A valuable reminder of what was going on in the e-Government era (and funny to see fishinglicence.co.uk there – I joined just after the service had been squashed).
The summary is that we started well, but maybe without direction, and then lost our way a little bit. I think the targets were useful to get people thinking about online services in a rapid time frame. As we used to say in the local e-gov programme: putting a bad service online just makes it easier to see how bad the service is.
After 2005, my feeling was that the focus was on big services (such as self-assessement, Corporation Tax, VAT, Tax disc renewal). While these are all great revenue streams for the government, I’m not sure how much focus there has been on getting services we actually want online?
In related news, Accenture is all about e-Governance (efficiency and effectiveness AND using new technologies to strengthen relationships with citizens). My question is whether I want a relationship with government: surely I want to pay what I have to, receive what I am due, and feel that they are doing a good job. Is that a relationship?
