Govt 2.0 report 'lacks purpose and aim'

The Government 2.0 Taskforce report, released late last year, had "analytical weaknesses" and read like it had been "written by a machine", according to an IT analyst.

Guy Cranswick
(Credit: IBRS)

The Government 2.0 Taskforce looked at how government information could become more accessible and useful, how the government could make use of the views, resources and knowledge of the public, and how to promote collaboration across agencies. The taksforce's final report, Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0, was released at the end of last year.

Intelligent Business Research Services IT and business management consultant Guy Cranswick planned to release a paper that critiques the report. Cranswick believed it had "a number of weaknesses" and "lacked an audience and market context".

"If you are going to write any strategy, certainly a communications strategy, you've got to have that," he said. "And that's completely absent from it."

The other problem with the report, he said, was that it lacked definitions and terms of reference.

"Who is it addressing and why? And what is the aim? Because of this analytical weakness in the report, which presumably is a very quick representation of the work done by the taskforce, it lacks purpose and aim."

It was also "poorly written" in some parts, using "standard cliché" words such as "transparency" and "better strategies" without defining what the words meant in their context. "It could have been written by a machine," Cranswick said.

Questions asked and answered in the report were not clear-cut either, he said.

"They haven't asked the right questions, they haven't plotted the right kind of strategy, and they haven't dealt with discrete sets of the market as you would in a proper commercial communications strategy."

The report also confused the word "engagement" with "activity", Cranswick said. "So what this document does is confuses an act, that is sending an email or being in a chat room, with genuine engagement and the kind of paradigm that the commercial media industry has used for about 40 years," he said.

Cranswick plans to release his paper in March.