European Journal of ePractice

Progress towards realizing the full potential of eGovernment -using digital technologies to improve public services and government-citizen engagements- has been slower and less effective than the technologies' take-up in spheres such as eCommerce.

This paper, based on the Breaking Barriers to eGovernment Project, presents seven categories of barriers to eGovernment progression and identifies eight associated legal areas that underpin these barriers. The discussion then turns to four organizational solutions to overcome the top barriers to eGovernment as identified by an online survey of eGovernment stakeholders conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. These barriers are: coordination across central, regional and local levels of government; resistance to change by government officials; lack of interoperability between IT systems; low levels of Internet use amongst certain groups; and lack of political support for eGovernment. We make some explicit recommendations which aim to further the objectives of the European Commission's i2010 eGovernment Action Plan.

The four solutions discussed here are: creating a network of eGovernment champions, segmentation of citizens, working with chaotic co-ordination and encouraging an eLiterate workforce. It is worth noting that some of these solutions could be used to tackle more than one barrier. In this way, implementation of the proposed solutions can reinforce each other and have a generalised effect in promoting IT-enabled business change across a range of government activities.