Since the 1990’s the federal government has used the phrase “E-Government” with the objective of utilizing technology to improve how they serve citizens, businesses and other government agencies.  In 1999, Bill Clinton’s “Memorandum on E-Government” required the top 500 forms used by citizens to be placed online within a year.  Today, every one of the States has a website and the vast majority of counties and cities do too.

Surf over to your local county website and you are likely to find an E-Government section where you can do things like pay your property tax and water bill, renew your vehicle registration, search for certain records and find minutes of public meetings.  Notifications to bid for local, state and federal contracts appear mostly online now.  Long gone are the days when you had to search through local newspapers (although there are still a minority of agencies that still publicize their bids this way.)

But the use of technology in government is beginning to change.  Jon Lebkowsky recently posted some notes of a keynote given by Gary Chapman, the director of The 21st Century Project at a conference in Texas.  Gary discussed efforts at greater transparency in government at all levels and a transition from E-Government to a new term, “I-Government”.

Quoting directly from Jon’s notes, Gary described “a transition from e-government, which is merely transactional to i-government, or information based government.  Government shouldn’t just build PR web sites, it should be guarantor of data quality for access by tool builders. This is the next phase of democracy, and the next stage in the fight against corruption. We won’t need to file freedom of information access requests, because the information will already be online and accessible“.

Transitioning to I-Government must be the priority for our public sector.  Every government agency should have a strategy of how it is going to get its data in one place and provide access points so that developers can use their skills and create meaningful applications for the community.  This will create truly open and transparent government and tools will emerge that add real value to the community.  Too much of the discussion around the use of emerging technologies in government (often referred to as Gov 2.0) focuses on the adoption of social media and other collaborative tools within government agencies.  While I can’t deny the importance of these technologies I strongly believe that elected officials should be directing their IT departments to focus more of their energy on making information available.  They don’t need to build applications that make use of the data, our innovative developer community will do this for them.

In small part, we are beginning to see the emergence of I-Government and we have seen how powerful it can be in relation to government bidding.  In an earlier post, I introduced FedSpending.org a great website which has used spending data made accessible by the federal government and created a rich intelligence tool for the federal vendor community.

There is still a great deal of work to do at the local level but I look forward to PublicSpend showing how public spending data can provide a valuable intelligence tool that will enrich vendors and provide buyers, whether in the private or public sector, with information to make fast and optimal decisions.