A Citizen-Centric Hierarchy of Broadband E-Government Needs

What should citizen-centric, broadband-based e-government look like? To answer this question, we have adapted Alcatel’s useful “Broadband Hierarchy of Needs” to serve as a reference point. However, for purposes of this discussion, the layer of the pyramid that Alcatel has designated as “Entertain Me” was recast for the public sector as “Engage Me,” since governments rarely seek to entertain citizens and employees (at least intentionally). In this report, we discuss what governments can do to connect, organize, engage and empower their citizens.

Connect Me

The digital divide cannot be looked at exclusively in terms of the availability of Internet access. Households must have the devices -- PCs, modems, etc. -- and the know-how that will allow them to connect to available broadband services.

Recognizing that the cost of a computer is often the primary barrier to getting online, the state of Kentucky has launched a “No Child Left Offline” effort, whereby retired state government computers will be refurbished and distributed to offline households with eighth graders. Since the program was announced in the fall of 2005, nearly 900 refurbished computers have been distributed to eighth-graders and their families in five Appalachian counties. The state has also set a goal to make broadband universally available statewide by 2007 (up from the current 82% availability).

The widely publicized municipal wireless project in Philadelphia is expected to generate $5 million in net revenue that will be partially reinvested in low-cost broadband services as well as in home PCs and training for low-income users.

Understanding that all broadband is local, the state of Michigan has initiated a seven-stop road show across the state to educate municipal and county leaders on how to develop public-private broadband deployment efforts in their communities. Representatives of Michigan’s Department of Information Technology (MDIT) have met with representatives of more than 200 local units of government. The day-long sessions have included a guidebook that provides cities and counties with baseline information for developing broadband action plans.

Will state employees be tethered to their desks or liberated to serve constituents in the field?

While state governments might not be among the primary drivers of broadband adoption by citizens, they do control whether their employees remain tethered to their desks and back-office databases and paper files or are liberated to serve constituents in the field, as occurred recently with workers at Texas Child Protective Services.

So far, it has been easy for governments to recognize the value of technological mobility for workers whose jobs (by their very definitions) pull them out into the fields, as with child-protective case workers. However, bringing mobility to the rest of the government workforce will require more than a commitment to technology. It will require business-process changes that are embedded in decades-old traditions and even in statute. Also, given the fact that rarely a month goes by without a high-profile loss or exposure of citizen and/or employee records by some public entity, government decision makers will eventually have to bestow the necessary resources and authority on state information security offices that will allow them to assure public information.

The loss of mobile devices, such as laptops/tablet PCs, PDAs, cell phones, and portable memory, looks to be every bit as serious a concern as the threat of having systems “hacked” via the Internet. Data sets in portable memory and devices with real-time access to back-office systems simply cannot be allowed out into the field without significant investment in internal access controls that keep data from leaving the office when it shouldn’t and ensuring that it can’t be accessed remotely by unauthorized parties when it does leave the office.

Government entities must decide whether they would rather conduct state business securely or roll the dice as to whether they will have to pick up the tab for providing free credit-check services to citizens and employees whose personal information is compromised.

Finally, in a geographically expansive nation with dramatic climatic conditions,rarely a year goes by where at least one region of the nation is not affected by some sort of natural disaster. That fact, combined with a trend toward homeland security and all-hazards preparedness, puts a premium on having state government workforces that are capable of maintaining order and providing emergency and minimum-essential government services remotely as part of responding to and recovering from various types of attacks, accidents, or disasters. Therefore, the user-centric broadband requirements of bandwidth-intensive tools, such as intranets, VoIP, and GIS, should be considered within the context of telework processes and continuity of operations plans.

Organize Me

The potential to provide citizens with a more integrated and coherent view into their recorded relationship with government has been in place for quite some time. Up until now, there has been no significant market event to drive demand for such organized presentation in the public sector. However, skyrocketing healthcare costs are now that driver.

States, like every other healthcare provider, are looking to reduce the costs of serving consumers—such as prisoners and the not-insignificant percentage of citizens who use public/university hospitals and clinics. States are looking for ways to pay for outcomes rather than incidents of service for the insurance coverage they provide to citizens (via Medicare) and employees. Healthcare consumers—particularly the aging Baby Boomers—are seeking more control over their healthcare consumption.

This is where electronic/personal health records (PHRs) come in, and the lessons that will be learned from the national effort to implement them will bleed over into many other areas of business.

PHRs promise to provide consumers with a unified view of their healthcare “accounts” over time and across multiple service providers in the same manner they have come to expect from single-source providers, such as Amazon.com or eBay.

Already, with the establishment of a National Coordinator for Health IT within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, this industry is seeing movement toward national standards for e-health records. The goal is that in the next ten years consumers and their attending physicians, through the use of elaborate record-locator services, will be able to pull up a complete history (accessible only to them) of their healthcare and, thus, provide continuity and outcomes-based services that are not common today.

