eGovernment Implementation: Words and Deeds

— Published April 4th, 2003  |  by David Moore

The dogs in the street know that Ireland is a leader in eGovernment. There's buy-in from the top, and flagship projects are receiving praise internationally.

So why are so many public sites so unrewarding to use? Behind the high-flown words and much vaunted deeds, Irish eGovernment provision is behind schedule and poorly focused on delivering good user experience.

The recent progress report on the New Connections action plan revealed that more than one third of projects are delayed, including the crucial Public Services Broker (these findings mirror the results of our own eGovernment implementation survey).

The recent Accenture report on eGovernment maturity shows that Ireland has slipped in the rankings from 10th to 11th in the last year (details in Research below). The report concludes, 'the speed of implementation progress has not kept pace with recent years and with other countries'.

Good work has undoubtedly been done, but for every one Revenue Online Service there are three sites like the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform (both reviewed below).

Accenture also point out, 'The goal for eGovernment now is to tailor service delivery to meet citizens' needs, as opposed to approaching it from the government side', and one great impediment to this is the culture of the civil service itself.

Offline, departments and agencies are becoming much more customer focused, but ironically their online presences still reflect an older culture that is overly hierarchical, excessively cautious and given to the use of official vocabulary that confuses more than it clarifies.

In working with departments and agencies, we've met many people who are trying to change this, but we've also seen examples of the challenges ahead:

People are asked to work on their site but not given any Internet access to see where their work is going.

Or network administrators are required to write material (without any training on how to do this), because the website is seen as a 'techie' issue.

Or all work is submitted for approval to a principal officer much less well-versed in the basics of the Internet than the people writing the material.

Or jargon-heavy reports full of acronyms and overly formal diction are put up on the site in MS Word format with no summary, signposting, or file size information.

This is anecdotal evidence of course, but a quick examination of many of the public sector sites in this country will show the results of such cultural difficulties.

Often checklists on progress are too heavily weighted towards low-end presence or high-end functionality - in other words, 'is there anything there at all?' or 'look at the cool stuff you can do'. The problems cited above don't get addressed because work on them won't show on reports that get reviewed by senior officials or consultants.

Until the service is improved for the consumer across the board, then Ireland will be only be meeting eGovernment standards in words, not in deeds.