The idea that government should not be in the business of business was first articulated by the Bureau of the Budget during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. BOB was the predecessor to the Office of Management and Budget, which was created in 1970 during the Nixon administration.

Government should not be in the business of business. What this principle means is that there are broad areas of business activity that should lie outside the domain of government effort, e.g., providing food service, manufacturing, advertising, and offering medical services.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, one of his top priorities was to shrink government. He believed that many of the activities carried out by civil servants could best be executed by the private sector. So he instructed the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) to aggressively implement OMB Circular A-76, a government directive geared toward privatizing government activities.

The current issue of The Economist (Feb. 16-22, 2008) contains a 14-page special report on technology and government entitled “The Electronic Bureaucrat.” I'm still making my way through it, but it appears to confirm the obvious:

(1) Much that is good has happened to date, but there is more to do;
(2) It isn't all about technology;
(3) The real challenge will be to use IT to transform government.

But more on this when I've fully digested the whole section. What really got me going was an article on page 13 – “Government Offline.” The subtitle should give you a sense of what irked me – “Why business succeeds on the web and government mostly fails.” While private sector IT failures don't attract headlines in the Washington Post or snippets on the major news show, I seem to recall reading about as many serious problems in the private sector as I've seen in government. One major consulting firm had an entire practice devoted to systems in private sector firms that were over budget, behind schedule and not delivering the promised functionality. They even trademarked the name – “Runaway Systems.”

But am I just ranting as a retired civil servant, who can't accept the truth. Has e-government so far mostly meant high costs and poor returns? While in the private sector they have used technology to lower costs, please customers and raise profits? Let me know your thoughts.