Chevallerau describes what role e-government will play in the European countries in his latest study, The Impact of e-government on competitiveness, growth and jobs, prepared for the European Commission’s e-Government Observatory.

"E-government is indeed the key enabler that makes it possible to streamline the public service supply chain," Chevallerau says. "It is also a way to simplify compliance mechanisms and controls, while raising service quality and reducing processing times."

Chevallerau says that e-government can have a significant impact on government levers for boosting competitiveness, such as:

• taxation, by reducing the cost of government operations and therefore potentially the required level of taxation;
• government spending, by freeing up resources for key investments that were previously used for standard service processing;
• and regulation, by reducing administrative burdens on businesses and citizens through e-enabling public service provision and delivery.

Other benefits include: openness and transparency (e-government gives citizens greater access to information held by public authorities and to information about public policies); increased participation in the information society (e-inclusion); increased democratic participation (through online forums and consultations or electronic voting); enhanced policy effectiveness (the ability to produce results matching the objectives); and increased economic competitiveness. It also encourages entrepreneurship and increases the competitiveness of enterprises.

Chevallerau says it is necessary to demonstrate that e-services provide a real value-added solution compared to the anterior, offline situation, if e-government services are to be successful.

"E-services must be convenient and easy to use, built on users' needs," Chevallerau says. "Many early e-services have been designed to meet the needs of public administrations rather than those of citizens and businesses. They bring only limited benefits to the customer compared to the offline service. On the contrary they sometimes add extra complexity - and sometimes cost – to the process of using the service. As a result, due to the inertia of existing habits, some users prefer to continue using offline services rather than switching to the e-service."

Another key requirement for e-government service uptake is security. Efforts to increase the security of e-government transactions, in particular through the use of smart identity cards, will therefore be very important in convincing people that using e-public services is safe.

One key lesson is already clear, says Chevallerau: countries that are performing better see e-government not only as way to deliver better, faster and more convenient services to citizens and businesses, but also as an instrument to fundamentally review and improve the processes of public service production and delivery.

Chevallerau says all European countries are committed to implementing e-government. In Scandinavian countries, widely seen as leaders in e-government, the implementation of e-government is regarded as a natural step. It is seen as a logical element of the move to an e-society, which is made possible by the wide diffusion of information and communication technology (ICT) across society, and does not fundamentally challenge an adaptable and flexible public sector culture.

In the UK, e-government has long been identified as a strategic enabler of public sector reform - the most important issue on the British political agenda. The challenge in the UK is to improve public services without substantially increasing the tax burden on citizens and businesses. This can only be achieved through increasing the efficiency of the public sector by streamlining back-office operations to release resources for front-line services. The use of ICT is seen as a strategic element of this efficiency drive.

Other countries have not given the same level of attention to e-government as the UK so far, partly because public service reform has taken longer to be perceived as a pressing imperative, and partly because the lower use of ICT outsourcing in the public sector has not generated market opportunities on the same scale (and hence not generated the same level of attention from market players and the media).

However, this situation is changing quickly and the priority given to e-government, on a political level, is increasing almost everywhere on the continent. Countries that were considered followers a few years ago have learned from the early adopters, devised and implemented effective strategies and improved their rankings in the annual benchmarking surveys performed by the European Commission. Austria, for example, has moved from 11th in 2002 to No. 2 in 2004 thanks to its "e-Government Offensive" launched in June 2003.

"Most of the new EU member states of Central and Eastern Europe are making rapid progress as well," Chevallerau says. "These countries have identified e-government as a key aspect of their drive to catch up with Western European living standards by increasing their competitiveness. The best performances in that respect are from countries, such as Estonia and Slovenia, that became independent in the '90s and thus had the opportunity to build an efficient public administration from the outset, without inheriting structures from the old regime. These countries are already doing better than some of the older member states."

Hendrik Bergstén