Managing Technology

ears ago, I read a column by Norman Cousins in the Saturday Review in which he wrote: "The things that I find most profound are those that cause me to say: 'Of course! I knew that! But until I read it here, I never really thought about it.' "

I had several of those revelations over the past 18 months as I traveled to widely dispersed places around the globe to study the use of information technology in public management reform. The premise is simple. A system works only if it solves a problem for the user. And the systems that work best are built around those problems.

Let me make that a bit less abstract. People are not interested in government services per se; but they are interested in using government to help them cope with the challenges in their daily lives. The international public management community is using a wonderful term-"life situations." A life situation may be starting a business, getting married, having a child, moving across the street or across the country, buying a car, taking a trip overseas or dealing with the death of a loved one.

All of these situations involve dealing with the government and may be as simple as filing a change of address form with the post office or as complicated as dealing with three different levels of government to start a business. The goal is to solve a problem or achieve an objective, but, in each case, at least one governmental process is involved.

The Big Picture

In my travels, I have seen a growing recognition that a full-service government means more than one-stop shops, 24-hour phone service or Web sites. It means integrating governmental transactions into larger life situations. One example is the Australian visa system I described in Government
Executive's January issue ("If It's Overseas, It's Overlooked,"). Under that system, travelers often don't even know that a visa permitting them to visit Australia has been issued. It all happens as part of booking an airline ticket.

The concept of integrating a government service with a life event is not new. States figured out a long time ago that allowing car dealers to handle motor vehicle registration made sense in terms of compliance and convenience. For as long as I can recall, both the Social Security Administration and the Veterans Affairs Department have allowed funeral directors to file death benefit claims for surviving relatives. The funeral directors have every incentive to get death benefit claims processed so that funeral costs can be paid faster. Beneficiaries avoid having to report to a government office, and the government gets notified more promptly that a person who may have been receiving pension checks is now deceased.

In recent years, the Social Security Administration-an agency that really understands how to deal with the public-has worked with hospitals to get Social Security number applications into the hands of new parents when they are filling out all the other paperwork incident to having a baby.

Easing the Load

Often governmental transactions cannot be made virtually transparent or effortless, but it is still possible to move toward integrating service delivery with other related services. The problem can be attacked at several levels:

• The gold standard is to achieve complete transparency, as in Australia's electronic visa system, which remains my favorite.
• If that is not possible, try to piggyback a related transaction. Motor vehicle registration or death benefit applications, while still requiring some governmental paperwork, impose minimal burdens on applicants and are done as a natural adjunct to another transaction.

A number of governments are using the Internet to develop pre-packaged searches, so that people in a particular life situation can get lists of and links to all government agencies they may need to deal with. Finland offers the Citizens Guide, and the Norwegians have developed a sophisticated system that reviews government Web sites and monitors traffic to create a thesaurus of life-event terms.

The power of information technology, especially the Internet, makes this kind of integration increasingly possible. Perhaps if I were setting up my business a few years from now instead of last year, a friendlier government would walk me through the various processes required by the IRS, state corporation and revenue commissions, and local licensing and taxing authorities.

Franklin S. Reeder's report, "Information Technology as an Instrument of Public Management Reform: A Study of Five OECD Countries," can be found online.