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| 'Online Government Services Are the Future' Ofcom consumer chair Anna Bradley stated at the Westminster eForum, the government could make savings and encourage further public adoption of broadband by moving more government services online. According to Nick Kingsbury, director of Objective Corporation, a specialist in content, collaboration and process management, encouraging public services to go online could result in faster resolution times, fewer errors and even the redeployment of staff from back-office functions to front-line service delivery. "Promoting efficient and effective services for the public is a worthy objective, as proven by some successful online services such as the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency excise renewal tool. However schemes such as this will only be truly effective when joined together and integrated seamlessly, as opposed to ad hoc and individual approaches that often lead to IT duplication and considerable waste. It's more than making information available, it's about creating engaging and useful processes with measurable outcomes", says Nick. This year the Treasury Select Committee's report, Evaluating the Efficiency Programme, lambasted the government for adding £5 billion to its £21.5 billion IT savings target, without clear explaining how this would be achieved. "UK IT projects have often considerably overrun both their implementation time and allocated budget. It's important at this time of economic belt-tightening that the government looks to proven solutions and aims for the achievable." Nick continued: "We are seeing a shift toward empowering citizens and ensuring they have the opportunity to influence local policy and community issues. Local authorities will have to provide interested members of the public the opportunity to debate, collaborate on and influence local decisions that affect them via consultations, petitions, Freedom of Information requests etc. By offering online options focusing on key processes and stakeholder consultation, organisations will increase the chances of saving both time and money." Objective Corporation specialises in transforming the connection between organisations and the public, enabling greater and more meaningful collaboration. write your comments about the article :: © 2009 Computing News :: home page |