Tony Blair wants all government services online by 2005. But public
sector IT staff are sceptical. Mike Simons outlines the problems
ahead
The Government has earmarked a massive £1bn over the next three
years to bring all its services online in an accessible, convenient
and secure way.
The plans include a single Web portal based on life events, such
as "having a baby" rather than individual public institutions such
as social services, GPs and registry offices.
And the key milestone is 2005. By then, Tony Blair wants all
government services online, and Internet access to all who want
it.
Officials knew there was little point, given the disaster-prone
past of government IT projects, in deploying the spin machine. But
that did not stop them trying.
The Prime Minister proudly announced that 33% of government
services are now available online.
Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of these offer
information only. They are not transactional. The hard work has
just begun.
A key part of getting government services online, we are told is
to "join up the back-office systems". No IT professional would
argue with that. The real question is: how it will be done?
The Cabinet Office tells us that the "government gateway" will
be crucial. According to the annual report, this gateway is "in the
early stages of development to join up existing IT systems in
departments to a single point of access".
"The gateway will make it much easier and more efficient for
citizens and businesses to use online public services and will
provide universal security and authentication standards for online
government transactions," it says.
The report failed to mention that the launch of this gateway has
been delayed, nor did it point out that a portal to offer a single
point of entry differs from joining up back-office systems.
The e-business world is full of tales of flashy front ends
masking creaking, barely connected back- office systems, and it
will be a hard, expensive battle to prevent the government portal
being the same.
The Government is putting the building blocks of this process in
place by insisting on interoperability standards based on XML, but
those standards will not become mandatory until next month.
Even when the relevant ministers have signed them off, the
standards have to be applied, and that will not be straightforward.
The NHS Information Authority's preference for Edifact rather than
XML standards for messaging (Computer Weekly 7 September) could be
just one of many disputes that need to be settled.
There is a similar ambiguity around government e-commerce. The
document's "strategic goals" include getting 90% of low-value goods
and services purchased electronically by March 2001, and ensuring
100% of procurement by civil central government is tendered
electronically by 2002.
Last year the government set itself extremely ambitious targets
for e-procurement and has been retreating ever since.
The Modernising Government white paper last year said 90% of
government procurement should be electronic by March 2001. Now the
target has changed to 90% of "low value" procurement.
Meanwhile, some departments lack the right systems to carry out
online procurement, while some are not even on the Government
Secure Internet.
The Office of Government Commerce (OGC), which was launched in
April, has got off to a stuttering start. It was charged with
saving £1bn from Whitehall's procurement bill, largely through
e-commerce.
But the OGC has already frozen its initial plans to create a
Government electronic shopping mall and is scrapping the G-Cat
pre-tendered procurement catalogue.
Meanwhile it will launch pilot projects for electronic tendering
systems in the autumn and is studying existing e-procurement
systems across government. Some innovative projects are under way,
and few would criticise the OGC for seeking to evaluate them, but
the process will make Blair's targets tight, if not impossible.
John Blundell, chief accountant at the Local Government
Association, said he backed the e-government scheme - although he
admitted it might not all be in place by 2005.
"It's unlikely to be possible in all cases in that time scale,"
he said, adding that if the Government came up with the right
conditions and funding, "a good crack" at the target would be
possible.
He pointed out that local government has earmarked £350m over
the next three years - but with only £25m in 2001 and 2002 so there
would not be much money for the project's early stages.
Following the launch of UK Online last week, Dominic Fagan from
the Central IT Unit in the Cabinet Office briefed 100 public sector
IT managers last week. Many thought the e-government strategy had
serious flaws.
Socitm press officer and past president John Serle, who was
chairing the meeting, summed up the general response: "I thought it
was meant to be about policy to implementation, but it seems to be
more about hype than reality."
He said structuring the user interface for a government portal
around "life events" was problematic, given the involvement of
private sector services in most such events. "If somebody dies you
need an undertaker, and if you're moving house you need to get a
solicitor and estate agent."
Delegates to the meeting asked why putting a layer of technology
over troubled government deparments would make them work any
better. Serle said that if the UK Online idea was meant to paper
over the cracks in the way the government worked, then it was not
likely to succeed.
Peter Sommer, research fellow at the London School of Economics,
said, "I don't think the e-government targets are realistic. Look
at the Public Accounts Committee report on Whitehall IT disasters:
why do you think the Internet will be free from all these troubles
just because Cabinet Office minister Ian McCartney is saying 'we've
learned the lessons'?"
Additional reporting by Robert Dunt