E-Government: making it easier for citizens and businesses

The urge for effectiveness and transparency by creating a “one-stop shopping” for citizens and businesses is here. The need to align public sector cross-departmental processes to prevent ineffective administrative process by requiring citizens and businesses to go from counter-to-counter to achieve a goal has become a necessity.

e-Government has become the new way for public administrations to become:

• more open and transparent, and to reinforce democratic participation;
• more service-oriented, providing personalized and inclusive services to each citizen; 
• productive, delivering maximum value for taxpayers' money.

The fourth benchmark study indicated that online availability of public services is still in its infancy. Although the results differ per country, and per service cluster i.e. income-generating, registration, returns and permits & licenses, road ahead is still a challenge – not just for the new countries entering the European Union (EU).