Who's in charge of the UK's online strategy?

IN 1997 the incoming Labour government was urged to introduce a cabinet-level eminister. It resisted the pressure, choosing instead to create three new offices to oversee the UK's online strategy: the Office of the eminister, Office of the eEnvoy and the Office of Government Commerce (OGC).

Douglas Alexander, eminister (or ecommerce minister) works at the DTI. The job helped the career of its first holder, Patricia Hewitt; she now heads the DTI, although confusingly, she has retained the 'eminister' title as part of her Cabinet responsibilities.

After a slow start, Alexander has worked hard on pushing adoption of broadband. His status as one of the most respected young Labour MPs may well attract some much-needed attention to the IT cause.

The position of eEnvoy, the civil servant responsible for introducing electronic government, is also on its second incumbent. Alex Allan took the job in September 1999, only to resign a year later. His successor, Andrew Pinder, recently caused a rumpus when he told Computing at a Microsoft conference that IT led to redundancy for a fifth of civil servants. He has been trying to ease the tension since.

The OGC was set up in April 2000. Chief executive Peter Gershon was appointed after being called in as chief operating officer at BAE to review government procurement. Responsible for buying IT services and managing large technology projects, the OGC has established some long-overdue processes, such as gateway reviews of IT projects, designed to nip potential failures in the bud.

It is too early to assess the OGC's overall success, but it has already made big improvements in using the government's consolidated buying power to negotiate better contracts. In its first year, the organisation claimed a £30m saving on a Vodafone contract, and last December negotiated a sophisticated office productivity software deal with Microsoft, resulting in licensing savings of £100m over three years.

Perhaps surprisingly, the three offices seem to have clashed very little. There are formal links: the eminister and eEnvoy are jointly responsible for a monthly report to the Prime Minister on the development of the UK's online strategy.

The OGC has scored the biggest successes so far, perhaps because there was a lot of slack in the area of IT procurement. The chief role of the eminister and eEnvoy has been to give private and public technology staff respectively a prominent point of contact and a voice within government.