Book Description

We live in an increasingly interconnected society, where the Internet has spawned tremendous improvements in efficiency and customer service. People use the telephone and the Internet to get service 24 hours a day, seven days a week. More than 60 percent of all Internet users interact with government websites. E-Government will save taxpayers a significant amount of money, while adding value to citizens' experience with government and better serving their needs. Consequently, the President has made "Expanding E-Government" integral to a five-part Management Agenda for making government more focused on citizens and results. Federal information technology (IT) spending in the United States will exceed $48 billion in 2002 and $52 billion in 2003. That level of IT spending provides enormous opportunities for making the transformation government into a citizen-centered E-Government. Indeed, a good portion of current federal IT spending is devoted to Internet initiatives, yielding over 35 million web pages online at over 22,000 web sites. But past agency-centered IT approaches have limited the government's productivity gains and ability to serve citizens. As highlighted in this report, the federal government is poised to transform the way it does business with citizens federal government check budget through the use of E-Government. This report presents the federal government's action plan for E-Government. The primary goals for the President's "Expanding E-Government" initiative are to: Make it easy for citizens to obtain service and interact with the federal government; Improve government efficiency and effectiveness; and Improve government's responsiveness to citizens. OMB Director Mitchell E. Daniels initiated an interagency E-Government Task Force (see Appendix A) to identify the action plan for implementing the President's E-Government initiative. Under the leadership of Mark Forman, Associate Director of Information Technology and E-Government, about 80 federal employees from across the federal government made up the Task Force (see Appendix B). The E-Government Task Force found that the federal government could significantly improve customer service over the next 18 to 24 months by focusing on 23 high-payoff, government wide initiatives that integrate agency operations and IT investments (subsequently, payroll processing was added as the 24th E-Government initiative). These initiatives could generate several billion dollars in savings by reducing operating inefficiencies, redundant spending and excessive paperwork. The initiatives will provide service to citizens in minutes or hours, compared to today's standard of days or weeks. Moreover, by leveraging IT spending across federal agencies, the initiatives will make available over $1 billion in savings from aligning redundant investments.