Personal health records become bandwidth-intensive once they include medical images and audio files.

None of this is particularly bandwidth intensive until the exchange of healthcare-related images is considered. X-rays, MRIs, and other images (maybe even audio files) can be attached to your permanent electronic record, so to speak. And, given that care for chronic conditions (such as heart disease, emphysema, diabetes, HIV, depression, and high blood pressure) drives the vast majority of healthcare spending, the opportunities to provide more consistent and cost-effective care via telehealth technologies cannot be underestimated.

So, while telehealth transactions don’t appear to be bandwidth-intensive today, scaling up to millions of telehealth and PHR transactions per day becomes a concern on par with any other peer-to-peer exchange of rich-media files.

In time, citizens might come to expect an electronic public record (ePR) that will allow them to see a record of all their interactions with government. This might allow them to see all the taxes they’ve paid, update personal contact information once (rather than for each separate governmental entity), and conduct more business online using the stronger identity management that will be available in the wake of REAL ID. However, before citizens will be able to organize their relationship with government, governments will have to organize themselves through improved business processes and information sharing architectures.

Engage Me

Indiana, Kentucky, and Nebraska are examples of states that have begun providing access to real-time and on-demand video footage of state legislative sessions. Oregon is providing audio casts of legislative sessions. Some governors are providing rich-media versions of their state-of-the-state addresses, and other public announcements. Delaware provides a multimedia portal site for a directory of content (see http://www.state.de.us/gic/mmedia/). However, much more can be done along these lines.

Rich-media files can help citizens understand government processes - and reduce calls to help desks.

State agencies can provide more than just welcome messages from directors and cool graphical animations. Audio and video – including web animation ­– can be used to provide more engaging instructions as to how citizens and employees can complete processes and do business with the agency. These techniques can also provide accessibility to those with special needs and can reduce calls from citizens and employees to help desks.
 

Empower Me

As citizens and employees become more savvy and aware of the potential applications of rich-media and other bandwidth-intensive applications, they will seek to use what has traditionally been considered “government-held” public information for their own purposes. An emerging example has been geographic information systems (GIS) and geospatial data.

Online tools such as MapQuest and, now, Google Earth promise to raise citizen expectations for the use of mapping technologies. ESRI is already forecasting the emergence of a GeoWeb that will facilitate these citizen desires.

The GeoWeb will be a “system of systems” that will make an ever larger and more diversified body of geospatial data available to all types of users. A recent report by ESRI discusses the prospect of a “geodata-rich society” where (possibly within the next six years) “we will have a hundred times more satellite imagery available...and the real-time monitoring of various geographic phenomena will be increasingly available in consumer as well as professional applications.”

This means that businesses, nonprofits and even individual citizens will become increasingly GIS-savvy. Citizens will move beyond simple activities, such as conducting preliminary investigations of locations to site a structure or plotting a data element or two (criminal activity, voter registration, fishing-lake depths, school-district boundaries, etc.) against a street or topographical map. Soon real estate agents might want to plot census, police, and school system data on a hybrid satellite/street map when advising potential homebuyers and sellers.

Knowing that few users will have true GIS software on their PCs, GIS and mapping service providers have stayed with browser-based applications. But they have already begun moving toward multilayered applications that provide more user customizability,which makes these services much more bandwidth-intensive. Users will visit these sites out of curiosity and quickly graduate to restaurant hunting and vacation planning. Eventually, they will begin to see applications in other areas of their lives.

The GeoWeb may change citizens' relationship to government.

This transformation represents more than technological advance. It holds the potential to leverage the entire citizenry as an open source for the review and analysis of public data sets. Government executives will face added pressure and increased scrutiny when, for example, a graduate student at the local university, using a geocoded data set of criminal activity, disproves the local sheriff’s claim of reducing crime in a given neighborhood.

But savvy government decision makers will learn to invite public scrutiny to improve policy and implementation. They will leverage the increased input and buy-in to invert the traditional government-to-citizen relationship for one-to-many (G2C) arrangements into many-to-one arrangements (C2G) in more than just the symbolic sense.

Broadband-based, grassroots e-government of this sort will take its place with e-learning, e-health, entertainment over IP, and e-commerce as the primary pillars of the Internet Age.

About NASCIO

NASCIO represents state chief information officers and information resource executives and managers from the 50 states, six U.S. territories and the District of Columbia. This article is adapted from a report that was produced under the guidance of NASCIO’s Broadband in the States Working Group, which was led by George Boersma, Director of Technology Partnerships for Michigan’s Department of Information Technology. NASCIO is indebted to former Senior Issues Coordinator Chris Dixon for his significant contributions.