France (finally) gets on the e-government bandwagon

A public service portal and smart cards for everyday life - two initiatives planned by the French agency for the Development of Electronic Administration (ADAE) - look set to form the pillars of the country's push for e-government.

The Agency, which was created in February, is charged with ensuring the success of the e-government drive – a project which was launched in 1997 but is still very much in the starting blocks.

In a cabinet meeting yesterday, the Secretary of State for State Reform, Henri Plagnol, detailed the developments to come in "e-administration". The central idea behind the initiative is to "move from an anonymised approach to an individualised approach, centred on the needs of each user, under the control and within the framework of a privileged relationship with the public services", Plagnol said.

Plagnol also said the two objectives that had been set for the project are to "bring the IT systems of different administrations closer together and make them interoperable" and "drive and oversee concrete projects across departments".

Several such projects are already under way. The initial two concern a public services portal 'mon.service-public.fr' and the experimentation with "everyday life" smart cards.

Trials are under way to test "personal administrative areas", which will be accessible by users via the portal. The user can, amongst other things, manage his or her administrative files, follow the development of their personal account and communicate with different public services. But when it comes to knowing when users will actually able to take advantage of these services, the timescale is still unknown.

The introduction of smart cards is intended to facilitate access for citizens to local services. Thirteen local councils were selected to take part in a pilot scheme, mostly focusing on trialling microchip cards, which can either be used with a reader or detected at a distance and could be used, for example, to pay for public transport or a subscription to a local library.

An interdepartmental committee on the reform of the state will define a "strategic plan" for the development of e-government in the autumn, Plagnol announced.

Estelle Dumout writes for ZDNet France