Ministers have given councils just five years to start delivering all their services electronically, but the dream of wired local authorities could be jeopardised by widespread ignorance about e-government.

A new survey of more than 200 heads of IT found senior officers and politicians in 75% of authorities have only a patchy or poor understanding of ministers' electronic service delivery plans for local government. This is despite the fact that officers in two-thirds of councils had been briefed on e-government, and a third of authorities had briefed councillors.

Brian Westcott, the consultant who edited the survey for the Society of Information Technology Management (Socitm), said: "IT managers are having to cope with a lack of commitment in some cases. To some extent people don't want to be informed about this. They are still worried about the technology, and think it's still something for tecchies."

Councillors in particular, he said, might not have a good grasp of e-government policy: "A lot of them are old and retired and, with all due respect to them, a bit out of touch with modern technology."

The government wants councils to adopt the "spirit" of a 2005 timetable for all appropriate Whitehall services to be delivered electronically. This target is not yet statutory for local government, and therefore legally unenforceable, but the Socitm findings still underline council concerns about meeting it. An e-government survey released earlier this year by pollsters TBC research found that nearly two-thirds of the 100 officers questioned thought the target could only be met with extra money for IT. Socitm's survey, which also took in the views of over 150 council chief executives, finds the same concern.

These anxieties hide the fact that local government is forging ahead with electronic delivery. The Socitm survey found that 77% of authorities had prepared an e-government strategy suited to local needs, or plan to do so. Around a third had appointed a senior manager as an "e-champion" to oversee the implementation of the strategy across the authority. In nearly 100 authorities, however, the chief executive and head of IT did not agree on whether an appointment had been made. E-champions, believes, Mr Westcott are key to driving change through resisting authorities.

According to Mr Westcott, the government is already taking many of the necessary steps to ensure that councils are wired up by the 2005 deadline. Ministers have announced a £350m fund to support on-line local government, which councils can only access if they have an e-government strategy. By setting targets in the first place, the government has also piled both direct and peer group pressure on authorities to implement electronic delivery.

The obvious next step for ministers is to make those targets statutory - a move that would really ratchet up the pressure on councils to move their services into call centres and onto the internet. The most likely method of doing this would be by incorporating e-government targets into the best value regime.

It is a move that Mr Westcott supports, although with the important caveat that the best value measures should not be so prescriptive that they stop councils tailoring e-government initiatives to the needs of their communities. Once the targets are in place, he argues: "It will be up to local authorities and their heads of IT to lead on this and make something happen."