E-Government

E-Government is becoming another big part of today's world, it offers many different services that allow people to find information they need or want and take part in things to help to make their Government better and in a whole, make their community better. In this blog, I am going to explain the features of E-Government and why it is good.

E-Petitions

An e-petition is a petition set up on your local council website for members of the community to easily and quickly look through the current petitions and sign them if they agree with them. This allows petitions to be more easily accessed by a much wider audience than ever before, anybody that lives, works or studies in the Kent area can now view and sign these petitions to their own accord.

I personally have signed a few petitions on these sites, one petition that I signed really took off, and it was a petition to do with bus travel for 16-19 year olds allowing them to pay a reduced one off charge in return for a years worth of travel in and around the Kent area, 12686 people signed this petition and it was so popular, due to the importance of the subject, that it was taken to a full council debate in which a conclusion was made to trial the pass in three areas and depending on the success of the trials the pass will them be available for everyone in Kent between the ages of 16-20.

This shows how important petitions are and shows the effect it can have, this is why the government have made it much easier for people to sign petitions online and in turn saving the government a lot of time and money as they do not have to register all of the petition slips, so by the government creating a website that offers such a service as the petitions it generally helps everyone in the community including employees of the government.

NHS Direct

NHS Direct is an online medical service that offers many different features that may offer help to save you the time and effort of getting your self checked up at a hospital or your local GP. It was introduced to try and solve waiting times at GP clinics and especially in hospitals as the average waiting time at a hospital is well over 3 hours on a weekend.

The service offers a free 24 hour helpline that residents of the UK can call any day of the week, any time of the year to help find out whether their illness or injury is bad enough for them to go into hospital or if they can stay at home and treat themselves with help and advice from the helpline.

How the online service works is it has questionnaires in which people answer interactive questions followed by more questions depending on your answers to the previous questions. Once you have answered these series of questions you will then be told some advice on what to do next and in serious cases you will be told to get yourself straight to the hospital.

The obvious advantages to this service is that by people checking their symptoms online, they may not have to go to hospital therefore cutting down on the waiting times, this can also be an advantage to the doctors and nurses as they then do not have to feel rushed when seeing patients as they have less patients to see so the ones that they are seeing can give have a thorough check to make sure they haven’t missed anything.

But there are obvious disadvantages too, this being that if a patient is checking their symptoms through the interactive questionnaire on the website, they could incorrectly answer one of the questions or click the wrong button therefore giving the client the wrong outcome, meaning that people could end up going to the hospital that do not need to or visa versa.

Taxing

With everything in the modern world being done through the Internet, taxing is another thing to now be being done through online services. There are many types of tax that you are now able to pay for online such as car tax, you can also claim your tax repayment and complete your self-assessment tax return.

Some websites also offer information on whether people would be entitled to benefits, what ever the benefits are, as you may already know there are many benefits that can be offered to people who may not be able to work or are looking for a job.

The advantages to websites that offer this services are that it makes it easier for people to pay taxes and that it can save people a lot of time by giving out a lot of information on the website. The disadvantages are that it could be difficult for some people to understand where they find the information and generally navigating their way around the page and from this they may waste time trying to find something and not actually getting an answer.

Statistics

There are some sites on the World Wide Web that offer services that show statistics concerning your local government and community whether it be the local crime rating in the area or to check the weather report for your area. There is one website, www.police.uk, that provides you with helpful information about crime and policing in your area, all it requires you to do is enter your address, postcode or place name. Once you have searched you area it will show what type of crime in was and where exactly it was in the area, this is a great example of e-government as it is a very advanced service.

The advantages to this service are that it is a very quick, easy and up to date way of finding out information, it is a massive advantage to find out crime rates in a certain area as if someone is thinking of moving house they may want to find out such information to make sure the place they may be moving to is safe for them and has the community that they want to live in.

The disadvantages to this are that websites may be inaccurate therefore giving people the wrong impression of an area; it also can make people find out things that maybe they do not want to know.

In my opinion I think that offering statistics like this on the Internet is a very clever way of giving people information as it is very easy to get hold of and generally very easy to interpret.