Lean government and platform-based governance—Doing more with less

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Abstract

Governments from all over the world are looking for ways to reduce costs while at the same time to stimulate innovation. While pursuing both objectives, governments face a major challenge—to operate in a connected environment, engage stakeholders and solve societal problems by utilizing new methods, tools, practices and governance models. As result, fundamental changes are taking place on how government operates. Such changes are under the larger umbrella of ‘lean government’ (l-Government). Lean government is a new wave which is appearing as a response to traditional approaches—like electronic government (e-Government) and transformational government (t-Government), and aims at reducing the complexity of the public sector by simplifying and streamlining organizational structures and processes, at the same time at stimulating innovation by mobilizing stakeholders. In l-Government, public organizations introduce platforms facilitating innovation and interactions with other public organizations, business and citizens, and focus on their orchestration role. Experimentation, assessment and gradual improvement based on user requirements are key factors for realizing l-Government.

Highlights

► Lean government is a third wave of e-government. ► Collaborating and engaging with stakeholders are central in lean government. ► Platforms can facilitate collaboration and coordination with stakeholders. ► The need for orchestrating capabilities is explained.

Introduction

Governments find themselves in a situation where budgets are reduced and at the same time innovation is necessary to stimulate economic growth. In such scenario, politicians and legislators aim to reduce the administrative burden for businesses and governments, increase customer-centricity and at the same time they are challenged to innovate. Process standardization, providing services (only) online, open data, social media, participative innovation and reducing the size and complexity of the public sector are some of the developments contributing to this aim. As an example, the opening of data is a way of stimulating innovation, utilizing the wisdom of the crowds providing access to knowledge out of reach (Surowiecki, 2004). While by adopting these practices, governments expect that they can reduce their administration.

Most citizens agree to have a smaller government, but also that governments should still have the ability and capacity to solve societal problems. These seemingly contradicting requirements result in the rise of a concept we label as ‘lean government’ (l-Government for short). l-Government is about ‘doing more with less’ and is about the changing role of government in responding to complex political, managerial, and democratic challenges. An example of lean government is the XBRL-based business-to-government reporting in the Netherlands in which both companies and businesses benefit and do more with less (Bharosa, Winne, Wijk, & Janssen, 2012). Driven by the financial crisis government have to reduce their spending and reduce the size of their administration, whereas the web enables to engage with citizens and businesses, to build online relationships and involve them in the tackling of societal problems. Governments are getting smaller, but at the same time try to innovate and extend by creating ties within society. In a lean government, responsibilities are assigned to a single government agency, which is held accountable, however, with the key understanding that such responsibilities can only be fulfilled by collaboration among multiple stakeholders—including citizens, businesses, and NGOs.

Societal problems pay little or no attention to boundaries and transcend the boundaries of the public sector. The public and private organizations form an eco-system in which the various actors play a certain role in solving societal problems. Web technologies and social media support collaboration beyond the boundaries of government and are used in l-Government to tackle societal problems. The development and deployment of collaborative solutions require governments to embrace an orchestration role, monitoring and steering what is happening in the collaborative eco-system, introducing a shift in governments' role, and introducing roles that are different from their traditional ones. l-Government focuses on the coordination of information flows, mobilization of actors to stimulate collaboration and innovation, and on monitoring what is happening. In this way, governments aim to deliver the same value or more to its constituencies with less staff.

The character of lean government is under development and not yet a full-fledged concept. The rise of the web has undermined the traditional relationships between governments and the public. Such relationships operate in highly institutionalized contexts, in which policies and programs are created and executed. Institutional settings as well as the rules guiding their behavior are changing toward opening the government. These developments result in less control, as activities are performed outside the traditional command-and-control chain. Innovation is fostered in collaboration with the market and by market representatives interacting with and participating in government systems. The approach has been captured under the open government concept. In an open government context, citizens have access to all kinds of information, documents, and datasets. In addition, they become empowered participants involved in policy-making and improving the public sector. Enabling better accountability, open government is a stream which seeks to make government transparent by providing insight to its functioning as well as to government data. In such environment, governments exert less control. Nevertheless, governments can benefit from monitoring what is going on, responding to questions and needs, and actively seeking for feedback to improve the government (Janssen, Charalabidis, & Zuiderwijk, 2012). In open government, citizens are used to scrutinize government and spot waste of public resources.

Open government provides a void to the answering of questions like, which services are successful and which not and for what reasons, what the quality of the data is, what the data is used for, what other stakeholders have interest in the data, what kind of policy implications can be drawn from the data, and all kinds of other questions. Therefore, governments want to be aware of the discussions that are going on, which new applications work, what questions citizens have on social media platforms, and so on. From this perspective, the idea of platforms has been embraced. Instead of leaving the complete development somewhere in the field, governments start providing platforms which can be used by application developers, users, citizens and others to deliver added value to government constituencies. In addition, such platforms provide governments the opportunity to monitor the collaborative actors and the interactions among them.

l-Government is often centered around platforms that enable doing more with less by involving other players. Introducing platforms is a way of dealing with less control and involving a highly complex landscape consisting of many interacting, networked and collaborative actors. By introducing and running platforms for businesses and citizens, governments can monitor what is going on and are better able to orchestrate the interactions in the way they prefer. Platforms can be viewed as a kind of regulated environment that enable developers, users and others to interact with each other, share data, services and applications, enable governments to more easily monitor what is happening and facilitate the development of innovative solutions. Yet platforms are not isolated islands, integrating them with other platforms and systems and ensuring their interoperability might be more difficult than initially thought off, as on the web everything is connected with everything.

