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However, at present a project is being implemented on the internal website which takes a
similar direction, enabling government employees to put information on the website about active
projects – their status, who is involved, who the contact people are, and what the timeline is.
Another knowledge sharing instrument employed is that of manuals, or standard
operational procedures, such as in DGP 2, where the team was initially hired for a fixed period of
2.5 years, currently exploring ways to let the knowledge accumulated in the team flow back into
the government:
Our goal is to [document] the entire output that is related to IT systems, be it the intranet, the partial
projects, or the portal; […] to have created manuals which don’t leave any questions unanswered regarding
how they originated, who bears which responsibilities, and who administrates it. So, it is our goal to take
this operational knowledge back into the government.
Imitation. As asserted before, digital government is a governance mode that challenges
the traditional functioning of government in many ways. This is particularly evident with regard
to “looking over the fence”, or monitoring and copying the practices of other agencies and
governments. Of course agencies have compared themselves to other agencies before, but the
Internet offers a whole new range of possibilities for replications the work of others – at least to a
certain extent – because of the very nature of the World Wide Web. Replication from other
agencies involves knowledge transfer rather than sharing, and is often regarded as an effective
effort to avoid “reinventing the wheel”, as has been repeatedly stated by members of all projects.
A member of DGP 3 gives an example:
I would say a lot of [my work] is plagiarizing and relying on other people's, other agencies' websites,
sometimes doing a lot of hard work and wading through their online or print publications, pulling out what
it is the business needs, and presenting it in a user-friendly way.
Imitation is mostly encouraged by the “imitated” agencies, especially if given credit for,
since it promotes the image of the duplicated website:
We certainly do communicate with agencies by email, just letting them know what our efforts are. We go
out on the speaking circuit and speak to […] explain what the portal is all about […]. You know, we do
agency presentations.
DGPs often serve as a hub for diffusing best practices among the agencies, as stated
members of all projects. For example, a member of DGP 3 said:
We had to look for best practices, and then share those best practices across the enterprise. It doesn't make
sense for one agency to have developed an expertise and not share that expertise across several different
agencies that might have similar missions.
Convention