KEY POINTS:
The online face of the Government, the Govt.nz web portal, is to get a makeover to make it easier to use and search as a UN report rates New Zealand high in e-government uptake but still well behind Australia.
Figures reveal the Govt.nz portal attracted 3.7 million unique visitors last year, a 35 per cent increase on 2006 with around 60 per cent of visitors coming from offshore.
While increasingly on the radar of locals as a place to get information on everything from dog licences to tax issues, nearly as many people visited the Trade Me auction website in December alone as visited the Govt.nz portal in the whole of 2007.
The 2008 United Nations E-Government Survey ranks New Zealand 18th in the world in terms of e-government readiness, in between Israel and Ireland and 10 places behind Australia. New Zealand has slipped three places since the last survey in 2005.
Laurence Millar, the State Services Commission's deputy commissioner for information and communication technologies, said the Govt.nz website was being revamped to bring it up to date with changes made to the portals of other governments.
"We're at the end of the lifecycle of that version of the portal which actually rated very well back in 2005," he said.
RSS (really simple syndication) feeds will be added across the portal to allow information updates to be sent to people rather than them having to visit the website regularly.
Software widgets would also allow people to receive information directly to their computers.
"Having government information on people's desktops will be a theme," he said.
The Govt.nz search engine was revamped last year to include page indexing by Vivisimo and external search results from Windows Live Search, as people sought a search experience similar to that of Google.
Millar said the weighing towards international visitors to the website was due to its high rankings in search results for information about New Zealand.
"New Zealand isn't that well known in the world.
"So the place people go to for information about us is the portal," he said.
Local web users were increasingly going directly to specific Government websites rather than to Govt.nz.
The Ministry of Social Development alone has 18 websites.
"We're not looking to be the single gateway," said Millar.
"That was a concept out of the commercial world that isn't really relevant to government."
While the UN rates New Zealand well in terms of e-participation and e-democracy, our relatively poor track record in broadband has held us back.
The UN picked out some good examples of e-government in action - Brazil's House of Representatives website allows citizens to talk to their representatives and participate in debates directly through the internet, while Singapore's SingPass system lets citizens with an ID and password gain secure access to 370 e-services across 40 government agencies.
Overall though, the UN says governments have been slow in preparing for the next phase of e-government, so-called "connected governance".
"After more than a decade of e-government developments under way the general performance of electronic service delivery has been uneven and sporadic," the report noted.
"The logic of connected governance goes beyond viewing the public as a 'customer' and as a service recipient, as e-government must also facilitate strengthened democratic accountability and more socially inclusive governance," it added.
Millar for his part counts the three most successful components of New Zealand's e-government strategy as the Govt.nz portal with improved search, the public participation wiki that was released last year and the Government's award-winning secure authentication programme also launched last year.
Government had to do better in improving take-up across Government of the e-GIF (e-Government Interoperability Framework), link up more online services, particularly ones aimed at the business sector and encourage the re-use of Government information, using web standards like XML.
More details of New Zealand's long- term plans for e-government will feature in the Government's updated Digital Strategy report, due to be released in March.
PROGRESS
E-Government report card:
* New Zealand ranks 18th out of 182 countries in terms of e-government readiness but lies ten places behind Australia.
* 3.7 million people visited the Govt.nz portal last year, up from 2.4 million in 2006.
* A Web 2.0 makeover of the portal has added improved search engine facilities and will include RSS feeds and widgets allowing information to be sent to a computer desktop.
