Lessons for Policy
The EEC case study raises some questions about the extent of commitment of the New Zealand government to timely implementation of legislation enabling firstly electronic transactions (especially electronic signatures), and secondly the continued requirement for paper data storage of details for the purposes of the Electoral Act. Likewise, the necessity for a twenty-four hour delay in updating between databases servicing crown activities in an environment of real-time online databases needs to be questioned. Delays in addressing these issues are forcing costs to be incurred which technology is capable of reducing. The government itself is incurring the costs in this instance, as the cost of the contract between the Ministry of Justice and New Zealand Post is higher as a consequence. The EEC is but one system affected by these requirements. Without doubt there are many other systems with electronic components that are similarly disadvantaged. More attention given to the implementation of these legislative reforms would benefit such systems.
The case also highlights the need for Government to address its role as both a regulator and a customer or owner of such services. Fragmentation of the systems amongst many departments, and contracts that move the operation of such systems into the non-government sector mask the size of the problem. Whilst the inefficiencies of each individual system may be small, collectively the potential benefits are much larger. And whereas the private sector can make strategic adjustments and associated investments quickly, government decisions often lag. As many of the systems operated by Government, like the EEC, do not face competition and hence commercial pressures to implement new technologies quickly in order to accumulate the benefits, Government must provide other mechanisms to induce their timely introduction. New Zealand Post has utilised a variety of cost reduction and performance improvement incentives based upon budgets and improving accuracy to encourage EEC to be innovative in its use of technology. By the benchmarks available (based upon cost reduction, productivity improvement and "value for money", trading off quality against cost), these appear to be quite successful. The potential exists for government to use these same types of incentives and performance benchmarking techniques as both the purchaser of services from third parties, and internally within government departments, to induce similar efficiency gains and performance improvements based upon use of new technology.
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