ELECTRONIC GOVERNMENT IN THE UK

The introduction of electronic government in the UK has created a better environment for innovation and helped many public institutions.

The introduction of electronic government in the UK has created a better environment for innovation and helped many public institutions.

Question # 1

The new millennium marked a significant turning point in e-Government. According to the Commission Background Paper for the E-Europe Mid-term Review, the proportion of basic services fully available online in the EU grew from 17% to 43% between October 2001 and October 2003. The e-Europe Progress Report reveals that notable advances were also made in the then 13 candidate countries: in 2001 over 80% of online government services identified in the e-Europe Action Plan were either unavailable or still in the planning stages; by June 2003, this figure had been reduced to 34%. Benchmark surveys have demonstrated similarly that between 2002 and 2004 the percentage of European governments providing online services increased from 12% to 35%. During this highly dynamic period, we have learned first-hand that e-Government implicates many different and complex issues. These encompass matters of believe (e.g. data privacy and security), of training/expertise, of archiving and migration, and of surmounting language differences, to name only a few (Roy, 57).

At the forefront of these matters is interoperability, however. Effective communication between and among consumers and providers, whether governments or businesses, requires that the products they use be able to share and exchange data. In rapidly evolving, highly competitive IT markets such as the European market, companies have strong commercial incentives to make their products interoperate with each other. These commercial incentives must be reinforced by appropriate public policies, however. While industry can and should be allowed to lead, its ability to do so depends largely on the right technology policies being in place to support these efforts. EU policymakers have long identified the importance of interoperability. Indeed, this principle was enshrined in EU law well over a decade ago, in the EU's 1991 Software Directive (Directive 91/250). The Directive's Article 6 establishes fair and balanced rules that permit reverse engineering of software in certain narrow circumstances and when indispensable to achieve interoperability. Article 6 has worked well in practice and has served as the foundation for many interoperable technologies. Since 1991, interoperability has remained an important EU goal—especially in the E-government context. To take one particularly pertinent example, in June 2002 the E-Europe 2005 Action Plan made the development of a European Interoperability Framework (EIF) a priority component of pan-European E-Government strategy (Brown, 231).

Question #2

E-government has the promise to advance substantially the delivery of public services, making them simpler to access, more befitting to use, more responsive, more clear and so on. It also has the promise to free up resources in the public part by consigning services more efficiently. However, the government's record on IT tasks is not good and the propel in the direction of e-government furthermore arrives with dangers, so it is significant that consignment organisations are clear about the ...