ALIA 2000
Capitalising on Knowledge: The Information Profession in the Twenty First Century
www.alia.org.au/conferences/ALIA2000/
Session: Information needs in the consumer society-a technological basis.
25 October 2000
Digital leadership
- why the politics of fear have no place in a knowledge nation
In recent years, we’ve seen a few new expressions appear on the organisational charts of institutions and large companies around the globe – knowledge centres and knowledge managers.
Although unfamiliar to some, these terms represent the evolution of titles we grew up understanding – libraries and librarians.
While it is true that librarians have always been knowledge managers, the change in rhetoric is entirely appropriate in an era when information has moved from bookshelves in to the great library in the ether – the Internet. The change is important because the Internet is place where interactivity makes the process of converting information into knowledge a much more dynamic and personal process.
This change in terminology is an example of the rubber hitting the road in this era of great technological leaps forward. The last decades of the 20th Century have seen developments in technology at a pace perhaps never matched in human history. But as with other intense periods of technological progress in human history, what will follow is even more dramatic social and economic re-organisation.
The social implications are starting to be felt with issues like data protection and privacy.
But the core social issue of the information age is the deepening of the digital divide. Equitable access to the internet combined with an education system to suit the needs of a 21st century society beckons as the single most important enabler for social participation. In other words, it’s about letting everyone access the information they need in the optimal way and have the skills to know how to convert that information into the knowledge they need.
But present indications are that the majority of the population is being left behind. The Digital Divide can be broken up and seen as a series of digital fractures, as the most recent statistics show.
According to the ABS:
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Only 15% of non-metropolitan Australians have Internet access, compared with 26% in metropolitan areas. |
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Only 17% of households with incomes below $50,000 have Internet access. 52% of households with incomes of $100,000 or more have Internet access. |
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Tasmania has the lowest percentage of Internet access (18%), while the ACT has the highest (35%). |
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72% of adults aged 18-24 accessed the Internet in 1999, compared to just 6% of adults aged 65 or over. |
Assessment of the information needs of people in this society of the future is therefore central to the policy considerations of any government that has its eye on the future. What sort of information and services could possibly encourage those citizens currently baulking at leaping across that gaping divide by buying a computer for their home, and connecting it to the internet?
The statistics demonstrate that the steady growth in the number of households being connected to the internet is occurring primarily in households that already have computers. Households that don’t have computers are trapped in the socio-economic reality of not being able to afford to literally plug into the Information Age. With the exception of a few of union, corporate and government initiatives, there no meaningful programs to close the digital divide that come close to resolving the problem on a national scale.
The internet is now established as the universal yet adaptable interactive medium, so servicing the information needs of citizens from an ‘e’-Government perspective seems a reasonable . But any such strategies needs to start with pro-active efforts to close the digital divide.
It is in dealing with this foundation issue that so many institutions, public and private, have failed to deliver. In corporate language, it is not enough to create a supply of services if the market is not there. It is not good enough to cut off other means of service delivery to artificially create a demand for a new way of delivering a service.
The banks, for example, still have not learnt the lesson that branch closures in the regions does not automatically create a warm fuzzy feelings in their customers toward ATM. And online banking only helps the less than 20% that are presently online in regions where the branches are closing.
In reality, of course, banks are making hard-nosed decisions about which customers are most valuable and dumping the rest. Anyone not online can safely be assumed to be not worth having as a customer, when this corporate perspective is taken.
Part of the reason technology is applied in such a brutal way is the underlying approach to change. Cost cutting in the drive for greater efficiencies and hence greater profits continues to be the primary motivating factor for technological progress within organisations. Seem reasonable? On the surface perhaps yes, but underneath this dry approach are the complexities that ensure all is not as it seems. This is particularly so when you add the reasonable supposition that public interest should be the primary consideration of the way governments conduct their affairs. It is also incumbent upon private corporations to factor in the public interest, even thought it is hard to find examples of this these days.
But rapid technological advances create new opportunities to deal with old problems of inequality.
Jay Naidoo, South African Minister for Postal Services, Telecommunications and Broadcasting spoke in inspirational terms back in 1998 at an OECD Ministerial Conference on E-commerce of how the internet was going to enable the leap-frogging of whole generations of technological development. Today his vision has held true with many South African villages being transformed as the single copper telephone wires servicing the whole towns have been replaced by optic fibre-services.
Acting in the public interest means making the individual and collective experience of Citizens the priority. In Government service delivery terms, this means the best quality and best value. The policies, competence and priorities of a government all impact directly on the capability of the public administration to deliver a quality service to Citizens. For governments to choose the path of using information technology to merely cut costs without consideration of the experience of citizens defies the public interest and squanders the myriad opportunities that exist within any period of change.
