Next week is the 10th anniversary of the birth of e-government in the UK. Michael Cross of The Guardian looks at how it came to be, and asks what progress - if any - has been made.
“In 1996, a green paper called Government Direct (”e” was not yet a business buzzword) set out a vision of citizens paying their taxes, receiving benefits and taking part in the democratic process via new electronic channels.”
“A decade on, after spending several billion pounds building websites, the government is only now getting to grips with many of the challenges the green paper set.”
[...] “For all the talk of radical reform, however, government bureaucracy of 2006 is much the same as it was when the Spice Girls were in the charts. The latest rebranding of the e-revolution, under the name Transformational Government, is wrestling with the same questions raised by Government Direct - how to orient services around the user, how to authenticate citizens’ identities electronically and how to share data in a legal and ethical way. We are no closer to creating a one-stop death notification service for the bereaved.”
Back in 1996, Colin Muid (one of the authors of the 1996 report) says, “We were saying ‘let’s clear up this mess’.” And what about now? “Now? We’ve got a digital interface to that mess.”
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