Management Toolkit

E-government 'not yet serving citizens'

Kablenet.com

Published: 24 Jun 2004 14:35 BST

E-government progress in this country still has much room for improvement, the chief executive of Citizens Advice claimed on 23 June, 2004.

Speaking at the GCExpo conference, David Harker said current electronic services are neither user friendly nor customer focused.

"Much more needs to be done," he said. "There is a real danger of services only being used once, leaving the Government with the problem of trying to persuade users to return."

Harker said electronic services need to be better, faster, and easier to use than traditional services. "The focus must be on people, not on technology," he commented.

Citing the intermediary work done by Citizens Advice, he called for more assistance and clarity from central government as to how his organisation can better serve citizens.

Harker said the Government's approach to using Citizens Advice as an intermediary with the public had been too cautious, although some good work had been done with the Department of Work and Pensions on disability claims.

Leadership in the public sector remains weak in many areas, said Harker, but he added that there were many examples of good project management appearing across the public sector and "enormous potential to improve service delivery which can be combined with efficiency savings across departments".

Citizens Advice is running a £20m, two-year project to create a Virtual Private Network infrastructure for more than 800 citizens advice bureaux in England and Wales. The award-winning Citizens Connect scheme is intended to provide an electronic case recording and filing system and provide wider general access to e-government services by October 2004.