The Ford Motor Company worked it out pretty early when they prepared a business case for putting every employee on line in their home. Their rationalisation was that a net literate workforce was a more efficient workforce. The unions were pushing all the way too, knowing that the interests of their members were being served by the opportunity to introduce the internet into their lives. It seems to me, that it is a simple step from there for governments to realise the benefits of a policy to create an interactive environment so appealing and accessible that people actually want to try it out.
The organisations behind these initiatives faced the same challenges as a Federal Government concerned about improving service delivery to citizens – how to encourage people online, and provide relevant, timely information. They saw that leadership was needed to give people a push toward something new, and to encourage them to act in their own interests.
The models mentioned above point to the viability of a similar nationally focussed, Federal Government scheme. But any such initiative calls for something the present Australian Government seems to consider an old-fashioned concept – visionary leadership.
In order to deliver services like a social security payment, Governments need to have meaningful interaction with citizens. The internet allows the level of intelligent communication needed for high quality service delivery. The aim would be to ensure that recipients of government services have affordable internet access in their home if they choose, and are equipped with the skills to be able to access meaningful services from the relevant government department or agency. It makes good policy sense to pursue a connectivity initiative that draws on the experience of the existing models.
Another important feature of a government service delivery initiative would be that it would provide an opportunity to set the online standard for a high level of scrutiny and public accountability in areas such as privacy and data protection. These issues need individual policy attention, but even in this, the Coalition has failed us.
Despite the preparation of draft legislation, the Coalition has chosen not to legislate as yet for the protection of personal privacy in the private sector. In fact, by their own behaviour, they chose to set precisely the opposite example.The Coalition was caught red-handed trying to use databases of private information, collected for statutory purposes by the government, for a manipulative political campaign. This attempt by the Prime Minister to send a personally addressed letter to promote the GST was found to be an illegal use of the electoral role.
Privacy and security have been identified by the Australian Bureau of Statistics as significant barriers to connectivity for both individuals and businesses.
The public backlash against the Government for these and other indiscretions – such as the attempted give away of the ABN electronic database demonstrates the need for a progressive Government to set the highest possible standards for privacy and data protection. Providing a genuine co-regulatory regime for protecting privacy will inspire confidence in the internet in an age where the trade in personal information for marketing purposes is a multi-billion dollar industry. The Government’s behaviour online so far can only have heightened the fears of people still too wary to log on.
In some parts of the world, political leaders have sought to define “light on the hill” objectives to guide specific policy development. The European Union moved early on the issue of privacy with the Data Protection Directive, and have since persisted with a primarily social perspective in their expression of commitment to preparing the European Union for the future. Sure, implementation presents an ongoing challenge, but the ideals and vision have been clearly expressed.
The EU statement, ‘E-Europe’ has three key objectives.
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Bringing every citizen, home and school, every business and administration, into the digital age and online; |
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Creating a digitally literate Europe, supported by an entrepreneurial culture ready to finance and develop new ideas; |
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Ensuring the whole process is socially inclusive, builds consumer trust and strengthens social cohesion |
The political message accompanying the initiative is that the changes in technology and the internet are a unique opportunity to be seized. The challenge to manage the changes are identified as representing ‘the central economic and social challenge for the Union.”
The e-Europe statement is very blunt regarding its ambitious aims. It states unequivocally that the objective is to get “every citizen, every school, every company online as soon as possible. Britain’s Blair Labour Government followed suit, announcing that everyone should be online within a few years.
Contrast this with the Howard Government. There is no clearly articulated set of values, principles and goals underlying its actions. It just presents us with a series of reactive, ad hoc policies as issues are thrust in its face.
The Coalition has targeted the internet with short-sighted political campaigns including attempts to censor sexually explicit material online and make internet gambling illegal. The rhetoric accompanying these campaigns is lifted directly from the genuine concerns expressed by devoted campaigners against child sex abuse and the suffering those addicted to gambling, caused primarily by poker machines.
Does Mr Howard do anything about these concerns? No. Instead he talks tough about the Internet to disguise his inertia. This shameless use of fear demonstrates how vulnerable the internet, and other new technologies are to being set up by way of censorship to become the scapegoat for problems that have historically been too tough to deal with. The only outcome served is that the internet is further demonised. As a result, he mortgages Australia’s future in pursuit of another election victory.
Meanwhile, debates of genuine moment are ignored or completely misunderstood by the Government.
