Accenture's fifth annual global e-government study

Executive summary
Our research shows that a number of trends discussed
in the past have taken hold and can now
be taken for granted. Some themes of the past
that could now be considered general attributes
of eGovernment programs are:
• eGovernment programs are customer centric.
Governments are no longer using their internal
structures as an organizing principle for their
online programs.
• eGovernment programs offer broad availability of
services. Although a few countries are still playing
catch-up, the average service breadth across all
countries approaches 90 percent.
• eGovernment programs incorporate portals. Most
governments offer some central point for accessing
services, even if the portals themselves have no
transactional capability.
• eGovernment programs exhibit greater maturity
in their business services than in their citizen
services. We surmise the reason is that so many
of businesses’ interactions with government
are routine and high-volume the case for
eGovernment conversion was clearer early on.
The potential value of driving the manual activities
out of these processes made them the initial
targets of focused development in many countries’
eGovernment programs.
What, then, are the new trends in eGovernment
We found five clear emerging patterns and present
them in the first section of our report.
First, we found that eGovernment advances are
diminishing. With few exceptions, growth in
eGovernment maturity has fallen off for the second
year in a row. The trend we first described last year,
in which countries hit plateaus of eGovernment
maturity after a period of rapid development, was
even more apparent in 2004. The pace of progress
has now slowed to the point that a large number of
countries are massed around the same level in the
rankings—making distinctions of one or two places
less meaningful than they have been in the past.
More interesting is to map the rates of growth of
these countries over the past four years. In some
cases, governments may have reinvigorated their
strategies; in other cases, there may be other factors
at play.
Our second finding is that leaders in eGovernment
are reaping tangible savings. In last year’s report, we
described the trend of some governments reevaluating
their visions of online service. Many had begun to
realize that the true value in eGovernment lies in
the way it helps governments deliver enhanced
services and makes government operations more
cost-effective. This year we see a decided trend of
countries finally realizing measurable cost savings
from eGovernment. For some, the savings result in
an agency being able to redeploy resources toward
more value-added activities. Other countries show
signs of wanting to replicate these successes. We
see evidence of many either adopting or planning
to adopt more judicious approaches to planning and
assessing their eGovernment initiatives, taking into
account the balance between better service and cost
savings for government. These strategies are far
more explicit than they had been in the past about
the need for measurable value being prerequisite
to any future investments in eGovernment.
Our third finding is that promoting take-up of
eGovernment is taking hold as a priority, although
more work needs to be done. Most governments
have put fundamental eGovernment enablers in
place to remove barriers to access. The leaders
are also making creative use of incentives and
marketing techniques to drive up usage of existing
services, with some notable success. The implications
for deriving value from eGovernment are
serious, particularly in today’s financially uncertain
environment. Many countries’ future plans incorporate
eGovernment as a component of a larger
agenda for governmental change. They build on
the potential labor and cost savings inherent in
eGovernment. However, these savings depend completely
upon the numbers of people and businesses
that use the services. Our citizen survey shows that
eGovernment currently is far from being used to
its full extent.
Our fourth finding is that the nature of governments’
integration challenge is changing. Governments
that seek to move beyond their current state of
eGovernment maturity are actively looking for ways
to build the cross-agency integration that will create
seamless interactions for their customers. Interest in
horizontal integration has been apparent for some
time; what is new are decided efforts to integrate
vertically—across national, state/regional and local
levels of government. Governments that attempt
this level of integration face greater technical complexity
as well as new challenges in organizing the
governance and funding of these new initiatives.
4