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By Sarah Left, 12 September 2000 15:00

NEWS A report from the Cabinet Office run Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU) found very few of the government's key services are available online. Additionally, none of the current websites allow people to conduct transactions to pay taxes for services. The culture and complexity of government is to blame, it said, with projects moving slowly and failing to cross department boundaries. The report reads: "The result is confusing to the user, and misses significant economies of scale and network benefits. There is currently a danger that the government's web presence will largely reflect its silos, rather than customer needs." To speed up the process of change, the PIU recommends an incubator unit within the Office of the e-envoy that will mimic the success of dot-com start-ups. The unit should generate and fund ideas that can be spread across government. Lobbyist Perri 6, of the University of Strathclyde, said the public sector could learn from the private sector: "In government computing, the people who have project management responsibility just don't have the breadth or span of control that a client-side manager in the private sector would have. "This is particularly important when dealing with projects involving several departments or several agencies. In the private sector, the client-side manager would order people around, to bring organisations into relationship with one another." However, as Perri6 noted, the government is more risk averse than the private sector, because taxpayers don't like to see failed projects written off. But the report says the biggest challenge facing e-government is the necessary transformation of the civil service. "The scale of organisational change required may be beyond anything government has previously experienced," the report stated.