The Digital State Revisited

It’s now almost three years since my co-authors and I completed our research for our book Digital State at the Leading Edge. Since then I have continued to write about the key question the book addressed – whether IT is transforming politics and government – in my blog, first at www.intergovworld.com, and now here. I now have an opportunity to pull together these three years of observation. I will be presenting a paper at a conference in honour of Carleton University Professor Bruce Doern, one of Canada’s most distinguished public administration scholars. The papers given at the conference will then be published as a festschrift – an edited book honouring Professor Doern.

I am posting my Powerpoint deck for the conference presentation here and hope to receive some feedback. While we were writing Digital State at the Leading Edge, most of the e-activity we witnessed involved e-government, and the public servants we interviewed often commented that few politicians understood the potential impact of the IT in general and the Internet more specifically on politics. That has changed markedly in the last three years. In a way it’s not surprising, because politics is about winner-take-all competition, and the struggle for advantage usually leads to technological innovation. While the Obama campaign represents the leading edge of IT as applied to politics, the two Canadian election campaigns I closely followed – Ontario and the feds – displayed increasingly technological sophistication.
Two other themes I noted briefly in the Powerpoint presentation are the politicization of government’s online presence, driven by technologically savvy politicians, and a slowing down of initiatives in the area of online service delivery.

The Powerpoint presentation is necessarily brief, because presentations at the conference will be limited to 10 minutes, but I intend to expand on these themes in the paper that will follow. I will definitely appreciate your comments on the Powerpoint.