Editorial

Will 2005 really be the year of e-government?

Is the e-government deadline being met?

GOVERNMENT agencies have had tough targets to hit in the last year or
two to ensure that all government services are electronically available to the public by this year. With deadlines virtually here ‘joined-up’ government should be a reality. Should – but will it? The technology and the hardware might be in place but can the staff use and understand it?

This is also vital as government departments must be able to ‘talk’ to each other and share information. And they can only share information if their staff can rapidly and easily identify what information is relevant to what department and where it is in order to retrieve it. But how can this be achieved? The basis of the process is a creating a taxonomy – something seen as a huge challenge by most people – even assuming they know what a taxonomy is!

According to Rita Know, Research Director and Vice President of Gartner Research, “Through 2006, more than 70 per cent of firms, including federal agencies, that invest in unstructured information-management initiatives will not achieve targeted return on investment due to under investment in taxonomy building. In 2003, there has been a major rise in explicit concerns about ‘taxonomies’; few professionals have the intuition or the skills to build robust, extensive and long-lived taxonomies.”

Simple and effective information access impacts everyone associated with the government. This includes government ministers, civil servants, local authority employees right down to a member of the public searching online for planning applications, tax forms, travel warnings, consumer credit laws or even security precautions.

So will all this be achieved this year? We will have to wait and see.

On top of all that, the Freedom of Information Act has come into force this month. The Act grants citizens two basic rights: to be told if certain information exists and to request access to that information. As part of the Act, public authorities are required to provide a schedule of information that they regularly publish so that the public will be aware of what is available without making a specific request. These schedules are known as ‘publication schemes’. Experience abroad has shown that other countries’ equivalent acts have been mostly used by the press and media and pressure groups in search of a ‘taking-the-lid-off’ story (or muck-raking.). Will the same thing happen here? Once again, we shall have to wait and see.

Anne Grimshaw, Editor

IM@T Online January 2005