Private sector must toe government line

Private sector companies will be forced to conform to emerging government data transfer standards if they want to make money from Prime Minister Tony Blair's e-government plans, warns one of the leading members of the working group on the initiative.

"Joined-up government is not just about public sector services: it's about joining up the private sector as well," said Simon Berlin, IT strategy lead officer for London Borough of Lambeth, speaking at the Content Management 2000 conference in London last week.

"I would argue we shouldn't pass people from government portals to the private sector unless those companies can offer a seamless experience. This will be a commercial incentive to the private sector to accept the government standards," he added.

The Prime Minister has committed to making all public services available on the internet by 2005, through its UK Online portal (www.ukonline.gov.uk).

The goal is to pass citizens between central and local authority portals to access all the services they require, as if they were using one integrated website. Many of these services are contracted out to private sector firms.

A set of standards is being defined for passing data and transactions between government and local authority websites. The government has published an XML-based 'interoperability framework' and is extending a metadata standard developed for libraries called Dublin Core, for classification of the information that has to be passed between systems.

"The government needs to avoid making decisions in smoky committee rooms," said Alexander Drobik, ebusiness research director at analyst Gartner.

"If it just defines a government standard, and gets it wrong, it could cause a lot of problems," he added. "Government needs to form a partnership with industry to sort this out. I'm sceptical that the right mechanisms are in place."

First published in Computing