information technology

One of the newest innovations in the provision of services for citizens is the one-stop centre. It began as a way to provide services to people with disabilities. The theory was that people with disabilities encounter enough challenges in their day-to-day lives, and that the way that they accessed needed services was detrimental to them. Disability advocates insisted that the structure of services and the ways that people with disabilities had to access them was in and of itself discriminatory. As a result, many governments have radically changed the way in which they offer social services to their citizens, and information technology (IT) became an important tool to accomplish it.
The new way to structure social services became known as “one-stop centres”. Before the establishment of these centres, citizens were expected to contact each service individually to access their programs. It was often the case that these services were housed in separate facilities, miles away from each other. The solution was to bring all these services together, often under the same roof. That way, citizens did not need to waste valuable time, money, and effort. If they needed job services, for example, they could make appointments with several agencies, all in the same day, and they no longer had to account for travel time. All services became centralized.
Directgov is one the best examples of a government-run one-stop centre, but on the web. Its previous version, UKonline, was established way back in 2001, and was managed by the Office of the e-Envoy, an attempt by Prime Minister Tony Blair to put all government agencies online. UKonline was a lower-quality website in comparison to Directgov, which is more “citizen-centric”. Whereas UKonline had consisted of just links to government departments, Directgov carries its own material and content, designed around the users’ needs.
Directgov serves primarily as an information resource, but goes further than other government sites, which often simply contain lists of government departments, agencies, and local councils. Directgov has those things, but it also includes officially written advice and information for users, targeted to specific topics (such as how-tos about growing an eco-friendly garden and useful news stories) for specific audiences (like parents, persons with disabilities, and employers). There is also a Welsh language version of the site.
In order for government agencies to be accessible to their citizens, it is important in our digital age for there to exist a central place to find information about services, whether they be services provided by local councils, ways to access transportation and garbage services, or a place to download and print applications for voter registration and library cards. Sites such as Directgov also should be as current technologically as possible, so Directgov also makes itself available on digital interactive TV, on mobile phones, and on analogue teletext pages.
Directgov is one of the most advanced attempts, by any national government, to provide information and services directly to its citizens through the use of IT methodologies and concepts. It is a good model for other government agencies, both national and local, something that is necessary to help citizens access the services government agencies provide. In recent years, IT has become more and more important in assisting nations—even developing ones—become more competitive, and as developing countries move to the forefront of what Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, calls “the technological frontier” (p. v).
IT is an important tool for developing nations to continue to be, as Klaus goes on to say, “…innovative in their processes and produces and to maintain their competitive strategy” (p. v). Kraus credits a nation’s ability to use IT to enable its growth, develop, and modernization. IT has also allowed developing and middle-income economies to “leapfrog” to higher stages of development and to increase their economic and social transformation.
In other words, IT can be instrumental in reducing poverty and improving living conditions for the poor all over the world. It empowers a nation’s citizens with, possibly the first time in many of these nations’ histories, more access to information, knowledge, and education. IT can expand ways in which their citizens conduct business and interact with others socially, and increases their productivity and economic growth. IT provides an extraordinary capacity to drive growth and innovation, helping countries to recover from economic crisis, and sustain their nation’s competitiveness. That is why it is crucial for even developed nations like the UK to have websites like Directgov, and to funnel their resources into a creative, helpful site for their citizens. As Kraus states, there is a “link between economic growth and [IT] readiness” (p. v).
John Chambers (2009), chairman and CEO of Sisco Systems, believes the best way to do that is to create worldwide, broadband access, which would provide internet access for all the world’s citizens. Chamber insists that doing this will “create jobs, provide better access to health care and education, connect small business owners to new customers, and in some countries create a middle class that will raise the standard of living and national GDP” (p. vii).
As of 2009, the statistics for internet use around the world is dismal. For example, seventy-seven out of one hundred Canadian citizens use the internet, while only sixteen out of one hundred use it in Panama. Twenty-eight per one hundred Canadians are broadband subscribers, while only one per one hundred in Panama is (Chambers, 2009). While Chambers and Cisco Systems have the potential of enjoying great economic benefit if the push towards worldwide broadband access succeeds, it is certain that countries like Panama, from the remotest villages to the densest urban centers, would benefit in substantial ways.
