eGovernment for Development

Techniques

Avoiding eTransparency Failure: Ideas About Change Management

This page offers ideas about how to address one factor identified as important to the success or failure of e-transparency projects. Follow this link for more information about such factors (and some related case examples).

Idea 1: Your Project Must Ask And Answer The "What's In It For Me?" Question For All Key Stakeholders

Key stakeholders - funders, managers, operators, users, clients, etc - must support (passively or, ideally, actively) the e-transparency project. For any human to support a project, that project must align with at least some of their personal goals and values. Put more simply, the e-transparency project must provide each stakeholder with at least some positive answer to the question we all ask of any project: "What's in it for me?". The process of change management must ensure that this question is asked for all key stakeholders, and the answer incorporated into the project design or implementation process.

In Gujarat state in India, efforts were being made to roll out a wide area network that would underlie a later e-transparency project. The project management process asked the "What's in it for me?" question on behalf of key stakeholders. The answer was: "Free access to email", "Free access to the Web and Internet", and "Free access to long-distance, inter-agency telephony". These answers were incorporated into project design, leading to high levels of project acceptance and use: far higher than could have been achieved through training or through empty exhortations to use the network.

This is one example of the broader phenomenon: you use either carrots (incentives) or sticks (disincentives) to overcome the natural disinclination of public servants towards greater transparency.

(From: Richard Heeks & RK Dave)

Idea 2: Stakeholder Involvement Is A Must

The main internal stakeholders for an e-transparency project - the senior officials and the operational staff - MUST be involved in the project in some way. Without that, you can almost guarantee failure. For example, the Cameroon government initiated the SIGIPES project: introducing e-transparency into the process of human resource management within government. The first attempt at the project - which took a top-down approach - was a failure. The second attempt ensured that general staff, including administrators and other lower-/middle-level system users, were involved with the project. Their ideas were incorporated into the design, and the process of involvement also helped develop their commitment.

The main external stakeholders for an e-transparency project - donors/funders, and citizens or businesses who are intended beneficiaries - should also be involved.

Involvement can take many forms, and you can see a ladder from low to high levels of involvement:

• Awareness-raising: stakeholders merely know the project exists.
• Communication: stakeholders know about project purpose and progress.
• Participation: stakeholders are involved in discussions/meetings.
• Active participation: stakeholders are listened to, and actions are taken on the basis of their input.
• Prototyping: stakeholders get to use a draft version of the application, and their comments are used in the redesign process.
• Stakeholder development: stakeholders themselves design (and possibly build) the application.

(From: Olivier Kenhago & Richard Heeks)

Idea 3: Use Public Meetings To Good Effect

Saying something in public often encourages stakeholders to make that thing happen - they will be embarrassed if they fail to match up to public pronouncements. Effective change agents use statements at internal and external public meetings to maintain momentum and motivation on e-transparency projects.

(From: Mr A.M.S.K. Chandrasena)

Idea 4: Projects Need Leaders As Well As Managers

Leadership and management are not the same thing:

"The difference between leadership and management was once summed up in the following way by someone looking out of our office window in Covent Garden in central London:

'Imagine there's a sudden power failure on the tube [ London underground rail system ]. The system halts and all the lights go out. In the central control room someone is marshalling resources, implementing the standby facilities, rescheduling the trains, calling the emergency services. That's management. Someone else is walking along the darkened platform with a torch bringing a trainload of people to safety. That's leadership.'" (Yeates, D. & Cadle, J. (1996) Project Management for Information Systems, Pitman Publishing: p249)

eTransparency projects need managers, but they also need leaders as well.

(From: Richard Heeks)

Idea 5: Let Users Take Over The Technology

If you initially let users make the technology their own, they will be more likely to support later ICT-related projects like e-transparency. If not, they will tend to see ICTs as an alien force that has no relevance: a threat not an opportunity. By allowing them to use the technology for personal needs - through email, chat, personal Web pages, etc - they will come to own the technology, not resist it.

(From: Moshtaq Ahmed)