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No matter where we live, we have all had the frustrating experience of standing in queues to get a registration, change our driving license, or even mail a simple package. All over the world people dealing with government departments and agencies are having to engage in time-consuming activities they would much rather avoid. Now how about this: Instead of having to stand in a queue at the motor vehicle department, you can go online and renew your registrations 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in a transaction that takes an average of two minutes. There is nothing spectacular about a public Internet service, but it is a straw in the Internet wind that is beginning to blow through government departments and agencies all over the world. Within the next five years it will transform not only the way in which most public services are delivered, but also the fundamental relationship between government and citizen. After e-commerce and e-business, the next Internet revolution will be e-government.

A full understanding of e-business principles, commitment and a clear strategy for overcoming the barriers to change are some of Iran’s requirements to establish e-government

Good Reasons, Bad Reasons: With few exceptions, governments have come late to the Internet. Most governments have seen their job as creating a benign environment in which the hoped-for economic and social benefits of the Internet could unfold, rather than actively harnessing the fancy new technology to their own ends. There have been some good reasons for reticence, as well as bad ones. Governments, even more than commercial enterprises, were deeply worried about the potential impact of the millennium bug (known as Y2K) on their computer systems, and the social disruption that might have followed.
Much of the available IT funding and expertise was channeled into forestalling millennium disaster. But even without the distraction of the Y2K threat, governments and their agencies would have lacked many of the private sector’s incentives to adopt the Internet. As monopoly suppliers, they are not worried about waking up one morning to find a new Web-based competitor with the potential to destroy their business. Transactions with government are rarely a matter of choice, and agencies collecting tax or managing entitlement programs do not see the Internet as a challenge to their existence. Nor are the people running government services likely to be rewarded with share options for, say, devising an innovative Internet strategy.
There is also the question of access. Even in America, the proportion of people with an Internet connection at home is still under 50%, and in most of Europe it is less than half that. Governments cannot choose their customers; the services they provide must be for everyone, and much of what they do involves dealing with the poor, the less-well-educated and the elderly – precisely the people least likely to be wired. Lastly, security and trust are even bigger concerns for government than for the private sector. Banks and insurance companies may know quite a lot about their customers, but nothing matches the range and detail of information that governments require from their citizens. Unless the integrity of that information can be guaranteed, the scope for governments to make constructive use of the Internet will remain limited.
But despite the late start, the pressure is now on to catch up fast. Helped by the big IT vendors, governments are realizing that they can achieve a similar transformation. Reinventing government, a fashionable but premature idea a decade ago, is at last being made possible by the Internet. More prosaically, the starting point for most e-government projects is the desire to reduce costs and make tax revenues go further. The potential for savings comes from the sheer scale of public-sector spending and from the opportunities to make internal processes more efficient.

