And that’s all before you get to the biggest niggling detail of them all: government.

“If you wanted to open up a small business here in Nova Scotia—say a little gas station and convenience store combo—there would probably be between eight and 12 different licences and permits you’d need to get before you could serve your first customer,” said Brenda Morse, project director of the Nova Scotia Business Registry.

Morse wants to change that, not by lowering the number of permits Nova Scotia entrepreneurs need, but by making those permits easier to obtain and renew. And, like a growing breed of government bureaucrats who believe in putting the customer (citizen) first, she’s doing it with the Internet.

“Right now, with our Web site,we can meet the needs of 32 per cent of businesses in this province,” she said, explaining that very small businesses that don’t need to register with, for example, the Worker’s Compensation Board, can now take care of most of their permits and licences online.

“By 2005, we want to have that up to 80 per cent. The easier it is to deal with government and conduct your business here, the more likely businesses are to locate here.”

Internet dreams It was political scientists who first declared the Internet would revolutionize the political world. The ’net, they said, would allow every citizen to voice an opinion about laws and policies. And no longer would ballot boxes and church halls be required; with Internet voting, an election or a referendum could, theoretically, be held every day.

Of course, security and computer stability issues slowed those runaway dreams. There have been attempts at Internet voting: the 2000 Democratic convention which selected Al Gore employed a small e-voting project; the U.K. recently held some municipal council elections online; and here in Canada, the NDP is about to get into the act by allowing its members to vote for Alexa McDonough’s replacement when the party holds its leadership convention in late January.

But voting is such a profoundly important act that even the appearance of corruption or irregularity calls an election’s outcome into question. That leaves most people wary of trusting a technology that, to be frank, hasn’t yet earned a reputation for rock-solid security or stability. Even senior NDP staffers admit publicly that the prospect of as many as 80,000 party members voting online is keeping them up at night.

“It’s a monster. These things are bound to blow up,” said NDP director of communications Wayne Harding. “We spend a lot of time trying to get our message across in the news media. But if there’s one little hitch with this (online vote) that’s what’s going to be the front-page news.”

E-commerce realities But while the political scientists have been steadily scaling back their Internet expectations, government bureaucrats and managers have been awakening to revolutionary possibilities of their own.

Taking their cue from Indigo, Futureshop and Mbanx, the people who run government are realizing that the ’net can profoundly change the way citizens deal with various public departments and ministries.

Not unlike the Nova Scotia entrepreneur who—until recently—had to visit upwards of a dozen government offices just to acquire the permits needed to get a business off the ground, most Canadians have to deal with governments on a variety of fronts: paying property taxes to their municipality, renewing a provincial health card, paying income taxes to the feds, etc.

It all added up to so much personal information spread out among so many different departments and agencies that it was virtually unthinkable for governments to offer anything approaching one-stop shopping.

The Internet is changing that.

Alberta, like Nova Scotia and many other provinces, is rushing to serve its citizens over the ’net. Already, you can pay a parking ticket or renew a dog licence through the province’s Web site, Service Alberta. If you’re getting married, there’s a page that walks you step-by-step through all the vital stats and marriage certificate hoops.

“We’re trying to bring as many different government departments into this as we can.We’re trying to be citizencentric,” said Wilma Haas, managing director of Service Alberta. “We’re trying to encourage [government departments] to take a broader focus at what our citizens wanted and needed. I can’t say that we’ve totally licked that one, but we’ve come a long way.”

Haas isn’t the only one who thinks so. For three years running, the management consulting firm Accenture has named Canada’s governments the most successful online governments in the world. The firm said our governments— or their online managers, at least—work hard at “customer-relationship management: treating citizens and businesses like customers by tailoring services to their needs rather than the needs of the agency delivering them.”

Recognized success Being treated more like customers is one of the boons of online service. Another is that it may lower the cost of government.

In fact, proponents believe it won’t be long before the start-up costs have been absorbed and the citizencentric Web sites begin saving governments money.

The math is simple: if only half as many people are renewing their health cards in person, only half of the existing physical facilities are required. In one study reported by the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration, after Arizona put its services online, the average time it took to register a car fell from 45 minutes to three, and the cost to the state plummeted from US$6.60 per vehicle to US$1.60.

But Haas pointed out that cost savings aren’t at the heart of initiatives like those in Alberta. The goal is to serve citizens. And she believes that the sky is the limit.

“Once citizens and business start becoming more familiar with what government actually does, we’re finding the demand actually starts increasing,” she said.

“When you make it easier for citizens to access you, the demand for services also goes up.”

W e b g o v e r n m e n t
Accenture http://www.accenture.com
N.S. Business Registry http://www.gov.ns.ca
Service Alberta http://www.servicealberta.ca
NDP http://www.ndp.ca