Europe making progress on eGovernment, study shows
The latest study from the European Commission on eGovernment in Europe shows clear progress since the last measurement in October 2001, with the availability and interactivity of public services on the Internet rising by 10 percent to 55 per cent. The study - carried out in April 2002 as part of the European Commission's 'Benchmarking eEurope' initiative - measures 20 basic public services in the 15 EU Member States and in Iceland, Norway and Switzerland. The online delivery of public services, a key plank of the information society, has been a priority of the EU's eEurope initiative since the launch of the first eEurope action plan in 2000. A representative sample of more than 10,000 public service providers was assessed in the 18 countries. The survey found that more than 80 per cent of these are available online, an increase of 6.5 per cent compared with the earlier October 2001 results. The degree of interactivity of each service was then assessed, with each scoring one of four stages of maturity: 'information', 'one-way interaction', 'two-way interaction' or 'full transaction'. Enterprise and Information Society Commissioner Erkki Liikanen said: 'eGovernment is now a priority in Europe. A serious limitation still is that genuine interactivity is often missing. Yet this is the key to modern public services. Putting public services online is not enough to achieve efficiency gains. As in the private sector, change in the front office goes hand in hand with back office reorganisation and investment in human capital. The survey results show that the overall degree of online availability of public services in the countries is 55 per cent, compared to the 45 per cent in October 2001. At the same time, significant differences can be found between different sorts of public services. Of the services measured, 12 cater for citizens and eight cater for businesses. Overall, services to businesses are more developed than those for citizens. Among the public service categories, income generating services (taxes and social contributions) are the most developed, followed by registration services (car and new company registration) and returns, such as social security. Services related to documents and permits (drivers' licence, passports etc) are the least developed on the web. Although almost all countries have made substantial progress, there are wide differences between the average results for individual countries, which vary between 22 per cent and 85 per cent. In addition to benchmarking progress and supporting e-government projects, the Commission is helping the exchange of best practice through the 'eEurope awards for innovation in e-government.' The aim is to promote excellence and creativity by European national and regional administrations in using information society technologies to improve the quality and accessibility of their public services. The first awards will be given within the framework of the e-health and e-government conferences in 2003.