Andy Bond has quite a job ahead of him. As chief scientist at the Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC), he’s playing a leading role in an ongoing effort to develop consistent interoperability standards for linking departments and organizations at all levels of government.
A strong push is on at all levels of government to make online self-service a reality. Responding to budgetary pressures and taxpayers' rising expectations, cities such as New York and Chicago have implemented programs to provide citizens with points of contact for nearly all government issues. Florida is among the states leading the way in putting traditionally time-consuming services online. And in response to the E-Government Act of 2002, federal agencies are scrambling to deploy self-service Web-based solutions to improve service to citizens and make their own workforces more efficient.
Information Management Office acting chief executive John Grant will tell the CeBIT e-government forum in Sydney today that while it is relatively easy to move government services online, the end-user experience depends on organisational change.
Mandated to deliver a single Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) security solution for the health sector, HeSA has endured trenchant criticism from a resistant medical lobby. It has seen its certification vendor change hands from Baltimore, to SecureNet to Betrusted. At the same time applications vendors have proved more than a little slow to develop software to deliver the federal government's grand vision of e-Health.
A federated approach to the set-up of sites, which helped speed up moves towards e-government, now threatens to derail the growth of online services, the report says.