l-Government is not a holistic and common reform movement; it is more a philosophy for the operating of government with underlying principles and ideas to shape government as it is nowadays. l-Government was initiated aiming at the reduction of the administrative burden and the focus on efficiency while pursuing enhanced services and innovation. Lean government principles can take new appearances in different contexts and in different countries. In l-Government the focus is on orchestrating networks which are enabled by platforms. The general idea of l-Government is outlined in Fig. 1 in which platforms play a key role in connecting developers, content providers, government agencies, and service providers and users. Platforms can, like a type of infrastructure, be viewed as socio-technological systems that emerge and evolve through the interplay of technology, users, and policy-makers (Janssen, Chun, & Gil-Garcia, 2009). With the current web, various platforms are connected to each other like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. As such the public platform has to have a close relationship with private platforms that already have a large user base. Based on the platforms data, APIs, and available services, all kinds of applications can be developed by third parties and provided to the public who can make use of advanced functionalities and services. The challenge for government originates from the changes in information flow and governance models enabled by the information society.

This special issue contains eight papers related to the theme of ‘doing more with less’. The papers in the special issue cover various domains and various applications of l-Government. By covering various aspects we hope to increase our understanding of the l-Government concept and at the same time contribute to its further development.

The rest of this article is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses the evolution of the usage of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the public sector by identifying three main waves: e-Government, t-Government and l-Government. Section 3, introduces the concept and principles of l-Government; while Section 4 explains its two main enablers: platforms and orchestration role. A summary of the papers included in the issue is presented in Section 5, and their contribution to l-Government is identified in Section 6. Finally, conclusions are briefed in Section 7.

Section snippets

From e-Government and t-Government to l-Government

There is no single agreed definition of e-Government (Scholl, 2002). e-Government is the use of ICTs to improve the activities of public sector organizations. Literature about ICT and government goes back at least to the 1970 (Grönlund & Horan, 2005). In the early days e-Government was primarily focused on creating citizen-centric service provisioning and on government itself, without looking beyond the boundaries of the public sector. e-Government was often discussed from the technological

l-Government concept and principles

l-Government is a contemporary approach to have a smaller government and is to some extent responsive to Osborne and Gaebler (1993) principles of to steer rather than to row. In their view, governments should focus on steering, that is, government should oversee the system, but not be in charge of carrying out policies. A main critique to Osborne and Gaebler's vision is that rowing should be left to the private parties which would be more suitable for doing everything better. Driven by the web

Platforms for l-Government

To make l-Government possible, a set of enablers is needed. Two main enablers include: technological platforms (platforms) and capabilities to orchestrate a complex network of collaborative entities. This section discusses the two main l-Government enablers.

Paper overview

This section presents contributions to l-Government from the eight papers included in this special issue. The papers are selected from the submission of the 6th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, ICEGOV2011, held in Tallinn, Estonia held in September 2011. In the conference over 500 people coming from 63 countries participated.

Conclusions

Lean-government can be viewed as a set of tools, an approach to reduce costs and improve services, a system, and a philosophy based on a smaller government that makes use of existing capabilities in the society to reach public values. The underlying premise is that societal problems can only be solved in collaboration with the society. l-Government is about having a smaller government and making use of the capabilities, intelligence and resources of the public. In this way, it enables having a

Dr. Marijn Janssen is Director of the interdisciplinary Systems Engineering, Policy Analyses and Management (SEPAM) and Compliance Design and Management (MCDM) Master programs and is an Associate Professor within the Information and Communication Technology section of the Technology, Policy and Management Faculty of Delft University of Technology. His research interests are in the field of ICT and governance in particular orchestration, (shared) services, intermediaries, open data and

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    Dr. Marijn Janssen is Director of the interdisciplinary Systems Engineering, Policy Analyses and Management (SEPAM) and Compliance Design and Management (MCDM) Master programs and is an Associate Professor within the Information and Communication Technology section of the Technology, Policy and Management Faculty of Delft University of Technology. His research interests are in the field of ICT and governance in particular orchestration, (shared) services, intermediaries, open data and infrastructures for coordinating public–private service networks. He serves on several editorial boards and is involved in the organization of a number of conferences. He published over 220 refereed publications. More information: www.tbm.tudelft.nl/marijnj.

    Elsa Estevez is a Senior Researcher in the Center for Electronic Governance at United Nations University—International Institute for Software Technology in Macao, and Assistant Professor at the National University of the South, Argentina. She has 25 years of experience in academia and software industry, including teaching e-Government-related courses to government audiences around the world and courses on Software Engineering to university students. Her research interests include electronic services and software infrastructure for Electronic Governance, and software tools to enable Communities of Practice; she has a number of publications on these topics. She served as a Program Committee member and Chair at several national and international conferences, most recently a PC Co-Chair of I3E2010 and ICEGOV2011. She holds a PhD and MSc Degree in Computer Science from the National University of the South, Argentina and Licenciado Degree in Computer Science from the University of Buenos Aires.

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