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19 November 2002
17:10 Closing address
Andrew Pinder, e-Envoy
Thank
you very much.
Well,
it’s been a long day and I hope that you have had a good day.
It’s certainly been a good day for me. It’s not often that
you get a cast of such eminent people, not just my colleagues
from the other countries here but also the ministers and other
serious players from the industry that you’ve had in front
of you today. I hope
that that’s given you good value for your money and that you
have enjoyed it.
Clearly
a day like this doesn’t get put together without quite a lot
of work, an enormous amount of work and I would just like
to take one moment to thank the people who have contributed
to that in my team and elsewhere.
Can
I first of all thank some key players in my team and I hope
that at least some of them are standing at the back of the
room and I’d like you to give them a round of applause and
that’s Harry, Louise, Sheila and John who have actually put
this team together. Alastair and his crew. There’s been lots
of other people from my organisation, from DTI, from ONS and
from other countries that have contributed to this and we
are enormously grateful. It wouldn’t have happened them so
thank you very much indeed.
Jeremy
– thank you also for all your efforts today. We were disappointed
about your dress this morning but it’s grown on us during
the day and you can stay like that. Thank you very much for
all your efforts and for prodding these panel discussions
into life. It is a difficult task as we all know and we are
grateful for that.
We
have had a very UK focussed
day today and I am conscious of that. It’s interesting that
actually our problems are just the same as everyone else’s
with varying different degrees. We are better in some things,
worse at other things, but the same agenda is around through
all these countries. It’s not just the G7 and Sweden and Australia.
It’s all the other countries I have seen recently where clearly
the same sorts of issues are being faced and therefore I apologise
for the UK focus,
but actually let’s just take that as illustrative. Things are happening in lots of other countries
as you’ve just been hearing.
One
thing I need to remind my boss about is that his French counterpart
or rather President Chirac was on Friday taking part in internal
elections for his political party and President Chirac cast
a vote electronically and I will be having a word with Tony
about just that.
We
have got a lot of things to do over the next few years. Clearly,
the agenda has been set by my political masters, the Prime
Minister’s speech was very challenging to everyone in this
audience and to the whole of British society, the whole of
British industry, but in particular to government and my organisation. We will be working hard to trying to push that agenda
forward.
I
have been listening to the lessons today from other countries
quite clearly. In the
area where we are probably weakest, which is providing government
services online, we have to learn lessons from other people.
And those lessons from other people have be around greater
customer focus, getting rid of the clutter of the thousand
of websites that we have, making navigation easier, building
services around the customer and focussing things, and that
is what we will go and do.
And
that’s a very useful lesson to learn. And it’s a lesson we
will carry on learning tomorrow because one of the things
we are doing tomorrow is the e-envoys and associated colleagues
will be getting into the DTI Conference Centre in closed session.
We will be spending the day working on the benchmarking report
and learning from each other about what we’ve done well, what
didn’t work for us and what did work for us and trying to
develop for each of us, a set of policies that will be useful
for going forward.
Because
one thing I do want to emphasise is that this is not, in many
respects, a competition. I am too much of a football fan to
realise that you can always stay at the top. You can’t. One
year it’s Manchester United at the top of the premier league,
the next year it’s Liverpool, the next year it’s Arsenal and
these numbers change around all the time. What matters is
that you play a good quality game, that the skills are all
there, that you field a good team and that’s what all of us
are trying to do.
So
we’ve all got to try and learn lessons from each other and
we are all going to develop our ideas. We’re going to try
to adapt them for the different countries because there are
differences in cultures and in laws in different societies,
that make things not easily transferable. But it’s something
we have got to go and do.
Equally,
British industry has got to go and do that as well. The Prime
Minister was making the point today that we’ve got to do something
about our productivity generally. Productivity in British
industry can be improved. There’s massive investment in technology. We
need to use that technology properly.
A
lesson we need to learn also in Government. Government needs
to improve its productivity. It needs to improve the way it
delivers IT, needs to improve the way it uses IT and that
is something we are all of us determined to work on.
Still,
in wrapping up, thank you very much for spending the whole
day with us. We hope that you’ve enjoyed it. It’s been a good day for us. A very tiring day. We’re grateful for all the help we’ve received. We’re
grateful for your unremitting attention and your concentration.
Thank
you very much indeed.
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