Reasons to Be E: Governments are also under pressure to meet rising expectations of service. Not many people enjoy dealing with their government; they do it because they have to. But that does not mean the experience has to be as dismal as it usually turns out to be. As increasing numbers of consumers become used to the quality of service offered by the best Web retailers and service providers their willingness to accept slum standards in the public sector is coming under strain. If the same 74-hour, seven-days-a-week availability and convenience, fast delivery, customer focus and personalization became the norm in the public sector, it would not just make life easier, it would fundamentally change the way that people view government itself. One of the greatest problems for anyone who has dealings with government, whether as a citizen or a business, is its sheer complexity.
The average government has between 50 and 70 different departments and agencies. Just finding out which is the right one for the task in hand can be hard enough. Worse, even for fairly straightforward matters such as licensing a business, selling a house or registering the birth of a child, a number of different agencies requiring a plethora of different forms may be involved.
Moreover, they expect users to communicate with each of them in turn rather than being prepared to communicate with each other. One of the basic reasons for public-sector inefficiency -”bureaucracy”- is that whereas departments are vertically organized, many of the services that they have to deliver require complex collaboration between employees across departments. The Internet offers a solution to both problems. Increasingly, governments are coming round to the view that they will need to construct Internet portals similar to consumer portals that can provide a one-stop shop for all of a citizen’s needs.
Governments have also realized that although a sluggish and half-hearted approach to e-government will not put them out of business, they may not be as immune from competition as they thought. True, the first thing they have to do is to create the right regulatory and public-policy environment for the digital economy, a competitive communications market, universal access, digital signatures, light taxation, online privacy, consumer protection for Web shoppers and so on. But they are also becoming aware that their own e-government strategies can have a powerful catalytic effect on business in general. By harnessing the efficiency, transparency and accountability that is inherent in the Web to improve all aspects of government-to-business and business-to-government transactions, governments can deliver a big economic boost. And by ensuring access for all to the Internet as the main channel of dealing with government, they can be a powerful force in bridging the “digital divide” between the haves and the have-nots and stimulating online education. Last but not least, by improving the quality of their relationship with citizens, they can make a big difference to the attractiveness of their country, region or city as a place to live and work. This goes beyond the delivery of services through the Internet, and to the beginnings of digital democracy.
Yet, making e-government a reality will be extraordinarily difficult. Experience shows that there might be a mantra for e-government: “Start small, scale fast, deliver value”. In other words, it is important to bank some quick wins from smaller projects that achieve what they set out to do, before moving on to bigger things like the all-embracing portals that cover every aspect of government activity. The potential is enormous, but governments will need committed leadership, a full understanding of e-business principles and a clear strategy for overcoming the barriers to change: the departmental rivalries, the hostility of unions, the fears of individuals and the sheer size of the thing. For once, the technology – although crucial to making it all possible – is the least of the worries. But then again, in countries like Iran where government agencies are still behind in effective use of hardware and software, digital technology also counts.

No Pain, No Gain: About 85% of all public-sector IT projects are doomed to be failures. That does not mean they are total disasters, but that they usually take longer to implement, cost more and deliver less than was planned. For anyone who is getting overexcited about e-government, that is a sobering reflection. At least the reasons why big government IT projects get into difficulties are well understood. On the technology front, at least, the Internet, or rather the success of Internet standards and protocols, has indeed changed things a great deal. It is the Internet’s open standards, allowing everyone to connect with everyone else, which are the basis of its power. What is more, virtually all the technologies that will make e-government possible are already working for e-business. If Iran lags behind severely in e-business, then how far it is from e-government? For example, applications for enterprise resource planning, customer-relationship management and supply-chain management, business intelligence and data-mining tools, Internet procurement and payment systems are all available now and need very little adaptation for public sector use. In the same way, the security protocols, the multi-layered firewalls and the public key infrastructures needed for authentication and the protection of data are already available off the shelf. Even the vendors, always keen to offer their own patent solutions, agree that technology is not a barrier to the introduction of e-government. But just as Internet technologies have forced many big businesses to change what they do as well as the way they do it, so they are about to transform the biggest and most change resistant business of all: government.

Four Difficult Steps: The way to e-government divides into four distinct stages. The first stage – which is as far as most governments today have got – involves departments and agencies using the Web to post information about themselves for the benefit of citizens and business partners. This is yet to be fully achieved by Iran. Thousands of such “one-way” communication sites are already up and running around the world. In the second stage, these sites become tools for two-way communication, allowing citizens to provide new information about themselves - such as a change of address - instead of telephoning or writing. There are also plenty of these around, although many depend on e-mail. During the third stage, things start to get more interesting. At this point, Web sites allow a formal, quantifiable exchange of value to take place. It might be renewing a license, paying a fine or enrolling for an educational course. There are several hundred such sites, mostly operating at the state or local government rather than central government level. The final stage is a portal that integrates the complete range of government services, and provides a path to them that is based on need and function, not on department or agency.
A single log-on and password allows users to get in touch with any part of government. Many governments have plans for such portals, but at present only two countries are operating such sites that go beyond local: Australia’s state of Victoria, and Singapore. E-government is definitely not for the politically timid or half-hearted. One-stop, non-stop e-government portals will revolutionize not just the way public services are delivered, but government itself as well. Online voting can be termed as one of the steps that e-government can take toward digital democracy. Thoughtful governments are looking at the Internet not as a threat, but as a positive potential tool to re-engage the citizenry in the business of governing.