Accenture's fifth annual global e-government study

The country is also hard at work on implementing a
national electronic identification card for citizens. It
has already delivered 37,000 electronic identification
cards and an additional 82,000 cards are expected to
be delivered within a very short time. The government
plans to have all citizens supplied with a card
by the time of the next federal elections in 2007.
The citizen’s card makes it possible for citizens to
have online access to their files with government;
request documents online (e.g., birth certificate); and
exchange information with government and other
parties in a secure way. Furthermore, a number of
new applications will be possible.
Belgium’s strong performance in 2003 reflected the
country’s efforts in developing customer-focused
services. Then, the launch of the country’s first
superportal coincided with a strong overall improvement
in customer relationship management that
gave the country a big boost in the rankings. This
year, although the focus was primarily on building
eGovernment enablers, the country also had several
customer-facing successes worth noting.
Specifically, the Belgian portal, www.belgium.be,
launched a number of useful services. It introduced
a service called Web DIV that allows citizens to
order their license plates online. In another example,
citizens can now declare their income online
and calculate their tax returns via tax-on-web
(https://www.belgium.be/taxonweb/app/page/
public/). In its first year of offering tax filing online,
the Belgian government received 57,000 electronic
declarations of taxes (or about 2 percent of the total).
The government also launched eCommunities through
the portal. This application has been accessible to civil
servants since April 2003. The aim of eCommunities
is to enable communication, cooperation, and
knowledge management and sharing within crossdepartmental
networks of expertise. System
functionality includes document management,
simple and advanced search capabilities, content
management, and joint working tools. The first
eCommunities have been initiated by departments
dealing with horizontal issues (such as personnel
and organization, information and communications
technology, budget and audit) and they currently
include approximately 1,000 members.
The portal also provided online results for the election
on May 18, 2003, in a one-day eDemocracy event.
One point missing from Belgium’s current set of
priorities is improving take-up of eGovernment services
among the country’s citizens. Last year we
emphasized that Belgium has a significant challenge
in increasing take-up among citizens. We found
little evidence this year to suggest that the Belgian
government is actively encouraging citizens to use its
services. Governmental efforts seem more inclined
toward simply getting people to use the Internet. In
this regard, Belgium is having success. For example,
the government has recently promoted the use of
broadband and as a result, the country now has very
high ISDN and broadband take-up. Again, this is
seen as an enabler for eGovernment.
Still, Belgium has only a moderate level of regular
Internet users—about 41 percent of the population.
More significantly, about half of these regular
Internet users have rarely or never visited a government
website. Younger users, who have a higher
Internet use, are even less likely to use eGovernment
than older ones. This segment should be building
their eGovernment habits now. Therefore, encouraging
trial will continue to be key.
Our citizen survey also shows that the regular
Internet users would prefer transacting with the
government via the Internet (as opposed to via phone,
mail or in person), if given the choice. Additionally,
when citizens are using the services they are generally
reporting a good experience. For example, the
most popular transactional service, tax filing, rated
well. In its first year of availability, the government
received 2 percent of total declarations this way.
Those who did so in our survey were positive about
the experience. The potential is significant.
As Belgium looks ahead to the future of its public
administration, it must focus more attention on promoting
usage among its citizens. Fewer than half of
those who use the Internet on a regular basis think
their government is doing a good or excellent job
developing its online government resources. Take-up
is still the issue. The government is right in that it
must work to get more of its general population
online. However, the potential value to be gained in
increased customer satisfaction, operational efficiency
and cost savings is too great for promoting
online services to be deferred until the future.
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