Government sites show improvement, study concludes

Setting up portals for state and federal sites and better access to publications helped improve government Web services noticeably over the past year, a study released yesterday reported.The report, “State and Federal E-Government in the United States, 2001,” conducted by researchers at Brown University’s Taubman Center for Public Policy, looked at 1,813 state and federal sites and concluded that portals helped government sites make “excellent progress” on integrating Web service delivery. Although the report, at , slammed federal judiciary sites for not making more opinions available, it lauded a list of federal sites. Among them were those hosted by the Consumer Product Safety and Federal Communications commissions, Food and Drug Administration, IRS, Small Business Administration, and Agriculture, Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development departments.Portals improve government services by reducing the “tower of Babel” factor of navigation among organizations, according to the report, which sampled sites over the past two summers to gauge improvement.The report applauded portals for making it easier for users to surf government sites, but it criticized government for not taking a more commercial approach by letting users customize pages.