Electronic Government

In accordance with the President's management agenda, the Office of Management and Budget has sponsored initiatives to promote expansion of electronic government--the use of information technology, particularly Web-based Internet applications, to enhance government services. Each initiative demands a high degree of collaboration among organizations. For four of these initiatives, GAO was asked to determine, among other things, their implementation progress and the extent of collaboration among agencies and other parties involved.

All four of the e-government initiatives that GAO reviewed have made progress in meeting the objectives and milestones of their early phases. Two of the initiatives have established Web portals--www.geodata.gov for the Geospatial One-Stop initiative and www.BusinessLaw.gov for the Business Gateway. The projects face additional challenging tasks, such as e-Payroll's objective of establishing governmentwide payroll processing standards and Geospatial One-Stop's goal of compiling a comprehensive inventory of geospatial data holdings. All four initiatives have taken steps to promote collaboration with their partner agencies, but none has been fully effective in involving all important stakeholders. For example, for the e-Payroll initiative, the Office of Personnel Management has taken steps to promote close collaboration with its four designated e-Payroll providers, but has not addressed the concerns of a key stakeholder that will be required to make changes to its payroll processes and policies. For Geospatial One-Stop, Interior has established a board of directors with broad representation, but has not taken steps to ensure that key stakeholders at the state and local levels are involved in the initiative. For the Integrated Acquisition Environment initiative, the General Services Administration is using a variety of tools to promote collaboration, but has not involved partner agencies' chief financial officers (CFOs). Finally, for the Business Gateway, the Small Business Administration has not taken key steps to facilitate effective collaboration with its partners and stakeholders, such as establishing a collaborative decision-making process and reaching formal agreements on partner roles and responsibilities. All four initiatives have faced short time frames to accomplish their major tasks, so that competing priorities have sometimes hindered full collaboration. However, without effective collaboration on the tasks that remain to be completed, these initiatives may be at risk of not fully achieving their objectives or the broader goals of the President's management agenda.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

Director: Team: Phone: