Andrew Pinder, the e-envoy, had an early leaving present last month. A respected annual survey of "e-readiness" placed the UK second only to Denmark among 64 countries. The study, by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the IBM Institute for Business Value, ranks countries according to a basket of 100 measures such as the availability of broadband, the legal climate and whether its people take to e-technologies.
In this year's survey, Britain joins four e-obsessed Nordic countries in the top five; the US, which once topped the league, is number six, largely because of the poor take-up of broadband. Azerbaijan takes the wooden spoon.
Britain scores well in the report largely because it is Europe's most competitive broadband market, and people are willing to shop online.
Pinder's target when he was appointed four years ago was to make Britain the best place in the world for e-commerce, so he's rather pleased with the result. "A photo-finish with Denmark - I can live with that," he says.
Unfortunately for the e-envoy, now minding the shop while the Cabinet Office reorganises his office under a yet-to-be appointed head of e-government, another influential survey last week painted a less flattering picture. In the headline findings, anyway.
The survey is management consultant Accenture's fifth scorecard of e-governments around the world. The report, which assesses the "maturity" of services by which citizens and businesses can interact with their governments online, places Britain ninth out of 22 countries surveyed. For the fourth year in a row, Canada is top. Singapore and the US are joint second.
More embarrassing than the bald ranking is that Britain's position has slipped one place since last year, to be overtaken by France. Accenture comments that Britain made "limited progress" in its e-government programme in 2003.
However, behind the headline ranking is more encouraging news. Slow progress can be a sign of maturity of e-government: when administrations put official business on the internet, they start with the easy bits, such as publishing electronic versions of government brochures. The British government has more or less done that; it is now at the stage of "e-enabling" transactions such as paying car tax. Transactions are more difficult especially if, like car tax, they involve more than one government agency.
Accenture says that, while few online services changed noticeably in 2003, backroom teams were putting in essential components for the difficult bits. For example, the Government Gateway, a centralised registration service for e-government services, "underwent a major upgrade in April 2003 to allow end-to-end transactions between agencies as well as with their customers".
The Accenture report commends the forthcoming appointment of a head of e-government (management consultancies are doing their damndest to put an alumnus in the post). It also praises Britain's explicit inten tion to reform the public service through IT rather than the more usual practice of duplicating existing ways of dealing with government, as an end to itself.
Britain also gets a gold star for trying to measure what exactly it gets from e-government. "Developments such as these are important, as in recent history the United Kingdom's e-government programme came under scrutiny for its emphasis on getting as many services online as possible without clearly demonstrating the value of doing so."
There is one small cloud on the horizon. Britons seem to be unimpressed with their state's e-efforts. "Our citizen survey showed that take-up continues to be an issue for the United Kingdom." Among internet users surveyed, 40% had never visited a government website. Germany, ranking 14, does even worse: 54% of regular internet users have never visited a government site.
Britons, however, take the prize for cynicism: 20% describe themselves as pessimistic about e-technologies making the government more efficient and more accountable. That is higher than in any other country surveyed.
Accenture suggests that if you build a service, people will come. "Of the countries we surveyed in both 2003 and 2004, Canada and Singapore recorded the strongest growth in e-government transactional use. For example, the percentage of regular internet users who filed their taxes online jumped from 21% to 33% in Canada and from 33% to 55% in Singapore in just one year."
And the number of UK internet users who say they have never visited a government site is falling. "Along with increased usage has come increased satisfaction. The number of regular internet users in the United Kingdom who rated their country's e-government performance as fair or better jumped from 48% to 65%."
Accenture concludes by saying the picture of e-government in Britain "may be very different in a year's time". Changes in leadership and organisation, enhancements to the Directgov citizen portal and initiatives to drive take-up of e-government should make Britain "one of the most interesting e-government programmes to watch over the next 12 months".
