The EU has started to promote its main e-services portal along with its latest plans for e-government
The European Commission has presented its new agenda for improving the efficiency of state administrations across the continent.
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has called on the European Commission to relax its requirement for open standards in its projects to make government services available to citizens online.
In an open letter to the Commission, Benoit Müller, the Business Software Alliance's European policy director, said that the EC's insistence on open standards would rule out the use of many widely accepted technologies, such as DHCP, and GSM mobile technologies.
All Western European governments are increasing their spending in IT services, though the levels of online service sophistication and citizen readiness varies from country to country, according to a report from market advisory firm IDC, which has been tracking the progress of e-government over the past four years, using the official EU benchmarks. As the deadlines for the e-Europe Action Plan near, many European countries have increased their efforts to bring new services online. In fact, many of the Western European countries have a large number of highly transactional services available to their citizens.
Read more: European governments to speed up spending on IT services
A blueprint for the future technical infrastructure of European e-Government has been published by the recently launched IDABC (Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Business and Citizens) programme.
Read more: EU consults on blueprint for future infrastructure of European e-Government
This year will see rapid growth in government spend on IT across Europe, according to research from IDC, as the deadlines for the eEurope Action Plan approach.
For the public sector, the 2005 objective is that Europe should have 'modern online public services.'