Accenture's fifth annual global e-government study

2004 key findings
The integration challenge
is changing
For governments that want to increase the value
from their eGovernment programs as a step toward
high performance, the logical move is to find ways
to integrate services for seamless interactions for
customers. The horizontal integration of eGovernment
services (across agencies and departments within
the same level of government) has long been a goal
of many countries, even while many have struggled
with the challenges of connecting across various
department and agency systems.
Horizontal integration is still a challenge area for
both technical and organizational reasons, but
governments are now beginning to look beyond this
to the next challenge: vertical integration. Vertical
integration can be defined as the integration of
central government services with state, local or
municipal services. It has all the challenges of horizontal
integration and more. Most significantly,
vertical integration adds a layer of complexity to
the governance challenge. Differences in legislation,
potentially more organizational cultural differences
and separate and distinct chains of command
compound the usual proprietary feelings within
agencies. Funding is also a more complicated challenge
if there is no central funding agency, as
decisions about equitable distribution of investments
deal with completely separate sources of money.
Nevertheless, for some countries vertical integration
is the ultimate prize—providing a truly seamless
approach to eGovernment—and they are starting
to pursue it.
For example, the Canadian government’s vision of
service is for delivery networks made up of shared
points-of-presence with integrated channels across
levels of government. Canada does not want just to
improve its Government On-line program, it wants to
move beyond it through a single, citizen-centered,
whole-of-government approach. Canada’s current
push is to reach a state of service transformation that
moves from federal to inter-jurisdictional integration.
Michelle d’Auray, the Government of Canada CIO,
has identified developing appropriate governance
mechanisms in vertically oriented and vertically
organized organizations as one of her top five
challenges for Canada’s eGovernment program
going forward.
The targets established by the Finnish Information
Society Program in September 2003 emphasize that
public administration services will be made customer
oriented and, in order to save costs and operate
in real time, will be carried out within the public
administration on a cross-agency basis (by different
agencies and departments). The plan also expresses
the expectation that as reliance on electronic services
grows, the boundaries between regional, national
and, in the long run, EU-level services will become
more and more blurred and lose importance.
To accomplish the new eGovernment objectives
it laid out in 2003, Portugal’s action plan specifies
that there should be an interoperable and integrated
platform that permits the connectivity not only of
central, regional and local public administration
portals, but also with the private sector and other
European institutions.
In Sweden (which has a highly decentralized
approach to eGovernment implementation), the
government appointed a delegation of members
from central and local government, the industry
and academia to increase cooperation between the
public and private sectors in developing e-services
for the public sector. The delegation also provides
visionary and innovative thinking. It focuses on
concrete actions, such as proposing funding
arrangements to help agencies and local authorities
implement the country’s 24/7 Agency concept.
(See the Building integration from decentralization
sidebar on page 19.)
The interoperability of services at an international
level is also garnering attention, even though it
poses greater challenges. Moving across country
borders not only brings the previously discussed
challenges of governance, funding and integration,
it adds a greater degree of technical complexity, as
all countries involved are not necessarily starting
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