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Daniel Greenwood, director of the e-commerce architecture project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that the United States is making great advances in B2B and B2G e-procurement projects and implementations and mobile communications, but praised Ireland's Personal Data Vault system as an exciting new programme that will store and secure a citizen's personal information. Greenwood told ElectricNews.Net, "This is an area where Ireland has the opportunity to leapfrog the US."
Greenwood was in Ireland following an invitation from Irish company Version1 to speak at the firm's VersionTalk breakfast meeting on e-government in Dublin. Oliver Ryan, director of Reach, the organisation co-ordinating the Irish government's strategy of integrating the internal systems of Ireland's public services and making them available on-line, also spoke at the event.
Greenwood explained that although privacy is a hot topic in the US, America is behind Europe because it does not have a legal privacy directive as exists in the European Union. It is therefore harder for the US to implement a comprehensive public policy regarding privacy.
Reach expects to release the tender for the Vault project in the next two weeks. The Vault has recently finished its proof-of-concept stage.
The concept behind the Vault is that a customer or citizen need only register once with the system and he would receive an authentication based on his PPS (formerly RSI) number. The citizen would then have one unique number across all the government agencies that would be associated with his personal data. The result would be that when the user logs in on-line, phones up or goes to a government agency in person, his number would then pre-populate fields in the forms with his personal data, and he can change that data as needed.
Meanwhile in the US, Greenwood pointed to a number of new e-government programs, particularly in the mobile space, where the US is making big strides. In Texas, for example, government employees have been armed with PDAs that enable them to collect e-signatures from people and even have them pay their fines on the spot over the device. Texas has demonstrated a cost-savings from this programme that has enabled the State to reduce staff in some agencies.
In Kentucky a kind of PDA known as the BlackBerry, which enables wireless e-mail and chat, was distributed to 35,000 civil servants. Staff who go out to work on-site, such as auditors, can then e-mail their findings back to the central office and boost agency efficiency.
E-mail alerts and messaging systems are going live in the United States to notify citizens of immediate news such as brown-outs in California, the progress of legislation that people are interested in following, and traffic and airport information. "These experiences in the US are not unique to our country; these are the kinds of applications that can work in other jurisdictions. People would rather be on-line than in line," said Greenwood.
Earlier this week, World Markets Research Centre released a survey that ranked the United States as the top e-government country, with Ireland in sixth place behind Taiwan, Australia, Canada and the UK.
Results of the European Union's own benchmarking project, which ranks member states according to their e-government readiness, are expected in November.
For more information visit http://www.civics.com or http://www.reach.ie
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