The question of whether those with access to online government services should be coerced into using them dominated the public debate at the launch of SmartGov, iSociety�s report on e-Government and public services reform. A cynical view of last night�s proceedings is that the media-savvy folk at iSociety cleverly chose to inflate the issue in their presentation (coercion is only briefly mentioned in the report itself) in order to raise the temperature of the debate in the knowledge that journalists would seize upon this peg.

Even if this wasn't deliberate, it was always clear that the Blairite wonks in the room visibly wincing and recoiling at the very mention of coercion outside a foreign policy context would turn this into an opportunity to stress that e-Government should be all about choice, people, and (with no hint of irony or historical perspective) about 'letting 1,000 flowers bloom'. The fact that absolute control upon the means of coercion is one of the principal characteristics of modern states, and that therefore coercion is intrinsic to what governments do, didn't seem to trouble Mr Blair's advisers, busily waving the emotive social inclusion flag behind which horrendous public sector inefficiencies and worse are regularly hidden.

What did trouble them, however, was our tongue-in-cheek suggestion that government in the spirit of PPP should consider outsourcing the coercion of e-Government uptake to the private sector. This is not as crazy as it sounds.

As anyone involved in leading online uptake initiatives will know, coercion as envisaged by iSociety may well be a necessity if the current usage targets are to be met (I won't discuss the artificial nature of such targets here, nor the reasons of political expediency leading Mr Blair to bring the deadline forward from 2008 to 2005). But the iSociety report focuses on the wrong people. Coercing individual citizens to use e-government services makes no sense, as most citizens feel massively detached from political decision-making, and their only regular encounter with government agents already entail some form of coercion (e.g. taxation, law enforcement, claiming rights add your own experience).

Rather, the target for coercion should be corporations, which could be brought on side through a mixture of incentives (mainly the lower cost of online transactions, but also tax breaks, grants, awards, etc.). This government is enamoured with the idea that the private sector can solve all their problems, rather than sort out its internal cultural and training issues. E-business is more deeply and efficiently rooted in part of the private sector than in the public sector. A large number of those likely to use many e-government services are employed in the corporate sector, have online access from work, and a large proportion of them would only visit e-government sites if they had good reason to do so, often as part of their workload. So why not allow corporate HR departments and line managers to take on the burden of coercion as part of their ongoing role? All that's needed is a compelling business case.

But all of this debate misses the basic issues of poor service, rock-bottom motivation and non-existent corporate culture which characterise so much of the public sector.

As some at the event observed, e-government is a misnomer. The project should be about service delivery redesign in the information age, and the problem with sticking an 'e' in front of 'government' is that the whole enterprise suddenly appears to have its own, stand-alone aims, objectives, budgets and consistency. It makes the enterprise esoteric and almost detached from the provision of government services overall. It's no wonder therefore that people talk about e-government failure: it's virtually impossible to judge the performance of e-government initiatives and return on public investment whilst looking at e-government as a discrete arm of government something which the Audit Commission, for example, is busily trying to do at the moment. The results gleaned with traditional accounting methods that have virtually no way of measuring intangibles assets will inevitably make negative headlines, and many public sector workers will feel vindicated in their decision not to engage with the programme in the first place.

In fact, the problem lies with the lack of any palpable service culture in the public sector, the lack of performance-related carrots and sticks, and the lack of customer centricity that is inherent to government's non-contiguous bureaucracies which, in turn, are overwhelmingly still structured to deliver the 20th Century Welfare State service model: one-size fits all, common denominator-based, maximum reach. Customer service redesign is what should have been debated last night.

Viewed from this perspective, the multiple service channel choice envisaged by the e-government agenda is meaningless. Citizens have the choice to choose between more and more of the same inflexibility and no-can-do, and whilst it�s clear that poorly implemented technology channels can alienate potential users, most of us also have experience of some pretty dehumanising face-to-face interactions with public services.

The enormous trust deficit that has developed in this way over the years will not be overcome by switching poor service off-line to providing poor service over one or more on-line channels. Even the most cursory analysis of the dotcom failure will reveal that success online cannot be achieved by simply moving existing processes, workflows and crucially customer relationships to low-cost, self-service, online channels. E-government experts need to spend more time analysing the dotcom lessons, rather than dismissing them as pop culture.

What is required is a complete, bottom-up overhaul of service delivery in its own right, team by team, unit by unit, and for this to be accompanied by training and facilitated by small, flexible deployments of smarter, simpler, social technologies such as blogs and wikis to provide a mechanism that enables each public service provider to capture the operational intelligence and learning they gather each week, share customer stories, exchange tips on how to improve the customer experience. Once critical mass has been reached i.e. when the service providers themselves feel comfortable with their own, self-managed service process re-engineering and the online tools that facilitate them it will be possible to gradually open the electronic gates and reach out to the end users with a personalised, individual service offering that represents a truly revolutionary departure from what the public sector was previously capable of. If trust and relationships are built in this way gradually, internally and eventually externally user uptake and loyalty will follow.

This will take years, and it won't happen by 2005. Until then coercion should be left to the corporate line managers and the agents of the constituted order.