E-government has multiple hurdles to leap

Governments will never be able to predict how citizens will use, or what they will want from, e-government. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't be creating e-government strategies, according to Mr Tom Riley, executive director of the Commonwealth Centre for Electronic Governance in Canada.

The ability to do something as simple as file taxes online or obtain information from a government department "is creating wider expectations from the public".

A recent study by analysts Accenture places Canada in the lead internationally for its transformation to e-government. Citizens can conduct their business with government over the internet, and government communicates and interacts with its own departments and conducts its business online.

The Republic, on the other hand - despite a recent high score in a European Commission study on e-government - comes well down Accenture's list, behind front-runners Canada, Singapore and the US (which it terms "innovative leaders") and countries such as Norway and Australia ("visionary followers").

While Canada has achieved about 50 per cent of what Accenture calls e-government "online maturity", the Republic is just below 20 per cent, in a group called "steady achievers".

Mr Riley, who is also a visiting professor in law and technology at Glasgow University, says there is one major reason that Canada leads in this area. It has the infrastructure to support a broad e-government initiative.

"The government had the foresight four years ago to build a broadband network" that spans the country, even extending to small communities in the vast areas of remote territory in the north, he says. Also, North America "doesn't have the problem of phone metering", so local calls - and phone access for the internet - is free.

"One of the main inhibitors in Europe [for the growth of internet use\] is your metered rates," he says.

Mr Riley believes the internet has done away with people's sense that time and distance restrain their actions. People often neither know nor care where they are getting information from - a local weather forecast might come from an Irish website or Weather.com in the US. They also send e-mail without any thought of where the recipient is, whereas, before, the time a letter took to make its journey might have inhibited the development of a business relationship - a potential partner might be just a bit too far away.

In addition, people - especially a younger generation used to programs that allow millions of computer users to share files, such as music file-exchange program Napster - are beginning to see the internet as a great democratiser.

Mr Riley called this shift "the invisible current of change" in a talk he gave on Tuesday at a Dublin e-government symposium organised by software firm SAP.

The more familiar people get with the internet, the more they will want out of e-government services.

But he thinks this "major cultural change" poses serious - and in some cases, formidable - challenges to governments.

Governments are run as hierarchies, from the top down, and Mr Riley thinks hierarchies do not allow for much creativity or entrepreneurship. In contrast, distributed networks - networks that comprise many computers and many users, such as the internet, or communities within it, such as Napster-users - are flat structures where the participants join in more or less equally.

Distributed networks offer the opportunity to create "virtual communities", in which "people are going to want to have their say". If, as he believes, "government has to represent all the people in society", then it too needs to start thinking of itself as a set of virtual communities (rather than as a set of rigid departments) that can respond to the needs of its myriad citizens.

At any rate, he says, government departments increasingly need to be interconnected and share information, rather than operate as lone islands. He points to September 11th as the moment when collaboration became a necessity rather than a vague goal for the future.

But this creates another tension - the desire for sharing information and the often at-odds demands of citizen privacy rights, and national and organisational security. On top of all that, there's a growing conflict between citizens' demand for access to information, and a government's reluctance to release it, evident in some nations' reluctance to implement or adequately service freedom of information programmes.

All these issues will have to be tackled as governments move online, bringing enormous change to existing relationships between citizens and governments. And as a consequence of the internet's ability to dispose of the relationship between time and distance, change will have to occur at a more rapid and disconcerting rate than other major cultural shifts of the past, such as the industrial revolution or arrival of railroads or electricity, he believes.

Nonetheless, Mr Riley is enthusiastic about the possibilities of e-government, for both national governments and the people they serve.

"People now have the capability to do things in new ways," he says. "They will have this ability of being able to draw on this source of information [the internet\] from the well."