Building a Better Bureaucracy
By Dale Dougherty
In the realm of abecedarian buzzwords, B, E, and I have had a full and proper introduction. Now welcome G. G is for government or e-government, which has its different segments: G2B (government to business), G2C (government to citizen), and—my favorite—G2G (government to government). The Gartner Group predicts that revenue for G2G and G2B segments will exceed $4 billion by the year 2005, up from $1 billion in 2000. The forecast for the G2C segment is $2.2 billion in 2005, up from $455 million last year.
Many first-stage G2C efforts sought to provide citizens with access to information online. Large federal agencies developed Web sites early on, and their sites occasionally make news when serious security flaws or privacy rights issues surface. Of these sites, www.irs.gov, in particular, has developed a reputation for notoriously poor design choices.
A relatively new service is FirstGov.com, an Internet search engine that indexes U.S. government information. FirstGov was created by Federal Search Foundation, a nonprofit organization led by Inktomi's former chief scientist, Eric Brewer. Brewer is now an associate professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, and his organization is scheduled to run the site for the next two years before turning it over to the U.S. government.
The line between commercial and public services isn't always clear. Some people argued that the FirstGov site shouldn't have been supported by the Federal government because it's a commercial venture.
