In its study, At the Dawn of E-Government: The Citizen as Customer, published last June, Deloitte Consulting defines six stages of e-government.
Stage One:
Information publishing/dissemination. Individual government departments set up their own Web sites that provide information about them, the region, the range of services available and contacts for further assistance.
Stage Two:
Of'ficial two-way transactions. With the help of legally valid digital signatures and secure Web sites, customers are able to submit personal information to and conduct monetary transactions with individual departments.
Stage Three:
Multi-purpose portals. At this point, customer-centric governments make a big breakthrough in service delivery. A portal allows customers to use a single point of entry to send and receive information and to process monetary transactions across multiple departments.
Stage Four:
Portal personalisation. In this stage, government puts even more power into customers' hands by allowing them to customise portals with their desired features.
Stage Five:
Clustering of common services. As customers now view once disparate services as a unified package through the portal, their perception of departments as distinct entities will begin to blur.
Stage Six:
Full integration and enterprise transformation. At this stage, old walls defining silos of services have been torn down and technology is integrated across the new enterprise to bridge the shortened gap between the front and back office. In some countries, new departments will have formed from the remains of predecessors. Others will have the same names but will look nothing like their former selves.
According to Mike Lisle-Williams, e-government principal with Deloitte Consulting's public sector practice, on a government-by-government basis, Australia is at least at stage two, going on stage three. However, he says that Australia's three levels of government are a complication not found in Hong Kong or Singapore, for example, both of which he believes have effectively reached stage four. He also thinks Australia lags behind some US states.
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