Alex Allan, former high commissioner for Australia (now there's a qualification for the top Whitehall IT job) has just started work as "e-envoy". His mission is "to drive forward e-commerce and e-government". The latter means putting the state online, a huge enterprise. Allan's chivvying of the private sector is going to be a lot more effective if government itself becomes a paragon of the new forms of electronic communication with the public.
Recent weeks have been breathless... NHS online; £500m for IT learning centres; an audit of the state's websites; guidance on website design; and large rhetoric from Allan's boss, cabinet office minister Ian McCartney. (Pat Hewitt, the e-commerce minister, is also somewhere in the chain of command.) "Through the click of a button we can provide high quality services, health advice and help finding jobs, directly to citizens in a simple and convenient way." And to that end, quantitative targets: 100% of public services to be online by 2008.
But forecasts highlight the downbeat expectations of Whitehall's top brass; e-dealings between citizen and taxman will double within three years, but still represent only a fifth of total contact with the inland revenue. Burning a hole in Allan's desk is last month's sharp report from the national audit office entitled Government on the Web.
All allowances made for the fact its survey of Whitehall web use is 12 months old, it says Whitehall lost the plot between the period of early Tory enthusiasm for "government direct" in 1995-96 and now. Is Allan, a mere civil servant, to evangelise and push through changes that must profoundly alter the economy of official information? The web means more freedom of information. It is ushering in an era of "co-production" in government - by giving the public so much more access and involvement. Lip service is paid to the idea in the latest plan for Whitehall reform, but unless and until civil servants start putting their email addresses (the vast majority still don't have them) on accessible websites, the rhetoric is empty.
At the centre, a cast of hundreds divides responsibility. If the prime minister has other things on his mind, who is the minister with enough seniority to crack the whip on improving websites? The Central IT Unit - once the main Whitehall think tank on the web's wonders - has ceded place to the Performance and Innovation Unit. Ian McCartney's new media team services the Information Age Champions' Group, which is meant to be spearheading the departments' push: government by committee with a vengeance.
Out on left field is the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency, responsible for the state's central portal, www.open.gov.uk - this ought to be a gorgeously-bedecked anteroom to the Aladdin's cave of official information but is in fact a pallid, poorly arranged thing scarcely changed since its inception in prehistoric times (ie 1995). One of the deficits on the open.gov site is how hard it is to follow policy around. There is no entry, for example, for "children" - a good example of the cross-cutting issue the cabinet office keeps saying must be joined up. The site does, however, support some little gems. There, nestling between the Scottish virtual teachers' centre and Sedgefield council is www.securityservice.gov.uk; MI5's is not a bad site as these things go.
In e-land, a little imagination goes a long way. GCHQ, the government centre for signals intelligence, won favourable publicity recently for putting a light-hearted crack-the-code quiz for job seekers on its web site ( www.gchq.gov.uk ). There is talk of citizens getting "personalised" home pages, based on their dealings with the state. But that would require lines between Whitehall and local government to be clearer than they are and for some constitutional theorist to advise the IT anoraks just what the boundaries of the state now are (BAA, a private company, is on the open government site for no explicable reason).
A besetting problem in our system is how to translate initiatives into delivery by disparate Whitehall departments, let alone all the peripheral bodies, local authorities and so on. There is talk of putting online targets in the "public service agreements" on which the treasury will in theory base spending allocations, but that will only work if the centre has a tight game plan. The web has to let a thousand flowers bloom.
Most of those paying tax under self-assessment can probably afford a computer and modem; most of those receiving income support from the department of social security cannot. DSS has its dedicated IT agency (ITSA) but it is the social exclusion unit in the cabinet office which is looking at paying for more computers in libraries or in kiosks in DSS offices to give poor people better e-opportunities. ITSA is, however, experimenting with letting people use information on its website to forecast their pension.
The national audit office shows how cost-effective the net can be for the state. Some 400,000 phone calls are placed each year to the department of trade and industry inquiry unit: if only 1% of calls were redirected to its website, it would save £6,400.
The DSS ITSA says it intends to put benefit claim forms online "as and when the public demand is there". In that phrase lies Alex Allan's (and Tony Blair's) problem. Is the state merely going to follow the curve in developing e-government, or is it going to innovate ahead of public opinion and behaviour and seek to lead us to the promised land?
