Critical Success Factors and Core Competencies for

Many factors will determine the success of the programme. The most critical of these are:

• Increasing numbers of people and businesses demand the all-of-government approach of e-government, and use the capability being built;

• Initial investment in an additional service delivery channel (online) is not at the expense of agency core business, though other channel costs in agencies can be reduced as online usage increases;

• Pricing and service quality for services delivered online can be managed to ensure continued demand for the channel;

• Agencies are able to accommodate the change from strong agency brands to strong service brands in preparation for the delivery of shared and integrated services;

• Agencies are able to identify compelling and practical life events or service needs that customers use as triggers to access government;

• Agencies are able to re-engineer processes to link life events or service needs at the front end with existing legacy processes and systems at the back end;

• Wider State sector organisations and local government are ready at all levels to embrace e-government policies, standards, solutions where possible;

• The E-government Unit can develop, and agencies adopt, acceptable privacy and security safeguards, including authentication;

• Agencies can ensure equality of access to information and services;

• The E-government Unit can ensure consistency, alignment and completeness with the e-citizen and e-commerce initiatives;

• The E-government Unit and agencies can anticipate change and refresh the strategy accordingly.

The core competencies agencies will need to deliver e-government successfully include the ability to:

• Identify service requirements in a way that is meaningful to customers;

• Negotiate (and monitor) agreements among managers of different agencies to fulfil these service requirements;

• Manage complex information systems environments and the suppliers of IS/IT and communications services;

• Lead change from an agency culture to a whole-of-government focus;

• Recruit and develop people with the skills to deliver e-government.

This change will affect almost every aspect of government. New structures, incentives, investment, performance metrics, customer service definitions, human resource policies and technology infrastructures will be required to support this.