Andersen Consulting is, just like many of the other large consulting companies, getting interested in e-government. Andersen’s eGovernment programme asks: But is the rhetoric of online government matched by reality? How long is it taking governments to achieve their vision? What areas of Government service are already online and how far do governments have to go to realize the potential of eGovernment? They set out to answer these questions through a research project examining the eGovernment status of 20 countries. Behaving as citizens and businesses, they accessed the web sites of national governments to determine whether we could receive services/conduct business with government electronically. The results show, despite the financial and competitive advantages of offering government services via the Internet, even those countries that have advanced the furthest down the path to eGovernment transact relatively little business digitally.
