Accenture's fifth annual global e-government study

Driving value through eGovernment
Improving costeffectiveness
Implementing new, high-performance business
models enabled by eGovernment technology will
allow governments to improve cost-effectiveness.
By improving the integration of services within and
across agencies, governments can not only meet
stakeholder expectations through service improvements,
they can also improve cost-effectiveness by:
• Automating services, resulting in reduced administration.
Government employees can then focus
their attention on higher-value tasks.
• Integrating services, resulting in the elimination of
duplicated efforts and greater cost-effectiveness.
Duplication of effort on the part of a citizen or
business reduces value by not meeting their service
delivery expectations. For government,
duplicated efforts means wasted resources.
Canada’s Record of Employment Web service shows
how eGovernment can add value by delivering both
improved time and cost savings outcomes to the
government through automation. It takes an average
of 10 to 15 minutes to create a paper record of
employment form. In the same amount of time, 300
to 450 record of employment forms can be issued
online. In terms of processing, the paper transaction
can take up to seven days whereas the online version
takes only a few hours. The cost savings are
significant.
Assessing value to
set strategy
To a considerable extent eGovernment strategies have
been an “act of faith” on the part of governments.
Some benefits in terms of increased automation and
improved access have been relatively obvious. Others
have been harder to quantify—in particular, the
general belief that providing online access to government
services must always be a good thing in
and of itself. Applying the concepts of the Accenture
Public Sector Value Model should bring a rigor to
future eGovernment strategies that has been lacking
previously. We believe effective eGovernment strategies
will address three key questions in the future:
1. How will the strategy improve the performance
of government agencies in the delivery of their
core statutory duties
2. How will the strategy meet rising stakeholder
expectations of government services
3. How will the strategy contribute to improved
cost-effectiveness in the provision of government
services
Effective eGovernment strategies will seek to add
value in all three dimensions and move governments
toward their goal of high performance.
40