The Government is pioneering the trend towards electronic rule, but
there are major hurdles.
Spoiled ballot sheets could be a thing of the past if the
current trend towards electronic government takes off. Deloitte
& Touche has launched a report putting the UK at the head of
the e-government movement, but warning that it needs to work hard
to meet increasing demands from the public.
The report, At the Dawn of E-Government: The Citizen as
Customer, outlines six things that any government must do to
prepare itself for the provision of electronic services to the
general public.
While the steps may seem superficially simple, the report
identifies some major technology barriers for public sector
organisations wanting to digitise their services - 32% of
governments surveyed identified legacy systems as a major obstacle
to development, topping skills shortages, project costs and
legislative restrictions.
Significantly, however, the UK public sector had a more
optimistic view than the US. Just over 40% of respondents in the UK
identified technology as a positive means to achieve e-government,
compared to just over half that percentage who were more
pessimistic and believed existing technology would hinder
development.
Chris Exeter, European research manager at Deloitte & Touche
and a co-author of the report, said the Government needs to
overhaul its back-end systems if it is to meet the demands of the
public on the internet.
"People are used to working in a fast-moving environment," he
said. "If you send an e-mail, you generally expect a response
reasonably quickly - the same day at the latest. How public sector
organisations respond to change is important."
Exeter also identified technology funding as a particular
problem for governments. One potential solution is the development
of matched funding initiatives, where the government develops
partnerships with other sectors, for example. "The public sector
around the world is tax-strained," he said.
Security was also identified as a big issue, said Exeter, who
explained that as the Government begins making tax forms available
online, this will become increasingly important.
Mike Saunders, service manager for strategic initiatives at
Kirklees Metropolitan Council, has been implementing a single
sign-on (SSO) system to make his set of applications more secure.
He is also examining the use of smartcards as a means of
identifying citizens online when accessing government services.
There have been some technology developments in the area of
e-government already. The Stationery Office has been making strides
towards the electronic publication of government information. In
March, Parliament conducted an electronic debate with the general
public for the All Party Group on Domestic Violence.
It is now planning one on leasehold reform, drawing together
landlords, tenants and lawyers.
The Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions has
also announced a £10m Wired Communities project to bring the
internet to deprived communities, and has stated that everyone in
Britain should have access to the internet by 2005.
This month, the first phase of the Revenue Online System (ROS)
in Dublin goes live, and will enable people to pay their taxes
online. Information from the Stationery Office suggests the Irish
government wants more than half its taxes to be filed online within
five years.
Six steps to digital government
- Information publishing/dissemination. This involves the
production of websites by individual government departments to
provide information to the public.
- Official two-way transactions. As government websites become
more sophisticated, it should be possible to exchange information
with public sector organisations, and even to conduct e-commerce
transactions with them, such as paying council tax bills, for
example.
- Multi-purpose portals. Realising that an individual member of
the public may need to deal with different government departments
at the same time, these portals would provide a one-stop-shop
approach to government interaction.
- Portal personalisation. Once established, government
"customers" should be able to tailor the portals to see their own
particular needs, displaying the information that is most relevant
to them.
- Clustering of common services. The report believes that when
the portal model takes a firm hold, the perception of individual
government departments will disappear and the public will view the
government simply as an entity with which to engage in a series of
transactions.
- Full integration and enterprise transformation. Front-end and
back-end applications will be integrated even further to provide
more services to the public. This is essentially the conclusion of
a transition to digital government.