5 years ago… UK e-Envoy promises action on ecommerce

14.09.99 The UK's newly appointed e-Envoy, Alex Allan, will play a crucial role spreading the government's ecommerce message across the country.

Allan is promising to travel nationwide, visiting boardrooms to help educate businesses. "My role is not in implementing programmes but in making sure people are doing the right job," he said.

The former civil servant will give up his current job as High Commissioner to Australia in January 2000 but in the meantime will be putting together the small team who will work with him in his ecommerce role.

Allan, who worked as an IT consultant in Australia for two years, believes that the lack of IT representation at board level in the UK is "disturbing" and hopes to encourage directors to educate themselves about the wider implications of technology.

He will also be charged with revamping the government's own use of online technologies. "It's slightly disturbing that I can email my mother but not the Foreign Office," he said. "But that is changing."

Allan will work in tandem with DTI minister Patricia Hewitt. "We're going to work very closely together, as lead minister and lead official," she said.

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14.09.04 It feels off looking back to a time when the concept of e-government and an e-Envoy was novel, though it is not really too far into the past.

With Ian Whatmore, an ex-Accenture executive, just like Hewitt, taking over in a role best described as 'government CIO' this month now is a good time to take stock and see how much such positions have grown up.

Five years ago it seemed almost quaint to have an e-Envoy. The role was mostly about tub-thumping - or evangelising, as some would say. Plenty of people in local and central government not to mention general taxpayers had little idea of what internet-enabled services could do for them. Nowadays it seems obvious that we should be able to do things such as pay council tax online, email in about details of local recycling services or consult a website for health advice from the NHS. It wasn't like that in 1999.

Allan and then Andrew Pinder have made progress as e-Envoys. Now Whatmore will have to be more mature, more focused on actual results and accountability.