A reader of last week's column on the rise of electronic government services gently pointed out the deficiencies of the World Markets Research Centre (WMRC) study I quoted from when discussing how slow government worldwide have been in putting citizen services on the Internet.

The reader, who described himself as an e-government analyst, agreed that while citizen services over the Internet is still in its infancy, the study was too flawed to be useful.

"One cannot be sure how advanced a country is in terms of e-government without first assessing the actual depth of e-government services," the reader stated in an e-mail to me.

"Once you've correctly measured the depth of services, a researcher should then measure how much technology is used in the back offices of government departments or in interactions between government departments. The report by WMRC does none of these.' The Gardner Group was even harsher in its criticism of the study. In an article entitled "E-Government Ranking Survey Is Meaningless", Gardner analysts said WMRC and Brown University (which conducted the survey) neglected too many fundamental factors and therefore inappropriately assessed e-government progress in different countries.

Gardner stated the study did not take into account the availability and actual use of the information technology and communication infrastructure, the way in which the country is organised (i.e., federal vs. centralised), the regulatory and political framework, the actual needs of constituents, the role of intermediaries, and the overall efficiency of government process and how oriented they are to constituents.

I agree with most of the criticism, but disagree that the study was useless.

I believe the report was useful in its breadth of coverage, its emphasis on user-friendly features, and its advice to governments on how to build services on the Internet.

The WMRC study, done by researchers at Brown University, looked at Web pages from a "citizen perspective" by assessing 2,300 Web sites according to 28 features deemed important for citizens, including areas such as privacy and security, access for disabled people, the number of available services, search capability, and support for multiple languages.

The researchers then ranked 196 central governments' Internet sites according to their criteria. The US, Taiwan, Australia, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Israel, Singapore, Germany and Finland lead the way in providing government services and information over the Internet, but smaller countries such as St. Kitts (13) and the Bahamas (15) also placed in the top 20 in the survey. St. Lucia placed 24th, and the Dominican Republic at 38.

Unfortunately Bermuda and some other UK offshore territories were not rated in the survey.

What interests me about this study is first, the researchers attempted a truly comprehensive assessment of e-government. For the first time in any study that I have so far seen, they included the Caribbean and other smaller nations of the world. A Taylor Nelson Sofres study this summer of e-government only ranked 27 of the world's major countries (except China), and found Norway had the highest level of use of e-government services, with 53 percent of the population logging on over the 12 months to September 2001.

Consulting firm Accenture also released a report ranking e-governments, but only covered 22 countries online. The study, done in a similar manner to the WMRC's, gives the highest marks to Canada, Singapore and the US.

The two other studies are narrow and ignore the great strides, and perhaps even usefulness of the sites, in many of the rest of the world that provide much over the Internet on much smaller budgets.

As the WMRC's study noted, many of the smaller countries are targeting their priorities according to their economies. So sites promoting tourism, online resources for international businesses, and exporters prevail, rather than being particularly directed at the general public. Anguilla and St. Lucia for example both have online company registries for attracting international businesses.

As part of my daytime job, I regularly tap into a wide range of government sites at 30 offshore financial centres, plus the US, the UK, and the European Union every month, and I am impressed with the advances being made over the past year in putting timely and key information on the Internet.

I was puzzled about the high ranking of St. Kitts, as its Internet site, while more comprehensive than Bermuda's efforts, is not as good as St. Lucia 's, which has Pinnacle, an online companies' registry built with development money from the UK. I was also puzzled, and as Gardner pointed out, that contrary to common wisdom, Singapore ranked only eighth.

An assessment of Hong Kong's fantastic efforts is also missing, perhaps because the researchers incorporated the territory into China's ranking.

That's why I didn't emphasise the rankings, but concentrated on the advice.

A closer look at the rankings shows why Singapore's online services were knocked down. Singapore ranked high on the amount of publications and information online (getting a 95 percent mark), for the amount of online services (47 percent mark), and for databases (53 percent), but scored low for lack of a privacy policy (5percent), a security policy (0), and for lack of handicap access (0).

While I think Singapore's efforts are lacking, perhaps the study's assessment should have been more judicious in giving ranking weights to the various criteria, rather than seemingly ranking them equally. But remember the study found all government efforts so far severely lacking in citizen-friendly features. Only the US, Taiwan and Australia had scores above 50 percent, with the US achieving only 57 percent.

Government sites fail to follow the basics of providing navigation and design intended to help their citizens, the Brown University researchers found. Many sites did not have phone numbers for government agencies or have not been updated for several years. Only one-third of government websites have search engines to help citizens ferret out information. The general conclusions mirror what I find in my continual surfing of government sites.

There is a lot that's bad out there, but there are some very good advances being made by the ignored jurisdictions of the world, when assessed in the context of their conditions. The criteria chosen by the researchers, what are labelled "usability" features, should be kept in mind by every government when building and maintaining their sites. It's a learning curve which Bermuda is just starting to approach.