Engagement is critical to a healthy relationship between the government and its citizens. Governments need to constantly monitor the usefulness, satisfaction, and trust levels associated with online applications and then to refine them based on the findings. Over the past few years much energy has been directed towards service delivery designed with the citizen at the heart.  Do you believe that citizens really believe they are the focus of your services?  Or, do they feel as though they are on the periphery and disengaged?  We all know that it is vital for citizens to have a sense of belonging to the local community, but there is still a question mark associated with how well they relate to services that are delivered electronically. What's the problem?

The fast growth in Internet, mobile phone, and email use, combined with the explosion of connected devices and social media technologies, are transforming how we discover, share, create, play, and communicate personally and professionally, often blurring the lines. There is continued growth in the number of people involved in social networking and virtual community activities — for example, MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, etc., reading and creating blogs, instant messaging, and completing Web-based transactions. It is reasonable to expect that the youth of today — adult citizens of tomorrow — will spend much more time online for social, commercial, and business activities than citizens currently spend.

Governments already understand the importance of these technologies and have launched a number of initiatives designed to exploit them. But do they really understand the full capabilities and possibilities of Web 2.0 technologies.  It's all very well to use them in the political process, but they can also be leveraged to strengthen the government-citizen relationship and for intra- and inter-government use. 

Recent research suggests that without such an understanding, there is the potential danger of ignoring social trends among citizens and thus rendering governments somewhat irrelevant and reducing civic engagement with certain citizen groups. Ai-Mei Chang and P.K. Kannan, of the IBM Center for the Business of Government, conclude there is a clear danger that governments may become increasingly remote to the citizens of tomorrow, with much reduced engagement levels, if steps are not taken to engage citizens where they are. The nature of social computing renders the online environment individual-user-centric and that government will need to engage citizens at sites where they are rather than expect them to approach government portals. Citizens view this as "keeping up with the times," indicating the inevitability of such initiatives. 

Government services are relevant to citizens — they are connected to their homes, their families, their jobs, their communities, and almost everything else associated with life. Many many public services cover highways, social care, health, crime, education, the environment, all of them with a high degree of relevance, but many of little interest to the people who should be excited by them. So why aren't citizens enthusiastic about accessing them online? Is the key to make these services more interesting, efficient, useful and satisfying  — will citizens then become involved, committed, and engaged?

Have we made a mistake in the way we have designed electronic service delivery systems? Are the practical benefits of today's social networking technologies too big to ignore? Recognizing that times change, where should governments be investing their IT budgets to ensure that the solutions being implemented offer sustainable benefits?  How can we utilize our best technologies and brains to support citizen engagement and interaction or does this really matter when considering government efficiency?