E-Gov Alone Doesn't Cut It, Accenture Survey Says

Despite being the golden child on President George Bush's IT agenda, e-government alone doesn't provide the level of services that satisfy demanding citizens, according to a global survey conducted by Accenture. That opens the door for VARs to sell more robust solutions that specifically enhance communication between government agencies.

For the United States -- or any country -- to achieve and maintain leadership in customer satisfaction, efficient multichannel service is essential, said Martin Cole, group chief executive of government for Accenture, during a morning keynote at Fose. That means doing more than throwing services online.

"Making incremental improvements to e-government isn't going to improve service on a broad scale," he said.

According to the survey, governments around the world are approaching a saturation point in terms of services offered online, with 91 percent of those measured already available on average. But in terms of maturity, governments are less than halfway to providing the full scope of services that citizens desire; of the 22 governments surveyed, only Canada scored above 50 percent in that measure.

"Governments are making service investment decisions without a complete view of outcomes they want to achieve," Cole said. "They need comprehensive view of citizens and business preferences."

Topping the list of preferences is the ability to interact with the government by more than one means -- in other words, beyond the Internet. According to the survey, the telephone ranked as the favored method of communicating with the government on average; not one country ranked the Internet as No. 1.

"E-government can't be viewed in isolation," Cole said. "Citizens want choices."

They also want efficiency. Those surveyed responded that 75 percent of the time, government was not able to recall at least some detail of past interaction. And that percentage correlated directly with the perception of how different entities within government work together. Given that, VARs able to offer network solutions that collect and maintain information from multiple sources -- enhancing communication between different agencies and different representatives within agencies through a single repository of citizen information, specifically -- could be an attractive offering to bring to the table that goes beyond standard e-government applications.

"If I get a letter asking me to call a government agency, [they should] know who I am, and why I'm calling," Cole said. "The government of the future has to be ready for citizens of the future. We will need to again reinvent ourselves."

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