Decentralisation could delay the maturation of e-government services but it may provide an opportunity to integrate the projects, writes Karlin Lillington.

The Republic's goal of taking a leadership role in providing e-government services could be severely damaged by plans to decentralise government departments at the same time, according to international analysts.

Research specialists from technology industry analyst the Gartner Group, who spoke to Irish clients from the public and private sector at a seminar in Dublin on Tuesday, say the push to move entire departments out to the regions while also trying to bring "joined-up" e-government services to citizens could be at loggerheads.

"This is possibly going to delay the integration [ of technology and information services that underlie e-government services]," said Mr Andrea Di Maio, research vice-president, Gartner, who was speaking after the seminar.

"When you have departments moving and decentralisation, managers think, 'I have to think of my people and my department first'," he cautioned. While decentralisation, which will also involve reconsidering information technology structures and services, could potentially be used as a positive trigger for developing e-government services, he does not think this will be the case in the Republic.

Mr John Kost, managing vice-president of Gartner government research, shares this perspective. He specialises in the area of shared services - the sharing of services and information between organisations and agencies - a hot topic for local and national governments seeking to cut costs, streamline operations and provide integrated e-government services to citizens.

The risk for any government both decentralising and developing e-government services is that the resulting information technology organisation and infrastructure could be poorly managed if the job were not done right, he said.

"But decentralisation and shared services happening at the same time are an opportunity to make them work better, to make government more responsive to its constituents and to government users of the services."

Mr Kost, who previously served as chief information officer (CIO) for the state of Michigan, the first state to create such an oversight role for its IT infrastructure, said a problem for the Irish government was that such big projects needed a governance organisation with a clear management role - even just a single person - to oversee and drive them. All departments and organisations must be answerable to such an overseer.

But at the moment, while government departments are thinking about shared services and e-government issues in relation to their own department, "the troublesome bit is that clearly each of these departments is thinking on its own".

Most US states now have "a very powerful CIO position", which puts one person in charge of state IT projects, he said.

The Republic's small size means that innovative e-government services should be possible, and could be brought in at greater speed than in larger countries with more complex government structures, said Mr Di Maio.

The State already has one groundbreaking e-government service, its Revenue Online Service (ROS), the Revenue's online tax filing system, which is widely seen as a model for such services internationally.

Another successful service has been the Government's public procurement website, which allows companies to tender for government projects online.

Crucial to all national e-government initiatives is achieving what Mr Di Maio called "joined-up government" - a friendlier way of talking about IT and services integration, he says.

He specifies four areas of integration for joined-up government - single-tier integration across one level of government, at city or county level - for example, cross-tier integration within a vertical service such as health services, which would overlap with national to local levels of government; cross-hierarchy integration, or integration across a single process, such as policy or paperwork; and cross-industry integration, between the public and private sectors.

Most governments are only now emerging from what he calls the "trough of disillusionment" about e-government projects, where initial expectations after the hype of getting services online in the late 1990s were not met with significant success.

Governments found they had security problems with projects and a poor return on investment. But interest is rekindling, not least because many governments now have requirements in place to provide a variety of services to citizens online.

The goal now is to lower costs while raising the value of the service to the constituents, Mr Di Maio said. He pointed again to the ROS, where people quickly took to filing online when offered the incentive of a later filing date.

In the US, constituents using the Internal Revenue Service online filing service receive tax refund cheques earlier.

"There must be a business case for integration" to get all parties to buy into an e-government service, he said - increased operational efficiency, political return or better constituent services.

Integration is a necessity, not an option, he said. "Joined-up government is really a fundamental issue in transforming government so it can meet the challenges ahead."