UK e-government scheme caught between word and deed

The UK government's scheme to provide all of its services online by 2005 looks set to chug along the B-roads this election year.

Among the factors frustrating the authorities' famous ambition to make the UK the "best place in the world to do ecommerce" within four years are Whitehall's mandarin culture of secrecy - which is inimical to the openness traditionally associated with internet culture - and a hardwired inability to translate policy rhetoric into reality in a 'joined-up' manner.

A slew of media reports towards the end of last year indicated a serious gap between 'e-government' rhetoric and reality. Patricia Hewitt, Minister for small business and ecommerce, Ian McCartney, Minister of State, and the E-envoy's office have all made their own individual efforts, but these appear to have suffered from lack of co-ordination.

Richard Barrington, director at the E-envoy's office, admitted that the dispersal of the government's e-services programme over several departments "keeps us awake at night" and urged the media to "cut us some slack" and "applaud the real progress being made".

E-government, Minister?
The Independent on Sunday dated 10 December reported that a group led by Lord Haskins was urging Prime Minister Tony Blair to put an 'eMinister' in the Cabinet to try and prevent the government's internet initiatives from stalling.

But David Walker, analysis editor and leader writer at the Guardian newspaper, was sceptical about such a minister's prospects. "The basic problem lies in the execution of policy in a joined-up way," he said. "If you put an eMinister in the Cabinet, that is no guarantee that an e-government programme will be realised."

The crucial thing, in his view, "is that the Treasury is on side, and I have seen no evidence that Gordon Brown has a strong interest in this area. Much has come from Patricia Hewitt, but, though she sings a good song, she is one person in one department."

Moreover, he added: "Unless a policy enjoys the Prime Minister's undivided attention for a long period of time, it won't get realised as envisaged. You need to have a project manager who is known to have the PM's undivided attention and backing, and this Prime Minister has been very busy on a large number of fronts."

Over at the E-envoy's office, Barrington is, as befits a former IT salesman, sanguine. "It is the intention of the PM and the Cabinet that government will be transformed over the next five years. This is not just about a web front-end to existing processes, but a fundamental root and branch review," he said.

But he added: "There is no point in putting government services online without customers having the confidence, ability and access to benefit. The E-envoy's office serves as a focal point for that activity."

Open or closed?
John Paschoud, a Labour Councillor for the London borough of Lewisham and an InfoSystems engineer at the London School of Economics, is concerned that this aim may be frustrated by Whitehall's preference for the interests of the commercial IT world rather than the open standards of the internet.

"A step-change is required in the thinking of the Civil Service. Government needs to start thinking like the World Web Wide Consortium, for example - and to acknowledge that the leaders in all of this are the 'nerds', not the big ecommerce and other IT companies," he said.

"There seems to be political opposition to that idea, not so much in government as in the Civil Service, where there has been a 'let's keep things secret' tradition that's now morphing into 'let's behave more like Microsoft or Oracle'. There needs to be more acceptance of open standards, a collective community-type thinking," Paschoud added.

Walker is unconvinced by this cursing of top civil servants, however. "You can't just blame senior civil servants for being stuck in the past. MPs are also antiquated where IT and the internet are concerned - only 16 per cent of MPs have websites, for example. And yes, I think this government has been captured by a kind of executive-mindedness that is suspicious of the culture of the internet," he said.

Mike Cohen, director of knowledge management services at British Trade International (BTI), an offshoot of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), likes the idea of open standards, however.

"We've been going down the open source route, mainly because we're a very diffuse organisation and have to bring different platforms together from the DTI and the FCO. I'd say we are open to internet culture, but we are maybe not typical of most government departments. And 'joined-upness' is still very much a key phrase for us," he said.

BTI is, plausibly, an e-government success story, something that Barrington is therefore keen for the media to highlight. The organisation brings together work undertaken by the FCO and the DTI to support British trade and investment overseas, and inward investment in the UK.

It started work in May 1999 following a Review of Export Promotion conducted by Sir Richard Wilson, the Cabinet Secretary, and it has two brands. Trade support services are delivered under the name Trade Partners UK www.tradepartners.gov.uk and inward investment services bear the Invest UK moniker www.invest.uk.com.

Cohen claimed that the Treasury has allocated £20m over three years to invest in BTI's activities, and all of its services are scheduled to go online early this year.

Big Bang or easy does it?
But BTI's ebusiness strategy document contains an implicit critique of the reasons why the government's IT projects have failed.

"Transforming BTI into a customer-centric ebusiness organisation will require a programme of interlocking projects that can be developed on an incremental basis. This takes advantage of the more flexible approach to developing IT systems created through use of WWW [world wide web] technologies," the document says.

"We plan to introduce new features and developments regularly and monitor usage closely to refine and further enhance them. This reduces the risks associated with the more traditional monolithic IT projects associated with government departments," it continues.

Cohen explained the meaning behind such statements: "In a way, there is an implicit recognition [in the strategy document] that large government projects, whether IT projects or not, have been difficult to manage because everything is specified in enormous detail at the start, and that has removed the flexibility to add or subtract elements later on, or to take advantage of changes in technology that have occurred while the project is being executed."

"We realised that there were about twenty projects that we wanted to bring together. But we didn't want to do so in a Big Bang kind of way. It was better to work with our IT services partners on an incremental basis," he continued.

"However," Cohen added, "it's not for me to criticise other government IT projects, and there are plenty of private sector projects that have failed."

But he sees "a lot of common ground" between the IT policies of the current and previous governments. "We're seeing continuation of policies that began in the early 1980s," he said.

Thoroughly modern government
Walker likewise notes the bi-partisanship of much government Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) policy. "Any government is bound to attach itself to IT and the internet as a badge of modernity. But this government has made specific commitments to do with the way government itself does business, and they have willed certain things - like the RIP Bill - into being," he said.

Hewitt claims, on the other hand, that the Blair project is not just making a fashionable fetish out of IT and the internet, but is instead trying to tell a compelling new story.

In a speech given to the Said Business School at the University of Oxford in November, she said: "Before the 1997 election, New Labour had a story - about modernising ourselves, modernising politics and modernising the economy. In government, we haven't always been as clear."

"Creating a stable economy, sorting out the public finances and then investing in public services - yes. But we have to link that narrative to the economic and technological revolution taking place," she continued.

She also worried that "faith in politics is low", which means that "overcoming political cynicism is vital".

"Well, yes", agreed Walker, "there is a kind of theory behind what the government is doing here, to do with the perception that western governments are losing legitimacy in the eyes of their publics. One way to alleviate this crisis of legitimation is to make government more user friendly, so that if you have, say, online dealings with the Inland Revenue, then you will feel more positive about it."

But he counselled against reading too much into this. "Who is doing the thinking? No-one. This is not a thinking government as such," he attested.

And even if it were, "there is no strategic centre that can drive things through from policy creation to implementation," he stressed.

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