The Internet provides the ability to make the government much more customer-centric. The approach to service delivery today is stovepiped and agency-centric. Second, agencies need to think about how they coordinate service delivery between local offices, their 800 numbers and the Internet. You can have a customer do an Internet transaction in the morning and call the 800 number in the afternoon, or visit a local office in the morning and send an e-mail message in the afternoon. The next big issue is simplifying the forms currently in use.
Many government forms are very complicated.
Government workers who are highly trained and who have lots of experience understand these forms and know how to ask the public questions to get the information they need. When you want to move to self-service and get people to input answers over the Internet, you need to rethink how you ask the questions. If they re not understandable and if the Web site isn t designed with an intuitive look and feel, people won t be able to provide the information. They re going to abandon the transactions in midstream. That s not what you want.