Towards an assessment framework for spatially enabled government

Government today confronts challenging and complex issues – the global financial crisis, terrorism, climate change, an aging population, deteriorating public infrastructure, natural resource depletion, and increasing demands for welfare support. Many of these issues require coordinated action across governments. In nearly every case government responses require knowledge of location – where are the people, infrastructure and resources affected by these issues and where should the response be targeted. Although government has benefited from the use of spatial technology for many years, this use has been for the most part fragmented and uncoordinated. Relatively recent developments in the fields of ICT, the internet and spatial data infrastructure (SDI), now offer the real prospect of cost-effective deployment of knowledge of location in business systems across the whole of government. This is called the spatial enablement of government (SEG), part of a broader and all encompassing phenomenon, the spatial enablement of society. One of the key requirements of SEG is a means of assessing whether investments in enablement are achieving expected outcomes. This paper briefly reviews the state of global development on SEG and cases of SEG in Australia, North America and Europe; and then focuses on an assessment framework for SEG. The framework builds on assessment methods under development or in place for eGovernment, SDI and, public policy and program evaluation. The paper concludes with some views on future directions for research on SEG assessment frameworks.