Apply for a loan online

Morag Preston finds out what new Labour can learn from the American online experience

President Clinton is not exactly net-head. But in June, in his first-ever webcast address, he announced www.firstgov.gov, a one stop portal to government information on the internet. At the same time, he threw down a challenge to government and industry -- to get the site online within 90 days.

Exactly 90 days later, on 22 September, the president was online again; this time, to announce the launch of FirstGov, heralded as a major step towards e-government. The new portal consolidates access to 27 million federal agency web pages from 20,000 government sites. With a few clicks of a mouse, visitors can apply for a student loan, track social security benefits, file taxes and so on.

Crossing government boundaries is a central tenet of e-government. At www.students.gov, you'll find the services of 42 different agencies providing educational assistance on offer. At www.seniors.gov, there is information about health and tax benefits. On the web pages of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, a worker concerned about safety on the job can file a complaint online.

"Electronic government has been a very high priority in this administration," says Sally Katzen, the deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget. "We wanted to make sure that sufficiently strong roots were sunk before our term expired, so whoever took our place would have a firm foundation to build on, or they'd have a hell of a time ripping it out."

Putting government services online has also given agencies the opportunity to rethink the way they do business, she says. "Technology gives agencies the chance to re-engineer processes, discover where they are, where they want to go, and decide how they want to get there." But not all of them are ready to seize the opportunity -- or spend the money. "That is one of the interesting challenges that we face: whether we should be funding this in a different way," says Katzen, adding that a central fund might encourage competition among agencies, which, at the moment, pay their own way.

Momentum for change has come in large part from the business world. Butcompeting with the private sector involves risk, warns Joseph Stiglitz, a Stanford economics professor who previously served as chairman of the White House council of economic advisers. In his recent report, "The Role of Government in the Digital Age", Stiglitz points out that US government agencies could breach old boundaries between the private and public sector. One example he uses is the US Postal Service's "eBillPay" programme, which supplies internet-based bill payment services in conjunction with Yahoo! and other e-businesses.

This year, 33 million US taxpayers filed their 1999 returns online. The office of student financial aid at the Department of Education processed more than 670,000 online applications during the 1998-99 application cycle. And about 34,000 people filled out census forms online. At least two out of three adults with online access have conducted an electronic transaction with the government. For those without access to the internet at home or work, kiosks are being set up in urban areas where there are few computers.

But there are obstacles in the path of full automation including fears about privacy, security and data integrity, in a country where many people are suspicious of the government. Only 35 per cent of internet e-commerce users polled by INC, an e-government transaction technology firm, felt confident that the government would keep their records confidential. And, without advertising, how can people expect to know that these services are available online?

Some agencies have gone only part of the way. Christopher Baum, the vice-president for electronic government at the IT consultancy Gartner Group, says that true e-government requires the transformation of all the systems involved in processing a transaction, not just those facing citizens. If a citizen fills in and submits an electronic form on an agency's website, only for it to be printed out in a government office where an employee must type the information into a database, "all you've done is built a great big remote controlled typewriter".

AlanBalutis, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's advanced technology programme and co-chairman of the Chief Information Officers Council's Committee on E-Government, is impressed by the number of government services online. "It's nice to see the way e-government has grown and changed," he says. "Even so, I'd like us to be thinking about when no one uses the phrase 'e-gov' any more; when people will think this is just the way to do business; when we've 'dot-goved' ourselves."

Morag Preston lives in Washington DC, where she writes for a variety of American and British publications