KEY POINTS:
The next big development in e-government should make the iPod generation feel at home. Called igovt, it's a service that will allow us to log on to government websites and securely do all manner of transactions.
It's the cyberspace equivalent of presenting a birth certificate, passport or other heavyweight document to verify that you are indeed who you say you are. The service hasn't been built yet, but has already reaped an international award for the State Services Commission team that has spent years working on it.
"We've proved we can build a secure, privacy-friendly identity verification service," says Laurence Millar, head of the SSC's e-government unit. "It's intended to underpin identity verification for all online government services."
That's good enough for the Liberty Alliance, a group formed seven years ago to promote open standards for federated identity management, which last year saw fit to give the SSC one of four IDDY (Identity Deployment of the Year) awards.
IDDYs are dished out to organisations that create identity-based applications using the alliance's tools and guidelines.
The key word in what the alliance stands for is "federated". As applied to identity management, it means a system that combines information about an individual across multiple IT systems.
Such a system - and igovt will be one - will verify identity to a range of stringencies, from highly secure to less secure, depending on the sensitivity of the service it's being used for.
Having proved the concept, the next stage - a month or so away - is to contract someone to build it. The system is then intended to be piloted next year.
The government's intention is that igovt will be used as an alternative to, not a replacement for, paper-based checking.
"The alternative is doing it in a non-online fashion, requiring you to send in a passport or birth certificate or two utility bills or whatever, whereas this happens instantaneously to passport-quality standards," Millar says.
One use of the system might be for e-voting in general or local elections.
In terms of New Zealand's progress at getting government online, a United Nations report at the start of the year graded our "e-readiness" as having slipped. We're now 18th in the UN rankings, down from 13th in 2005.
We're not the only country going down: 2005's leader, the US, is fourth, and Australia has gone from sixth to eighth.
Sweden, Denmark and Norway occupy the first three spots.
The results might have been different had the government's new shopfront, newzealand.govt.nz, launched a month ago, been open in time for the UN report. The site incorporates Google-like search functionality and other state-of-the-art web 2.0 features, Millar says.
Like many other sites, it helps visitors cut corners by featuring a "cloud" of popular search terms that changes according to what's hot at that moment. Given that more than half the site's visitors come from overseas, it's probably not surprising that "citizenship" and "immigration" loom large.
By Millar's assessment, the country is making good e-government progress, having "pretty much" transferred government services to the web. The next stage is greater agency integration. "You can do most things online now but you can't yet do them in a joined-up way. So the ability to do that is one of the major themes."
Some examples have been around for a number of years. Through links between the Companies Office and IRD systems, it has been possible for someone forming a company to at the same time obtain an IRD number for the new entity.
The extension of that is to merge, rather than link, the systems of agencies with a role in a particular transaction. In the education sector, work of that sort is being done to integrate communications between teaching institutions and the parts of government they deal with.
The same is going on in the health, justice and border control sectors.
Those developments are aimed at meeting the SSC's June 2010 goal of using technology to transform the operations of government "to provide user-centred information and services".
Another aspiration of e-government is to strengthen democracy. A "shining light" on that front is legislation.govt.nz, which provides public access to all acts, bills and regulations as they pass through the legislative assembly line. It went live in January - five years late.
For all its challenges, Millar says it's a valuable advance in opening up the democratic process to the public.
Perhaps Gen-iPod should be the judge of that.
Who's there?
The Identity Verification Service aims to give people a way of identifying themselves online, so they can use government services - renewing a passport, or applying for a student loan, for example.
Users would have to join first, by providing proof of identity.
Each user's details would then be recorded electronically, and they would be issued with a username, password and what the Department of Internal Affairs calls a "token" - a device that provides further security.
The department is promising the system won't be mandatory, and won't replace paper-based methods of proving who you are.
Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland-based technology journalist
