E-envoy lays out road to electronic government

The UK's e-envoy has set out the first details on how the government will get all its services online by 2005, and central to the plan is a single online portal.

E-envoy, Alex Allan, said the government will go live with the 'one-stop shop' portal in July. And he expects a fully personalised service at the same time, with the site able to read users' preferences, and register locally specific information where it is requested across the counties.

In addition, every government department is now required to present Allan with an "ebusiness strategy" by October 2000, detailing how they will meet the government's new targets for interoperability of IT systems, security and records management.

Allan said: "This is about bringing together all the ideas and initiatives for e-government and really pushing them forward into a coherent strategy."

The launch this week was hosted by digital TV company Open, and Allan was keen to stress the opportunities to work with industry to provide the services through all kinds of electronic media - PC, digital TV, mobile phone and call centre technologies.

Perri 6, senior research fellow at the University of Strathclyde, welcomed the government's proposals, but said they had to be implemented in the right way.

"Alex Allan has to ensure departments are using this opportunity to re-think the way they deliver services. We have to avoid a repetition of the past, where all the most wasteful government uses of IT have occurred when governments have tried to migrate existing services online, without reassessing the methodology behind them," he said.

Meanwhile, Thomas Kreidler, vice president of Sun Microsystem's public sector business, said the re-thinking of processes could be the hardest part. "The replacement of the equipment is the easy part - the difficulty comes in the replacement of process and of people," he said.

The moves follow a speech by Prime Minister Tony Blair, where he moved the deadline for all government services to be available online from 2008 to 2005.

In Allan's latest paper, 'E-government,' the E-envoy also sets out guidelines to improve the way IT is used within Whitehall and proposes bringing the methods of ebusiness to the public sector.