Simon Caulkin writes in The Observer about how news of the dot.com crash seems to have passed the public sector by almost completely. Private companies learnt three years ago that you can't just go around throwing money at online ventures and hope to turn a profit, but this small pearl of wisdom appears not to have percolated through to those in government.
Instead, the e-government initiative, which aims to make all local and central government services available electronically by the end of 2005, "will cost the taxpayer �7.4 billion by 2006". Yet there appears to be a total lack of clarity as to what sort of services the public would use.
Until now no one has bothered to find out what people actually want from e-government. As the 2005 deadline approaches, so little is known that the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, which is responsible for pushing local authorities online, has launched a �2.5m 'e-citizen national project' - a marketing wheeze to discover "what makes an e-citizen tick" and to catapult e-government take-up to success.
The E-Citizen website is, ironically, open only to those who have registered to use it. Not exactly an exercise in open and transparent public consultancy, it sends out precisely the wrong message to potential e-government users and is unlikely to achieve its aim.
The problem is one that bureaucracies are well known for - an inability to thoroughly think things through. Current spending will outstrip eventual savings by quite a wide margin, making the move from offline to online expensive and, one could argue, pointless. Simply making something available online just because you can does not mean that people will use it - there are plenty of existing websites that illustrate that point only too clearly.
Usability consultant Louise Ferguson says on her blog:
Last year [...] I found that even local government heads of ICT were sceptical of the business case for putting many services online. In fact at one London council, research showed that the biggest demand among local residents was for someone on the end of a telephone, to answer queries, solve problems or take payments. Many elderly residents just want to talk to someone... and don't have a home computer.
E-government is an excellent example of how the well considered application of social tools would help matters no end. Instead of a locked down, controlled website such as E-Citizen, they should implement a public consultation website with an open blog that allows users to quickly and easily leave comments.
They should then build on that to create e-government websites from the bottom up using a modular approach which allows for flexibility and collaborative development and takes into account the requirements and preferences of the users. It seems safe to bet that the IT vendors are instead shoehorning e-government into existing frameworks which are likely to be both expensive and inappropriate.
In theory, e-government exists to serve the public. At the moment, it looks more like it exists to serve the IT vendors.
I feel that you're being a bit hard on e-gov here...more at e-gov ain't that bad