The Republic has slipped one place and is now ranked 11th out of 22 states in terms of the maturity and scope of public services available on the internet, a new international survey shows.
A slowdown in the speed of implementation of some key e-government initiatives caused the Republic to slip one place, but steady progress is being made, concludes the report by the management consultancy Accenture.
E-government leadership: engaging the customer says the slowdown in the Government's progress reflects a refocusing of its agenda on the internal structural changes required to make e-government work.
It has also recently adopted a more rigorous approach to defining the business case for e-government.
The Republic is ranked behind some of its key European competitors such as Germany, Britain and Denmark.
However, it is ranked ahead of France, the Netherlands and Spain. Canada was ranked top of the survey, with an overall maturity score of 71 per cent while South Africa was ranked bottom of the 22-nation survey with just 13 per cent.
This overall service maturity score reflects the Government's progress on creating an online presence, basic service capabilities, service availability, mature delivery and service transformation for public services online.
The maturity score awarded to the Republic increased 10 percentage points over last year to 48.6 per cent.
This improvement reflected the refinement and expansion of existing services such as Revenue Online and An Post.
It also reflected the introduction of new services such as online driving test applications and a new Web ticket purchase system from the national bus service, it says.
Some 136 of the 149 services that are the responsibility of national agencies are implemented to some level for e-government.
Online transactions are possible for 22 of these services.
The report notes the implementation of the Government's planned public services broker has been delayed and is not expected to start development work until later this year.
This broker will form the basic platform upon which the public will interact with Government, using personal public service numbers as a unique identifier.
The key challenge for the year ahead - in light of the slowdown in the implementation of the Irish e-government programme - will be to focus on priorities and continue to target services that deliver most value for the public, the report concludes.
A theme identified by the report across all governments was a move towards maximising value from online investments through greater efficiency.
It also highlights a growing priority given to increasing the take-up of e-government. It concludes efficiency and cost savings will not be delivered if there is low usage.
