Governments should stretch the stimulus dollar

Tags: government, economic stimulus, transparency, accountability

Since the onset of the economic crisis in September last year, governments have gone into crisis mode, bailing out critical institutions and announcing mega stimulus packages in hopes of cushioning the financial impact on their economies.

This avalanche of uncertainty has left a lingering 'bitter-taste' when over a trillion dollars worth of taxpayer dollars are spent on rescuing money-losing businesses. The question for citizens remains, "is my government spending our money rightly and wisely?" as they scrutinize stimulus and budget initiatives unveiled and look for government leadership in rebuilding the economy.

Correspondingly, the challenge for government CIOs is how to stretch the stimulus dollar through IT investments – how to deploy IT capabilities and implementations to reduce operational costs while enhancing efficiency, and how to increase transparency and accountability as public confidence in institutions from banks to government itself dips.

Technology and innovation create immense transformation power to improve the business of government and the lives of citizens. CIOs should optimize the potential of technologies such as Web 2.0 – from blogs, and wikis to other social networking applications – to enhance collaboration and citizen participation, and create workflows and nurture skills for applications that have not been tried before. Likewise, as citizens expect government to behave more transparently and efficiently, CIOs can ride on stimulus initiatives to strengthen a focus on risk management, compliance, dashboards, and other metrics to manage performance and demonstrate accountability. 

However it is important to urge caution not to go overboard with such initiatives to the extent that they are seen to saddle government employees with a greater bureaucratic burden that translates into more red tape that citizens' face, instead of focusing on the original objectives of helping citizens in these new and challenging economic times!