The office, which was the brainchild of Peter Mandelson and lives within the Cabinet Office, refused to comment on the reports, but the newspaper quotes sources as saying the job will be "a champion, rather than formulating policy".
The e-envoy is Andrew Pinder, a former IT executive at the inland revenue and Citibank. He told the paper: "I am personally completely confident that I will have adequate resources to do my job.
"The Office of the E-envoy will continue to campaign and coordinate the UK's drive to become the world's leading knowledge economy, and remains dedicated to getting government services available online with a high take-up."
The office was set up in 1998, with the remit to put all government services online by 2005, but recently individual Whitehall departments have established their own IT units, and responsibility for introducing braodband was swiched to the Department of Trade and Industry.
The Commons public administration select committee will grill the cabinet secretary, Andrew Turnbull, about the relevance of the e-envoy next week.
The government also set itself the target of making the UK "the best place in the world for e-commerce" by December 2002 - an ambition which few would concede it had met.
A spokesman for the Cabinet Office said: "It's the annual budgetary process and we are not making an announcement until that is completed.
"Any changes will be announced in due course."
Tom Steinberg, an IT commentator on the voxpolitics weblog - which monitors the interface of government and the internet - said: " It had a reputation for missing the blindingly obvious and screwing up the relatively easy, with an extremely unwise reliance on giant technology companies.
"In the final account, though, perhaps the major sin of the OeO was not to manage its media profile better. As an organisation it has done huge amounts to help local government around the UK with a massive transformation process of uninmaginable scale. But this was never seen by the public, or associated with it."
"And if there is a capital crime in contemporary government - it is ignoring your media profile."
Quelle: Guardian Unlimited
