Interesting story today from the government’s Digital Inclusion Task Force, which is looking to get everyone in the UK online by 2012. The primary driver for this seems to be economic, predicting that doing so would save the government £1bn annually.
All well and good, there are clearly real benefits to be found from moving more services online where appropriate.
But one thing that’s not that clear at the moment is the way they intend to do this. The website for the project isn’t actually live at the time of writing, unfortunate on the day it’s being launched to the media, but the article in the Guardian seems to suggest the drive will be to provide people with computers and skills in order to get the on the web.
It will be interesting to see if this works, as very often the problem isn’t in the technology (a great many people can access the internet from libraries and internet cafes now of course) but in the motivation to get online. People have to see the clear benefits of doing things online, and see real outcomes from it.
Tied in with this is the content and presentation of the online services. As our local government e-consultation audit heads off to the printers, it’s interesting to reflect on the difficulty we had finding even basic services on some local authority websites, or understanding what was being offered once we did find what we were looking for.
Providing people with computers and promoting broadband rollout is all well and good, but it could well be a costlier option than looking at the service that’s being offered through the web and thinking ‘would I want to use this myself?’. Given the project is keen to promote grass roots word of mouth marketing for web services too, the question should also be ‘would i encourage others to use this service too?’.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this project. We’ll keep you posted.
