With collaboration as an important source of future value creation, smart governments are breaking down agency-centric silos in order to achieve increased productivity and deliver even higher quality services. More significantly, these collaborative efforts are being extended beyond the public sector to engage non-state actors in the process of decision-making and policy execution.

These were some of the observations shared by panellists in a discussion on Collaborative Government at the eGov Forum, which took place at the eGov Global Exchange on 20 June 2011. The session was facilitated by Mr Lim Swee Cheang, Chief Executive Officer of the Institute of Systems Science, National University of Singapore.

A panel discussion on the topic of Collaborative Government

Mr Steve Bittinger, Research Director with Gartner’s Government Research, noted that collaboration is an issue of rising importance, and that efforts are being made to bridge multiple silos of government agencies and to reach out to citizens in order to pursue value chains that cross traditional boundaries.

These efforts are geared towards achieving outcomes such as those outlined by Dr Robert Morris, Vice President, Services Research and Global Labs, IBM Research.  “Think about productivity,” he said. “We want the government to be highly productive, to use technology to achieve outcomes in productivity and deliver maximum value out of what we spend.” Other basic desired outcomes include quality services, a better quality of life, a competitive economy and job creation.

Collaboration is key in achieving these goals, said Dr Morris. “You have to collaborate because there are multiple constituencies involved and the only way to achieve those outcomes is to solve these problems collaboratively.”

Increasingly, these multiple constituencies will include non-state actors such as citizens, enterprises and civil society. According to Dr Tomasz Janowski, Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Centre for Electronic Governance at the United Nations University, the engagement of these non-state actors is important because “a growing percentage of the capacity to create public value does not exist within government; it exists within enterprises and citizens and the wider society”.

Mr James Kang, Assistant Chief Executive, Government Chief Information Office, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore

Important as it is, however, Dr Janowski also pointed out that collaborative government should not be seen as a goal in itself. “It should exist within a larger framework of objectives such as socioeconomic development, rule of law and social equity, and seeing how collaborative government is able to actually fulfil these objectives.”

For example, to achieve sustainable development, the aim of a collaborative government would be to bring about the required social change, changes in behaviour and increased awareness of sustainability issues in citizens and enterprises.

Reiterating the importance of this approach, Mr James Kang, Assistant Chief Executive, Government Chief Information Office, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, pointed out that in today’s interconnected world, the government does not have all the answers. “One of the biggest advantages of collaboration is that it helps the government to make the right decision and to execute its policies and programmes more effectively,” he said. “We don’t have a choice. The price of being disconnected is too heavy a price.”