eGovernment has failed citizens

Deloitte has released a report suggesting that eGovernment has failed to reach it's potential due to an over-reliance on technical delivery and failures to change Public Sector business models or adequately consider the customer at the centre of transactions.

A summary of the report's key findings is at CIO magazine entitled Governments Urged to Learn From Businesses

The report concludes e-government to date has largely failed to transform government service delivery as its original architects imagined it would. During the race to go online, public managers rarely stopped to consider such basic questions as who their customers were and what they wanted, impeding their ability to service those customers effectively and efficiently.

Customer-centred transformation goes well beyond automating Industrial Era business processes, the report says: it requires first stepping back to understand the end-to-end experience from the user's perspective and using those insights to improve the experience offered to customers.

The report also makes some strong points regarding the cost and efficiency savings of pursuing a customer-centric approach.

It's a thought provoking read.

The full research report is available at Deloitte's website entitled, One Size Fits Few: Using Customer Insight to Transform Government (PDF 2.7Mb)