Transcending From Open to Smart Government to Better Serve Citizens

Admittedly, nowadays increasing number of cities opening to smart government, yet there is still great room to improve for establishing a mature smart government and for better serving citizens. Thus, as far as I consider we should focus more on the following three key points in the future smart city development:

First, in terms of the citizen participation in governmental business, I believe agencies should be required to engage the public to enhance decisions through widely dispersed knowledge and increase public participation in government. More specifically, this point could be achieved through two ways:

• Government Dialogue: Government could push information to multiple electronic channels (eg. mobile devices) that enable citizens to receive real time information anywhere Government encourages citizens to provide feedback through these channels.
• Citizen Directed Government: Government could use dispersed technology solutions (eg. Internet-based dialogues, interactive radio and TV, and public hearings) to have multi-directional conversations with citizens agencies and constituents, meanwhile let citizens have conversations with citizens. Feedback from citizens should be incorporated from real-time, smarter, decision making.

Second, we should pay attention to the information transparency in government. Agencies should be required to utilize technology to put information about agency decisions and operations online and in forums available to the public.

Third, in order to deliver better citizen services, it is crucial to attach importance to the collaboration across government entities. Agencies ought to be required to use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate across all levels of government and engage the public in the work of their government.

Just as business analytics are used to enable fact-based decision making and extend accountability by providing all decision makers with the right information at the right time, I believe in this way, the government will have more pervasive deployment of business intelligence functionality throughout the enterprise and a 360° citizen services could be achieved.