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.