'Smart government' raises accountability concerns, says Gartner

But benefits will be seen in terms of better services and operational efficiencies

Local authorities and other public service providers are being dissuaded from adopting a "smart government" approach to problems by its perceived complexity and confusion around accountability, according to analyst firm Gartner.

Gartner describes smart government as that which puts emphasis on interoperability and shared services and increases the public value of services provided. However, when merging services and data many different elements must be knitted together, which can be very complicated, and it is not always clear who is leading the project.

However, the research firm argues that the benefits outweigh the costs, and provides examples of these with several recommendations that it said will help eliminate concerns.

Benefits include better and more timely services, but to achive this there has to be horizontal and vertical collaboration between data holders within and outside the government, Gartner said.

For example, Neighborhood Watch information collected by citizens online could be used to improve public safety. Another example is that of citizen-provided data from platforms such as SeeClickFix, which local authorities could use to better plan repair work so as to minimise disruption.

In addition government authorities can benefit from increased operational efficiency, by preventing duplication and sharing assets. Examples would include making procurement decisions based on up-to-date information on suppliers' risk and reputation and modifying staffing requirements for customer service centres.

Finally, government bodies can see increased political return from smart government; an example being an increase in fraud detection as a result of combining government data about individual tax payers or benefit recipients.

Gartner's recommendations to help overcome the problems around smart government include ensuring that government non-IT executives set out the public value proposition of smart government before embarking on the project.

Similarly, it said government CIOs must enforce interoperability approaches to initiatives as they emerge. Those tasked with running the projects will be responsible for interoperability. This will also help to eliminate complexity as projects will not have to be made interoperable retrospectively.

Finally, vendors must develop and clarify a smart government vision that makes sense and that government clients can clearly relate to in terms of their own public value priorities.