Growth of E-government slows in Europe

Cap Gemini Ernst & Young have released results of an ongoing survey on the adoption of electronic Public Services across Europe.

The objective of the survey is to provide a benchmark for the different European countries to compare progress and share best practice.

The survey, undertaken on behalf of the European Commission, looks at the progress Europe is making in providing online services at both the individual and business level across the 15 EU member countries, plus Norway, Iceland and Switzerland.

The adoption of e-government continues to grow but the pace of this growth slowed between 2002 and 2003.

The level of online sophistication grew 7% and is now at 67% as opposed to 60% in 2002 and 45% in 2001.

Austria has made the most progress of any one country for the 12-month period.

Due to progress in the last year, research can now focus on the number of public services that are truly fully-transactional online.

Taking this indicator to look at Europe's progress overall shows that only 45% of services are fully available on line with Denmark, Austria and Sweden the leaders.

In 2002 only Denmark, Sweden, Ireland and Finland showed progress towards two-way interaction, but today almost all the countries surveyed have improved the average level of online sophistication of their public services.

Twenty basic public services have been identified, eight for citizens and twelve for businesses.

In almost every country more progress was made by online services for businesses than those for citizens.

Services for businesses reached an overall score of 79% for online sophistication, 63% for fully available online.

The services for citizens stayed at the level of 58% for online sophistication, and only 32% for fully available online.

It was also noted that, for both citizens and business services, enabling the collection of taxes are more sophisticated than those where the government is required to provide a service to the recipient (eg permits, registrations etc).