GAO sees insufficient e-gov cooperation

With money tight and pressure mounting to succeed, four key e-government programs could do a better job collaborating with their partner agencies, a General Accounting Office report said Wednesday.

GAO officials evaluated four e-gov initiatives — e-Payroll, Geospatial One-Stop, Integrated Acquisition Environment and Business Gateway — and found that each require more effort in order for their services to be delivered across government agencies.

All four initiatives have short deadlines to develop programs and competing priorities, the report said. "However, without effective collaboration on the tasks that remain to be completed, these initiatives may be at risk of not fully achieving their objectives or the broader goals of the President's management agenda," the GAO report said.

The programs require a high degree of collaboration, the report said. For example, e-Payroll, an Office of Personnel Management initiative to set governmentwide processing standards, and Integrated Acquisition Environment, a General Services Administration initiative to improve federal acquisition of goods and services, need high degrees of interorganizational cooperation to succeed.

Both Geospatial One-Stop, an Interior Department program that coordinates the collection of geospatial delivery, and Business Gateway, a Small Business Administration project to reduce paperwork for small businesses, depend on state and local cooperation.

In its report, GAO officials recommended more cross-agency collaboration, better outreach and increased efforts to build relationships to make e-government work. All four agencies agreed that more collaboration is needed to succeed and said they have been working on improvements.