The Office of the e-Envoy was created by the Blair Administration to drive an aggressive e-government initiative.

In 1999, British Prime Minister Tony Blair read a startling statistic: Only 2 percent of surveyed UK corporate directors believed that the Internet posed any serious competitive threat to their business. It was a wake-up call for Blair and helped spur the creation of the Office of the e-Envoy (OeE), charged with making sure that all government services—and all of the country's interested citizens—would be online by 2005.

There has already been substantial progress. Today in the United Kingdom, 54 percent of all government services are online. More than a million of its citizens have broadband connections, and more than half of its businesses purchase electronically. E-commerce sales totaled more than 18 billion in 2002. Roughly 10 million Britons do their banking via the Web. And UK households spend an average of 20 days per year online.

Statistics such as these are not only interesting but also critical to the Office of the e-Envoy, which was formed as the part of Prime Minister Tony Blair's Delivery and Reform team that's charged with helping the country, its citizens, and its business community derive maximum benefit from information technology and the knowledge economy.

As early as 1999, Prime Minister Blair had become keenly aware of the opportunities and competitive risks that e-commerce represented. In his forward to a 1999 Cabinet Office study, titled e-commerce@itsbest.uk: A Performance and Innovation Unit Report, the prime minister noted that, although the UK had world-class telecommunications technology and fairly good levels of Internet penetration into homes and workplaces, complacency was a danger: "There are signs we are not capitalizing on our strengths and keeping up with the pace of change," he wrote. "A recent survey of Directors in the UK showed that (only) 2 percent of UK Board Directors believe that the Internet poses a serious competitive threat. That cannot be right... ."

The prime minister also reiterated his desire to "make the UK the world's best environment for electronic commerce." One of the first of the Performance and Innovation Unit's action items was the creation of the Office of the e-Envoy.

Office of the e-Envoy Delivers the Digital Message

Making the UK the premier environment for online government and business is a daunting challenge. It demands strong political and managerial leadership that's able to drive its objectives and galvanize and coordinate the efforts of governments, trade unions, the business community, charitable institutions, consumer groups, and other major stakeholders.

To meet this challenge, The Office of the e-Envoy was established in September 1999. It has been headed up since January 2001 by Andrew Pinder, who has enjoyed a long, distinguished, and varied career as an IT director, a partner in a venture capital firm, a management consultant, and an entrepreneur. This turns out to be just the kind of background that's been needed to bring such divergent groups together on a project of this magnitude.

The OeE works under a simple but ambitious charter: to develop the UK as a world leader for electronic business; make all government services available online by 2005; and ensure that everyone who wants Internet access has it, within the same time frame. To accomplish these goals, the OeE is divided into four basic work areas that, taken together, represent a kind of OeE go-to-market plan:

• E-policy
  E-policy focuses on delivering the digital infrastructure for the new economy and transforming government to enable and improve online service delivery. The group also provides market development and legal and regulatory analysis in support of the e-Envoy's broader economic responsibilities; works with the private sector to develop technology, security, and authentication policies and services; and is closely involved in promoting online voting and political participation.
  
  
• Service Transformation
  The Service Transformation team plays a key role in the OeE's relationship with its internal government "customers" and is responsible for making sure all the services under the OeE framework are fully linked and seamless.
  
  
• E-delivery
  The e-delivery group is the implementation and operational arm of the OeE—it spearheads a variety of technology initiatives and is responsible for delivering the linked products and services to government agencies.
  
  
• E-communication
  The e-communication team heads up the UK online program and works to ensure a world-class Internet presence and excellence in all online government communications.

Bringing It All Together, Digitally

Despite the challenges such a far-reaching project presents, the OeE is bringing it in on time and on budget. In 2002 the office ordered an independent international benchmarking study to determine the UK e-economy's relative strength compared to that of other industrialized nations. Several factors were studied to help create an overall environmental index. When all the numbers were in, the study determined that the UK already had the No. 2 environment for e-commerce, behind only the United States.

This is due in no small part to the "UK online campaign," an OeE initiative that's designed to help the UK seize and maintain a leadership position in the knowledge economy. One measure of the campaign's success is found in the more than 8,000 UK online centers, providing free or inexpensive Internet access, that have cropped up in public libraries and other meeting spots.

Additionally, Scotland is creating Internet access points in shops and pubs across the country, six months ahead of schedule. And more than six million homes with Sky Digital service can use their television sets to access UK online services, including job postings, health services, travel advice, and much more. In August 2002, Britons visited www.ukonline.gov.uk, the campaign's e-government portal, 872,819 times, for everything from reading the news to filing for a passport.

At the same time, the OeE has also delivered one of the most advanced e-government infrastructures in the world. Called the Government Gateway, the infrastructure enables secure, authenticated transactions and linked government services over the Internet. Because it's built on open standards, it allows government agencies to "talk" to one another through the gateway and lays the groundwork for new government services to be incorporated easily over time. It's also resilient: The OeE estimates that the always-on gateway will soon handle many of the nearly six billion annual government transactions, with rock-solid security and single-sign-on capabilities.

This kind of success has not gone unnoticed. The team responsible for the OeE's Knowledge Network, a service enabling real-time knowledge sharing among government agencies, was among the Information Age 2002 Innovators of the Year. And the www.ukonline.gov.uk portal won a commendation at the 2002 Visionary Design Awards, for outstanding achievement in Web design for the visually impaired.

But the OeE isn't resting on its laurels. It's already focusing on longer-term goals: raising the awareness of online services' benefits, promoting affordable Internet access through further investment in public access points, getting schools better connected, and building Internet consumer confidence by improving security and enhancing the public's computer skills.

Most think the Office of the e-Envoy has come a long way in just a short time. But the OeE knows it's just getting started.