The Great Questions of Tomorrow (TED Books) by David Rothkopf

Author:David Rothkopf [Rothkopf, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster/ TED
Published: 2017-04-17T22:00:00+00:00

Disintermediating Government

The story of governments’ lagging on technology is all the more striking when you consider the degree to which technological change could transform the nature of governance. Technology can improve and simplify governance when properly harnessed. By streamlining and clarifying its functions, it can help it to better provide services to its people, dispose of unnecessary steps and secret costs, and even root out corruption. It has done away with intermediary industries like travel agencies, changed the way people shop for real estate and cars, and put an end to the brief life of video-rental outfits like Blockbuster. It can do the same thing for government bureaucracy and the headaches and obstacles it presents to basic citizen access to services. You can see signs of what is possible in different corners of the world already, experiments that hint at greater things to come.

You may personally be familiar with other benefits of e-governance from your daily life, such as the ability to pay traffic fines or municipal fees online or to get information about Social Security without having to deal with the bureaucracy directly. Singapore offers an eCitizen Portal to a whole range of government services via the Net, including applications for paid maternity leave and passports, online bill-paying tools, a directory of all government agencies, and a portal for collecting public feedback. South Korea ranked highest for e-government services for the third time in 2014. Its advanced telecommunications enable the government to develop strong online and mobile public interfaces, such as a Home Tax Service that offers 24/7 online access to a range of tax-payment and assessment-related services. India, like many other nations, has begun to lay the groundwork for offering a broader array of such services via its National e-Governance Plan.

In 2014, the United Nations ranked the top innovators in e-governance. Most of the leading countries are from the highly developed world. South Korea leads the list, followed by Australia, Singapore, France, and the Netherlands. The United States is seventh on the list with the United Kingdom eighth. Little Estonia now ranks fifteenth, while China does not crack the top twenty-five. Countries with poor infrastructure have lagged behind, but there have been signs of progress. Six countries in Africa, where “progress . . . remains relatively slow and uneven,” six countries—including Tunisia, Mauritius, Egypt, Seychelles, Morocco, and South Africa—have above-average ratings.

None of this may sound revolutionary; portals are old-think on the Internet, and doing business online is commonplace. But virtually every sector impacted by the information revolution has seen one powerful, transformational trend shift expectations, and thus it’s likely that the impending changes in governments will be profound.

Take the big bureaucracies of today. They are incredibly costly, making many of them ideal targets for disintermediation. It is not just payment processors at the Department of Motor Vehicles, either. Do governments need large embassy staffs when so many communications no longer pass person to person, and indeed, often bypass diplomats altogether (whose role, after all, was fundamentally that of

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