Last week GCN reported on Accenture's new paper which asserts that e-government hasn't achieved all the objectives it was articulated as addressing but that it still has potential. The paper goes on to outline four elements that should be addressed for e-government to realize the potential, which focus on making the customer's experience central to the services. I don't disagree with Accenture's conclusions and, actually, they seem pretty reasonable to me. However, I think that people often forget that the original 24 E-Gov initiatives were selected based on how many citizens they would touch, and how deeply they would be touched. Customer service has always been a part of US e-government. It seems to me that the ethos of customer service is lost in the "government" part of e-government, and guvvies can hardly be blamed for that. With Congress, inspector generals, lobbyists, and God-knows-who-else constantly baying for responses to their needs, the faceless citizen is easily forgotten.
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