Goals and scope of study
Many existing foresight studies describe visions of the future until 2010, which are relatively robust because of the short-term time frame they consider. eGovRTD2020 deals with more uncertainties encompassed in a longer time-span. Consequently, likely environmental influences - both positive and negative ones - have to be considered as well as demographic changes and facts predictable for the time-span. On that basis and in respect to current research, the project aims at developing different scenarios to describe stories of eGovernment in 2020.
The overall objective of the scenario building workpackage was to develop visions of governments interacting with its customers thereby using ICT. The workpackage aimed at preparing, organizing and executing the interaction with the constituency to generate high quality visions of governments in 2020, and to evaluate the scenarios generated in the view of eGovernment research paving the way to 2020.
More precisely, the aims and scope were:
- Develop a thorough methodology which allows high quality interaction and feedback across regionally distributed workshops
- Conduct and evaluate regional workshops for developing potential research and implementation scenarios for eGovernment RTD 2020
- series of regional scenario-building workshops with governments, academia, business and other participants
Scenario building methodology
Overall methodology
Based on the state of play analysis in workpackage 1, where a reflection of trend analysis has been conducted as well, the scenario building mehtodology comprised of the following steps:
- Execution of regional scenario workshops. Since the expertise, political visions and circumstances vary among countries, these different perceptions shall be collected. Experts from governments, ICT industry and consulting, as well as from academia shall commonly develop visions of governments in 2020. The consideration is based on the holistic view on eGovernment as introduced in the state of play analysis in workpackage 1
- Validation workshop among the project partners. The scenarios developed in the regional scenario-building workshops were examined and evaluated. The main topics of interest and dimensions of scenario developments were derived.
- Analyze scenarios. Based on the results of the regional workshops with experts and the validation workshop, the scenario aspects were grouped and the set of final eight scenarios as introduced below has been developed.
Workshop methodology
The scenario building process started with a series of regional workshops in which experts from governments, academia, ICT industry and consulting collaborated to describe possible futures of governments in 2020. The workshops took place in several EU member states and one in USA - see scenario building workshops. The objective was to draw plausible and internally consistent scenarios of how governments will act, interact and be perceived in 2020.
The workshop methodology is sketched in the following figure:
Analysis of topics of interests and dimensions
The scenarios have been analysed in the validation workshop and further on to extract key dimensions. The methodology is depicted in the following figure:
Results from scenario building
The scenarios derived in the regional workshops were classified on the three key scenario axes (environment, attitude towards government in terms of trust, and scope of Government service). The placement of the 29 scenarios is shown in the following picture. As can be seen, some corners of the cube a populated with less scenarios, others are stronger.
According to the methodology, the 29 scenarios have been consolidated to a set of final eight scenarios, which are introduced in the following. The aim of these scenarios is to convey the pictures of the future in a condensed format to the subsequent activities of gap analysis and roadmapping eGovernment research.
Scenario overview
| Values of dimensions | ||||
| Scenario | Environment | Attitude tow. Government | Scope of service | Short abstract |
| Ambient government | stable | trust | all inclusive | Government is all around. Citizens have a high confidence in government to effectively and efficiently settle issues for the common good. They are helped by a stable development of key environment variables. |
| Incident Politics | disruptive | distrust | core | Two-class- society: On the one hand young, well-educated citizens always on the move and always on the run. On the other hand old citizens with only little understanding of existing ICT. Society has become largely individualistic, with only a small role for government that is distrusted. A disruptive environment is the reason why citizens demand security, and ICT is deployed for that purposes, as well as to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of government. |
| Orchestrating government | stable | trust | core | Disruptive developments that were predicted at the start of the 21st century did not occur or had only a modest effect on Europe's societies. Because of the stable environment government adopts a facilitating, but limited role in society, which attitude is broadly supported. |
| Individualized society | stable | distrust | core | People have become more and more individualistic and self-responsible. They want to get individual responsibilities as a mean to get the maximum out of their potential and for social security purposes. Government only takes care of essential facilities; because of the stable environment the private sector is in the position to compensate the lack of capacity of the public sector. |
| Government keeps on trying | stable | distrust | all inclusive | Despite its efforts to be involved in the bettering of the quality of life at all fronts, trust in government is low. People experience a big gap between the technocratic government and their own skills and possibilities to take part in eGovernment. |
| Transition period | disruptive | distrust | all inclusive | In a highly polarized world, governments focus on key state tasks. The socio-economic policy is aimed at individuals taking their own responsibility, a mentality that rests on great support in 2020's society. |
| Social state | disruptive | trust | all inclusive | Society has changed dramatically because of demographic and security-related developments. Government has been able to catch up with the high expectations from citizens and fulfils a key role in the provision of eServices, using state of play technology. Government provides all inclusive services in order to fulfil the expectations of the public and to bring the instable environment under control. |
| Empowering state | disruptive | trust | core | In a rapidly changing, confusing world, citizens do not have much trust in public administration and hence become self-responsible. The government focus on their core business, however, persists in its role as care-taker for society but fails. There is a large social gap |
Deliverable
The full documentation is available here: Scenario building report
