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By Joey Gardiner, 15 March 2001 16:35

NEWS The report says a lack of co-ordination means e-government is merely replicating the complex structure of the civil service online. Report author Daniel Stedman Jones of Demos said the government isn't taking it seriously enough: "There's still a sense that e-government is an add-on or an extra burden, and it's not yet placed firmly enough at the centre of wider programmes for the modernisation of government." E-minister Patricia Hewitt, present at the reports launch, defended the charge, saying past government IT failures were still hampering the roll-out of joined up government services today. Hewitt said: "We haven't moved into that transformational e-government agenda because there has been, and still is, so much work to be done in modernising and e-enabling public services. Never mind the amounts of ministerial time spent dealing with IT systems that were wrongly procured and don't work." The Demos report was sponsored by US government IT supplier ezgov. It says it has moved into the UK market because of the leadership and vision of Tony Blair in the area of e-government. However, the report finds that Blair's vision of getting all UK government services online by 2005, while spurring the civil service into action, has led to a lack of thought on how these services could be delivered coherently. It says there is nothing so far to suggest it is avoiding the kind of departmental information "silos" and departmental turf wars which have made delivery of public service IT projects so incoherent in the past. Perri 6, research fellow at the University of Strathclyde and e-government expert said the 2005 focus was distorting the process. He said: "Can the government deliver on their e-government promises? If they want to shove a lot of existing bad services onto websites - yes of course they can. The question is whether it's worth doing or not. If you want better services, and you want them online then you have to redesign the services first, and that's going to take a lot longer."