We need more that just Employee-Centric Government

Andrea DiMaio the Gartner eGov blogger posted yesterday about Governments needing to be “employee-centric” to get Gov2.0 to work – ie. without support from within their own organisations and from their own employees their transformation efforts will fail. The post entitled Citizen-Driven Government Must Be Employee-Centric, Too outlines his arguments and there is also further research if you have access to Gartner docs.

Anyone who has worked within or with governments will understand this position; the type of change that is needed to enact Gov2.0 can only really come from within – mandating policies will not deliver the results that are needed, only empowered employees can deliver it.

However I think we still need more.  We need governments to start understanding how all of their decisions and actions impact upon the goal to transform the way government works.  Current systems, policies and legal frameworks need to be triaged and actively worked upon to bring them into line with the open and transparent goals of governments. 

The same way new policies and initiatives in government have to be examined for potential environmental impact, why cannot the same be done to see if there is any impact on their transformation goals?

Hopefully the UK government will be positively influenced by Tim Berners-Lee (see my post Gov2.0 and Data) and be more proactive in opening up data; but they need to get this sort of thing ingrained into their DNA rather than just use it when they want to.