Open governance

Ike Señeres

Transparency International (TI) describes open governance “as a concept that moves beyond the traditional notion of government and describes the relationship between leaders, public institutions and citizens, their interaction and decision making processes.” As defined by TI, open governance is comprised of three main elements—rights, institutions and policies, and tools. To put it another way, open governance is the transparent process of interaction between the government and the people. As it is generally understood, the government is the bureaucracy that is elected by the people and should therefore serve the people.

As used in the usual terminology of the bureaucracy, serving the people is all about delivering public services. From the perspective of the private sector however, the people are the customers that should be served, and the scientific way of doing that is to use software tools such as Customer Relations Management (CRM). Using CRM, it would be easy to build a system that would enable the people (the customers) to contact (access) the government (local and national) at any time (24×7), from anywhere (local and abroad), using any available device (internet, mobile, kiosk and telephone).

One of the main features of the CRM is a ticketing system that will enable the customer to track the status of his or her request as it moves from one point to another. As it is designed, the tickets issued will not be removed (erased) from the system until it is acted upon (resolved). In order to cater to those who may not have a device or who may not be capable of using such devices, the ground floor of government offices, municipal halls and provincial capitol buildings can be converted into One Stop Shops where anyone could just walk in anytime, to be able to do everything that could be done through a device.

The CRM is designed in such a way that there will be no more need for a customer (citizen) to follow up the government about his request. The reverse would actually happen, because it would be the government now that would inform the customer about the status of his or her request. As soon as the project is deployed, it will no longer be necessary for all customers (citizens) to know anyone in any agency in order to be able to transact with it. Because of this, the patronage system will be removed, and influence peddling will also be removed.

The system has five (5) components, namely (1) in-person (human teller), (2) voice (telephone, Viber, Skype), (3) non-voice (text, email, Facebook), (4) video (teleconference) and (5) live chat. Except for the last two items, the three other components are now being used by the banking sector. That is the reason why I say that we should now transact with the government in the same way that we transact with the banks. As we know it, transacting over the counter through a human teller is the usual way of transacting with the banks. Aside from that however, we could now do phone banking via telephone, online banking via internet and mobile banking via a cell phone.

As it is now, the Philippines is already the text messaging capital of the world. As the saying goes, there are more sheep than people in New Zealand. In the Philippines however, there are more cell phones than people. What is ironic however, is that here in the Philippines, the people could not transact with the government by using a cell phone. What is also ironic is that the Philippines is now also the call center capital of the world, and yet the people could not also transact with the government by using a telephone. Hopefully, we could now correct these two ironies by way of using information and communications technology (ICT) for open governance.

There was a time when ICT could not be widely used for open governance because of the low numbers of personal computer (PC) ownership. That is no longer a problem now, because cell phone (CP) ownership is already very high, and a CP could now practically do everything that a PC could do. At the risk of stating the obvious, the CP now could be used not only for text messaging and voice communications, but also for browsing the web, for running mobile apps, for video conferencing and for live chatting.

I have done some technology related predictions before, and now I am ready to make another prediction. It’s more of a forecast actually, because the technologies that I am talking about are already in the market. I predict that in the future, video conferencing and live chatting will eventually replace text messaging and voice communications. The latter is not a big deal really, because video conferencing is really just voice communications with video added. I also predict that using mobile apps will overshadow web browsing, but that is not a big deal either, because it is starting to happen now.

Email bantaygobyerno-subscribe@yahoogroups.com