4: Electronic Government

Expanded Electronic Government

Other Information:

The federal government can secure greater services at lower cost through electronic government (E-government), and can meet high public demand for E-government services. This administration’s goal is to champion citizen-centered electronic government that will result in a major improvement in the federal government’s value to the citizen. THE PROBLEM The federal government is the world’s largest single consumer of information technology (IT). IT has contributed 40 percent of the increase in private-sector productivity growth, but the $45 billion the U.S. government will spend on IT in 2002 has not produced measurable gains in public-sector worker productivity. At least four major causes for this failure can be discerned. • Agencies typically evaluate their IT systems according to how well they serve the agency’s needs—not the citizens’ needs. Systems will often be evaluated by the percentage of time they are working rather than the performance gain they deliver to the programs they support. In general, agencies do not evaluate their IT systems by standards relevant to the work the agency is supposed to do. • Just as private-sector companies in the 1980s tended to use computers merely as souped-up typewriters and calculators, so government agencies in the 1990s have used IT to automate pre-existing processes rather than create new and more efficient solutions. • IT offers opportunities to break down obsolete bureaucratic divisions. Unfortunately, agencies often perceive this opportunity as a threat and instead make wasteful and redundant investments in order to preserve chains of command that lost their purpose years ago. Financial systems are often automated separately from procurement systems, which are in turn carefully segregated from human resources systems, significantly increasing costs and minimizing potential savings. Likewise, with rare exceptions—the Department of Defense’s Finance and Accounting System being one—agencies shun opportunities to work together to consolidate functions like payroll. Many agencies do not take care to ensure that their IT systems can communicate with one another. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), for example, built a new online form for veterans in one office and then discovered they had to print out the information and mail it to another office of VA because the two systems were not interoperable. VA is now devoted to interoperability—but not all agencies are as zealous. THE INITIATIVES The Administration will advance E-government strategy by supporting projects that offer performance gains across agency boundaries, such as e-procurement, e-grants, e-regulation, and e-signatures. It will manage E-government projects more effectively by using the budget process to insist on more effective planning of IT investments by government agencies. A task force of agency personnel in coordination with OMB and the President’s Management Council will identify E-government projects that can deliver significant productivity and performance gains across government. The task force will also identify the systematic barriers that have blocked the deployment of E-government advances. To support the task force’s work, OMB will scrutinize federal IT investments to ensure that they maximize interoperability and minimize redundancy. The President’s Budget proposes a $20 million E-government fund for 2002 ($100 million over the three years 2002 through 2004) to pay for collaborative E-government activities across agency lines. The Administration will also improve the federal government’s use of the Web. THE EXPECTED RESULTS The E-government initiative will make it simpler for citizens to receive high-quality service from the federal government, while reducing the cost of delivering those services. The PKI effort will ensure that electronic transactions with and within government are private and secure. The e-procurement and grant-management portals will make transactions with the government—or obtaining financial assistance from the government—easier, cheaper, quicker and more comprehensible. The work on supply chain management will enable agencies to eliminate redundant processes and save resources. And putting the federal regulatory process on-line will offer citizens easier access to some of the most important policy decisions: better informing the citizenry and holding government more effectively to account. In short, by improving information-technology management, simplifying business processes, and unifying information flows across lines of business agencies will: • provide high quality customer service regardless of whether the citizen contacts the agency by phone, in person, or on the Web; • reduce the expense and difficulty of doing business with the government; • cut government operating costs; • provide citizens with readier access to government services; • increase access for persons with disabilities to agency web sites and E-government applications; and • make government more transparent and accountable.

Objective(s):

4.1: Service Access Points

4.2: Business Reporting

4.3: Intergovernmental Information Sharing

4.4: Collaboration with Foreigners

4.5: Automation Best Practices

4.6: Citizen-Centered Information Discovery

4.7: PKI

4.8: E-Procurement Portal

4.9: Grants Web Site

4.10: Regulatory Information on the Web

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