For decades, a basic black rotary telephone was state of the art and government officials could serve their constituents with virtually no concern about changes to the handsets Ma Bell placed on their desks. Today, staying current forces us to move from second generation Web sites to third generation Web sites and figuring out how to use multimedia to deliver information more effectively. In short, we face enormous competition from the private sector in terms of sophisticated Internet presentation. The public's expectations for the Internet appears to be increasing at an exponential rate. As this happens, even the innovative quickly becomes the ordinary.
Government agencies have to run just to keep from falling behind.
Providing access to services and information offered over the Net to the people. Many poor inner-city and rural areas of the country have low telephone penetration rates and a lack of access to computers with the capacity of accessing the Net. One of the great benefits of putting government services on the Internet is that it will eliminate the need for so many offices and personnel to manage current paper transactions. However, if Internet services are not ubiquitous and comprehensive, they will actually result in duplicative delivery mechanisms. So, the challenge is to design a system to which everyone has access both geographically and socio-economically.