IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

In its fourth annual salary survey the Society of IT Managers (Socitm) found that 34.6 per cent of authorities had IT recruitment problems, compared to 36 per cent last year and a massive 60 per cent in 2001.

The government has introduced the first phase of an accreditation plan designed to build trust in IT security and ensure products and services meet basic quality standards.

The Cabinet Office's Central Sponsor for Information Assurance (CSIA) group, which co-ordinates information security projects across government, has started certifying internet security products frequently used by public sector organisations.

Technology is at the heart of Gordon Brown's plans to cut Whitehall costs. The Chancellor wants back office efficiency savings of 2.5 per cent by 2008, boosting front line service delivery funding by £20bn.

Medway Council uses an Adobe product to make the e-form system work and so successful has it been in doing this that dozens of other businesses and organisations have been talking to Medway about its work.

IT vacancies in the public sector have seen incredible growth between over the first three months of this year with a 37 per cent increase in permanent IT vacancies with contract vacancies growing by 25 per cent during the first quarter of 2004.

Channel Island Jersey is challenging its reputation associated with cows, potatoes and tax exiles with the roll-out of a cutting-edge egovernment initiative.

The island's government, the States of Jersey, has embarked on a five-year project with management consultancy Partners for Change to link up its various departments, improve efficiency and deliver services electronically to all of Jersey's 90,000 citizens.

The objectives of the research detailed in the report were to: examine the priority given to the delivery of good customer service in general, and more specifically, to achieving the customer service target; identify obstacles to good customer service performance; identify lessons of good practice and consider how the national tier can better support the field in achieving good customer service more widely.

Jobcentre Plus staff are put off from encouraging benefit claimants to use e-channels because of bad experiences with their own IT systems and contact centres, a government report reveals.

Ongoing problems with contact centres and an "inadequate" Customer Management System have apparently led staff in local offices to "distrust technology".

Services need to be linked across disperse geographical communities, and public sector IT needs to integrate complex systems to cover a wide variety of needs, such as health, education and planning.

The initiative called Link-Age in Wales, published in a consultation document yesterday (July 4), joins up services across and beyond government and will simplify how people are able to access the services and help they need.

The way long-term public IT projects are deployed by government departments such as the Inland Revenue and the NHS should fundamentally change, and not simply focus on public online services, according to a major new survey by Accenture.

However just as important is to understand the purpose of the project, and its objectives.

If the objective is to present web pages to explain what it is your department does, then that can be done for a very low cost. But if the goal is to create complex and highly scalable online business applications, then costs will rise steeply. They can soar for a variety of reasons, most importantly that the development work is simply very difficult and time consuming. Just because what the citizen eventually sees is a website does not mean that money got spent solely on some design and a Web CMS; more likely it's extensive back-end business process automation that runs up the costs.