ABSTRACT
As politicians increasingly identify themselves with what has become euphemistically known as the ‘third way’, issues around the concept of ‘electronic government’ have become important and latterly visible on the policy agendas of many major democracies, including Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. These issues should be viewed as important socially, politically and economically, because they are fundamentally linked to the achievement of the re-engineering of public services in alignment with the twin goals of leveraging both efficiency and effectiveness whilst increasing citizen satisfaction. Yet, seemingly perversely, the general consensus, and in the absence of any informed debate, would appear to be that electronic government is unquestionably accepted as a ‘good thing’. The result of this apparent lack of discernible political or public contentiousness has been what can best be described as a tide of ‘pilot-mania’, where, in countries across the globe, significant resources can be observed in use in relatively smallscale projects, with end results that fail, almost always, to deliver adequate social, economic or political returns in respect of enhanced efficiency or effectiveness of public services.