One such issue is the Government providing an exemplary standard for interactive services in public administration. Given such a massive proportion of this public or government administration is information management, there is ample room for leadership in creating an environment for excellence and innovation.
However the last four years have seen a government focussed on relinquishing the policy reigns of information management within the public administration, a policy direction that was embarked upon despite the growing understanding that the evolution in digital technology had massive social and economic implications. The relinquishment of these critical policy reigns arrived in the form of a specific Program for outsourcing IT in the Commonwealth Government.
This specific program seems to have been predicated on the basis that information management within government agencies and departments was no longer considered core business by the Government. The IT Outsourcing Program initially just involved IT infrastructure, was later expanded to include applications development and telecommunications infrastructure.
The structure of contracts under this Program has seen service delivery standards decline. Reports of significant disruptions to services as a result of whole systems crashing have emerged. The Rural Transactions Centres initiative was exposed as a blunt instrument for shutting down rural and regional government services like Medicare and Centrelink when the promised centres failed to open when scheduled. With the Coalition’s stated timetable for getting all Government agencies and departments online in shambles, it is little wonder that Federal Government service delivery online is seen as a joke rather than an exemplar.
As a result, the Government is rendering itself incapable of managing its relationship with citizens through the services delivered through the public administration. This role will be managed through the constraints of contractual obligations existing between agency and IT vendor. The policy reigns have been taken away from the government as far as managing information is concerned once the contracts are signed.
The opportunity to show leadership by establishing an exemplary public service in information management, including data protection, privacy, equity of access seems lost – at least for now.
The opportunity for the agencies responsible for being the interface between Government and citizen to develop their own skills as knowledge managers have been sacrificed, and with it the platform for governments to continue to provide leadership in Digital Age information management issues.
The Australian National Audit Office confirmed my expectations and everyone’s worst fears about the failure of the IT Outsourcing Program introduced by the Coalition Government in 1997. As a result, there is ample motivation to start building a system of public information management suited to this century, community aspirations for service quality and hopefully an improved relationship between government and citizen.
This challenge is significant, but as the alternative government, Labor is starting from a position of strength. We understand the strategic importance of information management. It is the depth of this understanding that will determine our ability to adapt the administration of the Australian Federal Government for the future needs of citizens, community and business.
The first task to be confronted is in fact one of the oldest of the accepted roles of government – ensuring that the infrastructure necessary for an efficient economy is in place. We need to ensure the communication infrastructure is appropriate and effective on both sides of the delivery model – the administration or supply end and, with equal priority, the demand: the needs of people, as citizens and consumers. Consideration of new models and methodologies to allow government to procure the best on offer from the private sector whilst serving the public policy outcomes is our challenge.
The underlying architecture, for example a network of data servers, must be built on standards of inter-operability. Significant effort is needed to break down the continuing tendency for IT vendors to install proprietary systems – a tactic pursued to ensure the perpetuation of the use of their products and indeed contracts. Only then will this critical underlying hardware architecture become a genuine base for innovation at the applications level. To date, the practice has been to outsource clusters or groups of agencies that don’t necessarily have a lot in common. The contracts are then awarded to different multinationals, each with proprietary hardware and software products. This has not only fractured information management across the public sector, it actively works against interoperability.
Secondly, the building blocks of information, the data, needs to be managed with the highest level of diligence. Data protection and privacy issues must be a priority at both the political and administrative level. Getting these things right is necessary if community confidence in innovation at the applications level is to be gained. Public spaces online would be the vehicle to make available useful information to citizens and provide a pathway to a secure environment for interaction. A feature could be an online, interactive civics education program, designed to stimulate interest in both civic and democratic participation. In this way, it could be demonstrated that the Internet is not a threat to people’s ability to participate in our democracy, but a powerful tool for extending that right.
In conclusion, an active strategy to close the digital divide from the bottom up is required. Relying only on competition in the marketplace to drive hardware and connectivity costs down has proved ineffectual the world over in closing the digital divide. Part of such a strategy lies in an education experience that introduces and sustains the internet as a meaningful learning tool as well as a medium for communication, information, entertainment, services and commerce.
Another part lies in developing a public policy plan that demonstrably justifies the intervention of government in facilitating online access for those most likely to otherwise remain on the wrong side of the digital divide and therefore in need.
Yet another part is developing some depth and quality to the interactive experience of those seeking support and service from the public administration.
What is most neglected in the political response to change is leadership. This leadership role goes beyond the rhetorical interpretation of changes taking place.
It is about navigating this change by providing a policy compass.