Putting the methodologies of IT in even the most innocuous of places would, as Chambers declares, completely change the way the world does everything. He advises that we use mobile broadband to connect the whole world—a global wireless infrastructure built on an Internet Protocol (IP) network platform, which would bypass traditional hard-wired environments limited by technological improvements lacking in so many parts of the developing world.
An illustration of how a developing nation used the concepts and methodology of IT is Korea, which according to economics professor Soumitra Dutta and Dr. Irene Mia, the director of the World Economic Forum (2009), has become a leading IT nation of the 21st century. Dutta and Mia credit Korea’s recent rapid economic growth to the nation’s successful development of an IT industry and its applications. Korea has been proactively accepting of new technologies, value-adding development with enhanced performance, and quick transition through industrial structuring. The IT industry in Korea is strongly connected to its electronic industry, and its leaders in all highly-technological fields there have a strong understanding of IT and how it can be used to gain business leadership globally. The Korean government recognized the need for strong IT leadership, and took a pivotal and proactive role in propagating new standard platforms of telecommunications as well.
In spite of a world-wide economic crisis, the IT industry continues to show signs of great resiliency. The reason for this trend is that technology continues to evolve and even progress, especially in the IT field. The price of personal computers, for example, continues to rapidly decrease. In addition, the emergence of a new class of inexpensive laptops has allowed whole populations of people in developing nations to afford computers. Software capabilities have also improved steadily, accounting for the rise in popularity of social networking platforms and other Web 2.0 services.
In the early 2000s, larger and wealthier nations such as the UK began to see the wisdom in making information and the access of services easier for its citizens. The Directgov website is a direct response of that recognition in the UK. More recently, other nations have understood the wisdom in utilizing IT platforms in similar ways. Both public and private sector leaders, in most countries all over the world, have now come to accept IT’s important role in stimulating growth in their nations. They now understand that IT enlists the development of their economies by greatly increasing productivity in most of their industries. As Dutta, Mia, and their colleague Thierry Geiger (2009) state, “Many economies have been able to leverage the extraordinary power of [IT] as a driver of change, modernization, and competitiveness” (p. 4). They go on to claim that access to IT have given nations such as Korea, Singapore, Israel, Finland, and Estonia significant advances in their global competitiveness. In the recent decade, emerging markets throughout Africa, Latin America, and Asia has also used IT platforms to increase the availability of information and transform social interactions in those nations. Additionally, the utilization of IT has contributed to the reduction of poverty and improved the life of all of its citizens, from all economic and social levels.
There are a myriad of obstacles to overcome for developing nations to utilize IT platforms. One obstacle is infrastructure. In an article written by Geiger and Mia (2009), they suggest one way to bypass the problem of a weak infrastructure is mobile telephony. Mobile communications penetration has boomed in developing countries, and compensates for the often flawed and underdeveloped fixed telephony infrastructure. As a matter of fact, the total number of mobile telephone subscribers in developing countries is more than twice what it is in nations with more advanced economies. Mobile telephones are a way for the citizens of these nations to pull themselves out of poverty by providing them with more economic opportunity.
Additionally, mobile telephony systems are easier to set up than traditional fixed phone systems. Mobile service regulations tend to be more liberal in most countries throughout the world, which favors competition. The costs of a hand-held phone is more accessible for more people, it is easier to pay for long-distance phone calls through the purchase of pre-paid cards, and unlike land lines, it is more feasible for groups of people to share one phone. With the development of new phone technologies, it is often no longer the case that the lack of access to phone communication is what divides the wealthy and the poor both within the citizenry of individual countries and between developing countries and economically advanced nations. There is a real connection between mobile telephony and economic growth and development, so it makes sense that ensuring that citizens have the use of them is beneficial to the leaders of these nations.
In many ways, the existence of a website such as Directgov in the UK is a small indication of the strength of a nation’s IT infrastructure. The UK is able to successfully manage and maintain a successful website that serves as a hub for the services the British government offers to its citizens because of its strong IT. In other words, if the UK did not have powerful IT platforms, like a mobile telephony, already in place, having a website would be pointless because very few people would be able to access it. Millions of people throughout the UK visit Directgov regularly. It is the contention of many in the IT field that if more nations had better IT, their economies would greatly improve. Perhaps then they can learn from the UK and create their own successful one-stop centre for information.

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