One of my first posts on the Regional Innovation Policies blog was about “traditional” public e-services – as opposed to Government 2.0 new applications – and their still slow diffusion in many countries in Europe and in the world. My point there was that low take-up of public e-services, which is considered by some the main reason of the digital government failure, was probably simply due to a shortage of… public e-services.
While most critics of EU e-government policy point only to the lack of interest of households and enterprises in expensive and unsustainable digital public services, I think we should also consider that today a significant number of public agencies, especially in the lagging regions of the world – fail to deliver their most useful basic public services on line. Considering e-government services, though most of them were pushed by national governments in the first years of the new millennium and are already available on the web with an acceptable level of sophistication (see for example the list of CapGemini twenty basic public services in latest benchmarking report), the situation is very different at the local level, where small agencies are struggling to provide services with less money and face complex coordination issues with scarce skills.
Moreover, if we zoom out and consider advanced services from other recently-developed domains of digital government such as e-health, e-procurement, e-education, infomobility, “smart” cities, etc, the supply-related issues are manifest.
In other words, measuring the progress of digital government requires a holistic view to include the wide spectrum of public e-services in different policy domains (health, transportation, education, etc.) and the different aspects of service provision (not just e-readiness or web interactivity, but also multi-channel availability and take-up).
Providing this view is the main goal of TAIPS (Technology Adoption and Innovation In Public Services), a research project carried out by the Department of Economics, Society and Politics (DESP), University of Urbino (Italy) and funded by the European Investment Bank (EIB), which aims at exploring the determinants and impact of public e-services diffusion from the point of view of the Economics of Innovation. The project is lead by Professor Antonello Zanfei, an industrial economist whose interests range from innovation diffusion to industrial dynamics and economics of multinational enterprises.
A few weeks ago the first outputs were released. One paper is entitled What do we know from the literature on public e-services? and provides quantitative evidence that ICT research, as it happens in policy making, still considers the various policy domains as separate silos. The next step of TAIPS will be to unify those views. A benchmarking the progress of Italian regions with a joint, e-services pilot methodology is under way. This exercise is to be eventually extended to selected EU Countries.
Plus, TAIPS staff is organizing an International Conference in Urbino, Italy on April 19-20, 2012. Here you can download the outline. The deadline for abstract submission is pretty soon (on Wednesday, October 5), but will probably be extended a little bit. The conference will be interesting since many invited speakers – leading scholars in the field of Economics of Innovation and Information Technology – have already confirmed their participation. I will report again on this in the next few weeks, so please stay tuned!