A few days ago, a friend's daughter had a medical emergency while on holiday on the continent. As her E111 insurance document had gone missing, her father had to order a duplicate in a hurry. But where to start? The post office? Her doctor? The Foreign Office?
Then we remembered the web. A quick search on the government web portal, www.direct.gov.uk, turned up a Department of Health page with a helpline number at the Pensions Service in Newcastle. My friend called, explained his problem and, within hours, an E111 document was rolling off the fax for forwarding to the hospital.
For my friend, e-government had alleviated one of the anxieties of a very anxious day.
The experience was also a nice example of multichannel electronic public services - we had used the web in conjunction with a call centre and fax machine.
This is good. Despite all the money spent on public sector websites over the past five years, multi-channel working will continue to be the norm, especially when it comes to doing something important. In moments of crisis, we do not want to rely on the web alone - we want to talk to human beings and, if necessary, bang on a desk.
This is worth remembering for two reasons. First, it means some optimistic predictions made about e-government cost savings have to go out of the window. These were based on the idea that, as citizens move to "self-service government", public bodies can save money by shutting down expensive traditional channels. This assumption is now being played down.
Another reason to bear multiple channels in mind is their value as a safety net. One organisation that has not learned this lesson is the Inland Revenue, which suffered a colossal embarrassment this year when its website was overloaded by late tax filers.
Most last-minute merchants, it seems, were people with simple finances and low income. Just the target audience, in fact, for another e-channel, filing by phone to an electronic voice-recognition system. Last year, the Inland Revenue ran two pilots of such a service, handling tens of thousands of returns. The pilots were a triumph for speaker-independent voice-recognition, which has improved noticeably in recent years. However, the Inland Revenue is not rushing to roll out the service.
One reason, according to insiders, is that its IT staff are already horrendously over-stretched after switching contractors from EDS to Capgemini and merging with Customs and Excise (which has yet another main IT contractor, Fujitsu).
Another reason, according to the same insiders, is that the Inland Revenue has invested so much political and financial capital in getting the web service right that it did not want it to be eclipsed by another channel.
To be fair to the Revenue, launching a national voice-recognition system would have been a big risk. Even the simplest tax form is a relatively complex transaction for the technology. If it had gone belly-up, heads would be on poles.
However, we can only hope that other public bodies are watching, and learning.
