Happy days playing footie in front of the gloomy house

Father Ludo was one of the most influential figures from my kaput knee period. It was the year of our Lord 1978 and we were being instructed by Father Ludo for our First Holy Communion. A big event, no doubt about it, because it was our first public appearance and Father Ludo was everything to us: manager, producer, art director, stage designer, visual effect specialist, personal coach, director and choreographer. It was especially in this last role that I remember him. After all, one of the high-points of the performance was to receive communion and that had to be perfect. Father Ludo's biggest fear - and not without reason - was that like a pack of hounds let off the leash we would race straight ahead to be the first before that desirable goal of ours, the chalice ('what would the host actually taste like?').

Thanks to weeks and weeks of drilling us, Father Ludo was able to suppress our youthful bloodhound enthusiasm. On the big day, we meekly made our way like lambs to the slaughter towards the altar, left hand in right hand, just as Father Ludo had relentlessly taught us in the previous weeks. What a coach, that Ludo.

But not everything that Father Ludo did was a success. Ambitious as he was, some time later, he taught us the 10 commandments, naturally in Roman Catholic verse form: “You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shall you serve ...”. And Father Ludo found it his apostolic duty to clarify each commandment in precise detail to each of the nose-picking, leg-wobbling kegs of nitro-glycerine that we were. Here too he was on the whole successful in teaching us except the second part of the fifth line “Thou shalt not annoy others”. We didn't get that one. But time brought understanding.

The 80s and 90s

The Eighties were a revelation with regard to having first-hand experience with annoyance: Rick Astley, white and green ribbed sweaters with snow-washed jeans, The Blue Lagoon and purple and white Honda Caminos were all rich sources of annoyance throughout the decade, although admittedly, it was more often the adolescent search for identity rather than genuine annoyance, because secretly we rather liked the Camino.

Annoyance in its grown-up and unadulterated form only became my daily fare when half-way through the Nineties a tsunami of websites flooded the internet. Today, anyone who characterises the Eighties as the tabloid decade should first of all take a look at the average website spawned in the mid-Nineties. Backgrounds created from wallpaper, information structured like a Mikado game, and graphics which barely surpassed the quality of the watery Happy Tattoo Bubble Gum tattoos from my youth. And unfortunately, the same applied to small community websites as well as to the first online bookstores.

But the playing-field changed rapidly in the late Nineties. Companies that placed e-commerce at the heart of their strategy realised from their sales figures that inconvenience when online shopping, irritation on the part of the consumer and annoyance during the shopping experience had a negative effect. The laws of commerce in the new online world were no different than in the traditional bricks-and-mortar environment. Annoyance is fatal. Money was therefore quickly invested into raising the professionalism of the web design industry and the big players broke new ground in improving the web experience and eliminating any annoyance the customer might feel. Pioneers such as Amazon had a good understanding of the concept.

The small community websites were no longer able to keep up. But they were the ones who had little to worry about annoyed users because their users were happy simply to find the date of the next Beerfest, even if the information was shown against a background of artificial roses.

Even the Federal Belgian government was unable to keep up, but annoyed citizens did indeed make their frustration known. Not that the policy-makers lost any sleep about the matter - unlike the CEOs at that time: in that tumultuous time of evolving federalism, a notorious serial killer and a new economic EURO landscape, government officials had other things in mind rather than the creation of a smooth, efficient information highway between government services and citizens. And the relics of that still remain today.

‘Thou shalt not annoy others'

De Standaard, 6 October 2006: ‘56% of the internet users who were surveyed by the research bureau Insites say that they require a more extensive service to be provided by the government via the internet. In 2004, that figure was 77%. (...) Only 24% of the citizens are satisfied with the online service provided by the federal government. (...) According to Insites only one in three surfers understands the information provided by the government on the web.’

A very embarrassing situation for the government. It's not difficult to read between the lines to detect the 'consumer's' annoyance.

But it is not only citizens who are less than enthusiastic. Even the World Economic Forum recently placed Belgium in a shameful 24th place on the Networked Readiness Index (http://www.weforum.org/pdf/gitr/rankings2007.pdf). This index indicates the extent to which a country or a community is ready to participate in and benefit from ICT developments. Germany was ranked in 16th place and The Netherlands in 6th place. Ouch...

But it doesn't surprise me. Our federal government is not especially known for its cutting-edge ICT initiatives, and especially not when compared to other countries. Employees may be happily surprised when they see information appear pre-filled on their pay-slip during a Tax-on-web session, but this is a straightforward intervention that is hardly ground-breaking. When it comes to really important things, the obstacles mount up: Kruispuntbank der ondernemingen (KBO), a central databank holding information on businesses that has replaced the Commercial Register, paperless customs system (PLDA), justice department ICT-project (Phenix). They make one mistake after another. Not only the suboptimal ICT service, but also the massive amount of money wasted on ICT investments are a source of annoyance.

But our voluntaristic government is nowhere near throwing in the towel. The government portal site is being updated - the one-and-only door through which surfers can enter the Belgium government's virtual buildings and where citizens should find themselves in a world of efficiency, clarity and speed. The site should have been completed as we speak (goal was 10th of June, the election day for a new federal government), but as luck would have it, this did not happen. I'm straining at the leash to find out the final release date so that I can test the new portal site.

Will I have to choose whether or not to enter as a citizen, company or government worker as is the case with the current portal site (www.belgium.be)? Will I once again be confronted with a website organised according to the internal structure of the government?

Or shall I be able to navigate my way through the administrative jumble on the basis of realistic scenarios? For example, if I want to form a company? Or if I want to temporarily live abroad? Of if I suddenly need help after a car accident? New Zealand comes very close to what I have in mind: http://newzealand.govt.nz/ttkw. Will the new site be a huge step forwards, a bold step into the 21st century (we are already in 2007) or will the architecture for presenting information be a carbon copy of the current version?

It won't be enough to create a new portal site that is truly excellent. This might be enough to compensate for the annoyance of the first site, but not to secure the future. Today a whole generation of knowledge workers are permanently working online (OK, not 24/24, but at least 12/24) and they form an important driving force behind the Belgian economy; it is they who guarantee our future economic prosperity. And the following generations who are ready to join the labour market during the 21st century are ‘online-savvy’ in a way that the current policy-makers can barely imagine.

If the entrepreneurs of the future are annoyed by the government's ICT service, then quicker than a broadband datastream they will migrate to countries with more progressive ICT services. And then we will fall even further down the global ICT lists...

So a message to Messrs Verhofstadt, Leterme, Vande Lanotte, Di Rupo, Reynders and Michel: as soon as possible, put the motto ‘Thou shalt not annoy' at the top of your list of online priorities for ICT initiatives. In the year 2007 it should be self-evident, but given the abominable ICT reports emanating given by the Belgian people as well as official bodies together with the ICT failures of recent years, even this seems ambitious enough in the short-term. Future generations may perhaps be somewhat more demanding.

So bring on your state-of-the-art new portal site, and no more excuses please for not doing unto others as you would have done unto yourself.

Johan Verhaegen, Sr. Project Manager