likely to grow over the next decade unless publicsector service delivery is further transformed into a more responsive and integrated offering.

There is a drive to automate the capture of information from citizens, for example through online forms and automated telephone systems. A good example is the CMEC (Child Maintenance Enforcement Commission) that is encouraging citizens to make arrangements online.

Identity authentication and verification will be an increasing requirement as government departments provide more online services. In particular, there will be a focus on the London 2012 Olympic Games where the NPIA (National Police Improvement Agency) is interested in how access to the Olympic Village will be controlled for the 200,000 official visitors, of which only 5% are expected to be athletes.

Verification not only of identity but also of income is key for government departments who will increasingly look to other departments and third parties, such as credit-check agencies, for assistance with this. There may be legislative and cultural impediments to sharing information in this way.

Social and demographic change continues apace and there are a number of increasing challenges, in particular the need to keep up with large increases in the old-age dependency ratio on the horizon. Security for the citizen includes ensuring adequate housing, a good system of healthcare, and an adequate pension on retirement. All these are areas for change and investment.

Within this context, it is important to ensure that the national infrastructure is in place to support a growing economy and the development of the information society. This includes transport, utilities, and other key services, especially bandwidth infrastructures.

Government must make further progress in achieving social justice (such as eradicating child poverty in the UK by 2020, for example) with continuing economic change, empowered individuals, and communities who can achieve their rising aspirations so that everyone can share in the gains from growth.

The rapid pace of innovation and technological diffusion will continue to transform the way people live and open up new ways of delivering public services. Consideration will be needed regarding the level and means of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) instruction in schools in order for children to take optimal advantage of this increasingly technically oriented world, now and in the future.

As ICT now enables many activities to be completed at a distance, the dependence on physical travel will reduce, but the dependence on technical infrastructure will increase. Ensuring reliability and availability will be key as they become the basis for delivering services to citizens.

Increasing pressures on our natural resources and climate are requiring action by government, businesses, and individuals to maintain prosperity
and improve environmental care. With climate change high on the agenda, EU countries must play its part in reducing emissions whilst at the same time preparing itself against the changing climate.

The global economy is in the midst of radical transformation with far-reaching and fundamental changes in technology, production, and trading patterns. There is an intensification of cross-border economic competition at all levels (local, regional, national, and international) with new opportunities for growth, as the balance of international economic activity shifts towards emerging markets such as China and India.

Across Europe, geographical borders are becoming less relevant as cross-border interoperability strengthens. More citizens are moving around Europe and more data is being collected on movements through standards that have been set globally.

Continued global uncertainty with ongoing threats of international terrorism and global conflict are reshaping global security. There is a great focus on security and immigration.

Sustainable mobility that is efficient, safe, and with reduced negative effects on the environment is being promoted by policy at a European level, along with support for trans-European networks, technological development, and innovation in transport and energy.

A new social agenda for modernizing Europe’s social model is part of the revamped Lisbon Strategy for growth and jobs, focusing on providing jobs and equal opportunities and ensuring the drive reaches everyone in society.

Impact technologies

Efficiency programs will drive government agendas. These will realize benefits such as cross-departmental working and improved customer service. Methodologies such as Lean, Six Sigma, and interoperability strategies will be of great benefit.

Government IT systems must be robust and resilient. In this sense, highquality levels of reliability must be ensured in such systems, as they will support citizen services, and citizens must be provided with a reliable service, whether at the local government office or remotely through online means. These IT systems ought to be fault-free, thereby requiring strict quality assurance in the development and operation of such systems and solutions.

Enabling IT agility will be key to ensuring that IT can respond more quickly to governments’ business needs.

A more effective and agile public sector will benefit from Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). This will help with the provision of pan-government services by enabling departments to share information and data with each other. Thus, interoperability becomes a key issue.
Brought together with Legacy Management, SOA has advanced the wealth of diverse legacy systems to a more flexible, accessible solution.

New Web 2.0 technologies, also referred to as social software, can facilitate knowledge transfer and collaboration, enabling citizens to feel more engaged. It will also enable information from different departments to be presented as an holistic view, as well as enabling online consultation with proposals or surveys of opinion on policy initiatives.

These types of technologies, along with technologies such as video conferencing, telepresence, and Virtual Worlds, will also enable collaboration at a distance, reducing carbon footprints for all.

Citizens and front-line staff will benefit greatly from the new mobile applications, giving them vital access to information from anywhere and on any device. The agile business will require real-time access to content information from any location through Enterprise Content Management. This can ensure enhanced security through controlled documents being only available to enhanced security users and remaining as controlled documents.

Electronic Archive will define new content management schemes to support electronic document filing for mid-term purposes.

The use of Open Source Software (OSS) in the public sector is increasing rapidly and becoming a technology with higher deployment. Most of the local and regional governments have OSS-based technological strategies and are developing OSS applications and specific Linux distributions.

Digital TV is a platform for offering interactive services to citizens. The use of standards like DVB-T, DVB-S, or DVB-C along with MHP (Multimedia Home Platform) allow developing interactive public services that can be offered by government to citizens.

Some front-line services may be commissioned to the private and voluntary sectors. Outsourcing is very much on the agenda. Effective management of third-party suppliers is vital.
 
Identity and Access Management (IAM) will be vital in providing new services with the required levels of security. One major concern of
government and citizens alike is the provision and management of digital identities, as well as the informed management of citizen privacy. In order to ensure proper adoption, IT security mechanisms that are simple, yet effective, will be necessary. They may be used to protect access to buildings as well as access to information and resources.

Digital Identity tokens based on digital certificates as well as biometrics may be the optimal solution. Digital Identity is essential to control access  to information and services and can also be used to control access to government premises. Service customization to specific user needs also relies on Digital Identity to determine the right user identification (with user profiles). Digital Identity can also be applied to government bodies working together to provide complex interoperable services. Cross-border services would require more complex schemes based on Identity Federation.

Integrated Swill help ensure efficiencies across departments, giving value-for-money back-office applications for IT departments in government.

Providing pan-government services that are increasingly complex will require transparency of processes and rules. Business Process Management and Business Rules Engines can oblige.

A single consistent view of information across all public-sector data sources can be provided by way of Master Data Management, which will give the sector the on-demand intelligence required.

In order to provide a better customer service, likely customer demands need to be understood. Citizen-centric services demand knowing how best to offer and deliver services to different segments of the population. Business Intelligence, with its particular analytical capabilities, will be beneficial here and at the other end of the scale, where better intelligence could help target criminal suspects.

Optimization technologies are likely to assume a greater prominence as a way of driving efficiencies in service delivery. Sensors will play an important part in ensuring that assets are functioning optimally through providing information automatically on current conditions and alerting to potential problems.

Defense activities involve specific technologies such as capacity planning and provisioning (from an IT perspective, but also in terms of global requirements for armed forces operations), Lean support, NetworkEnabled Capability (NEC), Global Information Grid, and Sense and Respond logistics, including PBL and RFID.

Governments must lead by example in cost and energy efficiency, employing new IT developments in energy-saving technology, as well as implementing efficient cost-saving internal processes. Although it will prove challenging, operational changes may be needed to achieve the goal of Green IT.

Virtual Worlds and other types of simulation software will be used more in education to help train our children for the technology-driven world of the future.