The UK's most critical piece of e-government infrastructure is failing councils, a local authority IT chief has told Government Computing News. Fahri Zihni, president of the Society of IT Management (Socitm), said that not a single council in the country is yet connected to the Government Gateway, despite official targets to have the first local services delivered through the system 12 months ago.
While two pioneering authorities - Sedgemoor District Council and Sunderland City Council - were due to offer transactional e-services through the Gateway last August, the Office of the e-Envoy (OeE) has scrapped the pilot schemes without providing any replacement.
"At least a year ago it was supposed to happen, it was officially quoted that there were supposed to be deliverables around August last year but it never happened," Zihni said.
"It was not designed with local authorities in mind. There was an assumption that anyone connecting to the Gateway would be on the GSI [Government Secure Intranet] - but local authorities are not on the GSI."
According to Zihni, the OeE's plans failed to appreciate key council requirements for identifying and verifying e-service users.
"The other assumption was that the Gateway would offer applications and authentication, but local authorities wanted to use the Gateway for authentication only and do the applications themselves," he told Government Computing's October 2003 magazine.
The failure to get councils linked to the system is a major setback for the UK's e-government programme Zihni said, as without the Gateway, councils risk providing "many hundreds of disjointed services" each with their own means of authentication.
Sedgemoor had intended to offer online council tax services through the Gateway, while Sunderland was aiming to collaborate with a number of other local authorities through the system in providing e-services.
Zihni said that in the absence of any Gateway connections, councils are either working alone or have made little progress.
"The tragedy is that local authorities always assume that someone else is working on a national solution so they will hold back in anticipation that work is being done. Of course, now that has not happened and it's had a huge negative effect overall."
Zihni also urged the OeE to be "more supportive" of councils and their Socitm representatives: "Socitm is very disappointed that nothing has been delivered through the Gateway for local authorities," he said.
But despite the failings he sounded a note of optimism.
"If it delivers very, very quickly and they turn their attention to exactly what local authorities want - with the Gateway acting just as an authentication mechanism - they can make up for lost time."
Council IT representatives and Whitehall officials held talks to discuss the situation at the end of September 2003.
In response to the concerns, the OeE issued this statement:
"The Government Gateway has huge potential to enable secure transactions across local government online services as well as central government. The Office of the e-Envoy has been working with local authorities and local authority bodies to address technology and policy issues and to ensure that the Gateway is able to meet short and long term objectives whilst adding real value to customer focussed services."
Quelle: Kablenet
