It is 1996. A cross-party group in parliament has just launched an exciting project. Called the Information Society Initiative, it aims to tell companies about this new-fangled internet thing and to get them talking about and using e-commerce more than previously. Celebrities at the launch event include Nick Ross, the people behind Wallace and Gromit and many others. Fast forward to late 2002. The ISI has morphed into UK Online, with a separate UK Online for Business brand. The dotcom crash has happened and there is a lot of negative feeling about the government's ability to hit its 2005 deadline for e-enabling just about everything - to say nothing of countless surveys concluding that when people want business advice they tend not to go to government sources.
Overall you can't help but feel it has been a rough time for the scheme, and its new head, Liz Grant, could have been forgiven for wondering what she was getting herself into when she took up the post in the middle of last year.
Unusually for someone in a government post, Grant came not from a civil service background but is on secondment from IBM. She has a 20-year background in IT. What? A government agency with a genuine commercial sensibility and background? Tell us more.
The central change Grant wanted to put into place was in the emphasis. "Historically we had focused on commerce and e-commerce," she says. "We now stress the fact that that's a single facet of e-business ... we're doing a lot of publicity to emphasise the people elements of the business; three years ago we really laboured the technical issues." This isn't to criticise the staff three years ago - when e-business was that new, putting the spotlight on the technical stuff was inevitable. It isn't now.
Grant has based her plans partly around her experience at IBM, where she was in close contact with SMEs - the sort of business that makes up the vast majority of the UK economy. It enables her to see the linkage between the "e" bits and the rest of a business clearly. Which is fine, but on a practical level what is the organisation doing about it?
Well, there's the website at www.ukonlineforbusiness.gov.uk, which gets a lot of traffic. "We get around 3,500 page impressions a day," she says. The site has a lot of information and business advice on supply chain, e-commerce and many other issues. But you get the impression that Grant's real focus is not on the electronic side of UK Online for Business but on the numerous events that it organises, often in conjunction with chambers of commerce, banks and IT and telecommunications vendors. "I love going out to the events in person," says Grant.
The objectives of the events and information is to get businesses thinking about technology in a different way. "They're not thinking about it strategically," says Grant. "There's this tripod, based on people, processes and technology." Too many organisations consider those elements in isolation, when in order to get real value they need to take them in the context of each other. "I'd love to be able to say most businesses are getting it, but I don't think they are." There are some truly enlightened examples, she suggests, whose integration of the net has meant more than just bolting it on to the front of a company, and many of these are profiled on the UK Online for Business website.
The number of people involved is impressive - 28 people in the Department of Trade and Industry are focused on the UK Online for Business initiative, plus three contractors and two secondees. There are 300 specialist ICT (information and communication technology) advisers working under the scheme's banner across the country and there are collaborations with business links, the Confederation of British Industry and the Institute of Directors.
The British Chambers of Commerce has a national e-business club under the scheme's auspices; Grant has every intention of pushing it further to the benefit of smaller traders. Her background in the commercial arena forces her to keep a constant watch on the value the organisation brings to its clients.
There are still bits missing from the jigsaw. No doubt due to internal politics rather than technology, businesspeople can't just log on to the UK Online for Business website and find something that says "Here's where you pay your tax online, here's where you pay your VAT and here's a link to Companies House for your company returns online" - which would be useful and save some ferreting around.
The aims overall, though, to inform people about what can and should be done in terms of e-commerce and to get qualified, rigidly independent advice to business on how to go about it, are laudable. The website tends to get tarred with the same cynicism that attaches itself to any initiative with the word "government" attached. Overcoming this will be one of Grant's most difficult jobs.
