Obama has focused on making the country more technologically inept. As mentioned in the module content he has had a major focus on connecting Americans to important information and services through different websites. Unfortunately, this has been a very costly venture, and reiterating that the country does not have the budget to endorse all of the endeavors, the whitehouse.gov website has been disbanded. Richard Heeks’ article discusses a proposition for evaluating government implemented online services to help reduce the risks of implementing the programs. There are two types of failures that can occur according to Heeks, which are project design failure and the design-to-reality failure. There is currently a lack of data to study government failure of online programs such as whitehouse.gov, but there is a subset of data he looked at. Of these programs, 35% were a total failure (never implemented), 50% were a partial failure (the goals were not attained or there were significant obstacles that occurred), and 15% were a success (the goals were obtained and there were no significant undesirable outcomes). Whitehouse.gov was a partial failure because it was implemented and then there were significant obstacles that occurred. Heeks outlines that through evaluation, government can determine if there were cost failures from direct, indirect, opportunity, political, beneficiary, and/or future costs. Also, by an analysis of information, technology, processes, objectives and values, staffing and skills, management systems, and others (time and money), an evaluation can help explain the design to reality failures that may have occurred. In the Science Direct article, the author has a few suggestions for evaluation that would be helpful for governments to use when evaluating online programs. They should try and understand citizens, engage the citizens to acquire information, continuously evaluate the program, and form community based partnerships. Community based partnerships are becoming very important to the sustainability of many public service programs and allow the government to work with the community to create the most impact on the community for providing services.
Serve.gov was created by President Obama in the early months of his presidency. It coordinates volunteers with activities that involve their interests and informs visitors to the site about sponsorship activities. Serve.gov is similar to volunteermatch.org. Volunteermatch.org is a website created to help nonprofit organizations find volunteers. Potential volunteers can search for events that they are interested in participating in and businesses can also post events that are in need of volunteers. The site functions as an infrastructure organization to help redistribute available resources to the appropriate parties. Both websites have the same goal of making it easier for Americans to find volunteer opportunities that they are interested in participating in, and making it easier for organizations to obtain volunteers to help perpetuate their causes. If Obama were to have recognized that such a website already existed, and instead helped endorse the cause, then there would not be two successful websites doing the same thing and splitting the potential for creating community impact. I had the opportunity to attend the Lodestar Center Collective Impact Seminar this week and this is the perfect example of how a collaboration would be beneficial. Obama would still be credited with caring about volunteerism, but his creation of a website to promote volunteerism was a duplication of an already provided existing service and therefore not helpful in working towards a collective impact on the “communities” of America. Both websites utilize the same techniques and rely on user membership to track information for the organizations involved. They both have information on social media outlets and offer many resources providing information on volunteerism. These websites are essentially operating similarly for the same cause, and to progress for the betterment of collective impact they should collaborate.
There are still challenges with making the online program services functional in all types of areas in the country. Wohlers study examines the different levels of government services provided online. He found that larger municipalities had more services provided online and more coastal states have a higher sophistication of services. The concentration of people in these areas and size places makes the online services more efficient and prevalent because they are regularly used at larger volumes and are necessary to make these higher populated areas more efficient. The most prevalent information provided is news and notices about local information and the least prevalent is service delivery programs, because they are more complex to efficiently operate online. His conclusions could be summed up as government has recognized to embrace the internet as a tool, but still needs to be cultivated to be more effective to reach all of the country. The E-government Security article confirms that the government has been overwhelmingly successful in implementing programs such as vehicle registration and tax returns online, but is still not efficient in as many areas of service as other countries. The major issue government has had in moving to provide all services online is that instead of serving a small subset of people like most online services, the government serves all of the people in that country. The United Kingdom leads the way for successfully implementing online government services by sticking to the plan that if you cannot supply the service securely then do not provide it at all, and implementing programs efficiently at a slower rate.
