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The report concludes e-government to date has largely failed to transform government service delivery as its original architects imagined it would. During the race to go online, public managers rarely stopped to consider such basic questions as who their customers were and what they wanted, impeding their ability to service those customers effectively and efficiently Customer-centred transformation goes well beyond automating Industrial Era business processes, the report says: it requires first stepping back to understand the end-to-end experience from the user's perspective and using those insights to improve the experience offered to customers.

"Over the past decade we've seen many governments invest significant time and attention trying to make government more citizen-centric," says Bill Eggers, global director for public sector research, Deloitte Services LP. "But these efforts have largely failed to produce their intended results because improvement initiatives are often approached one dimensionally with public dollars frequently chasing the latest fix du jour."

The report finds while many government agencies have invested heavily in state-of-the-art customer relationship management (CRM) technology to give them a single, integrated view of their customers and maintain a mutually beneficial dialogue with them, too many agencies left CRM to the IT group when the real issue is fundamentally rethinking the business model and culture of public services.

"The challenge extends beyond improving the way in which government services are delivered," the report says. "Restoring public confidence in government capabilities to cope effectively with the challenges of governance in the 21st century, such as global competition and an ageing population, requires using customer insights to transform the way public managers perform key government functions. That means a new way of approaching decision making — less guesswork, more reliance on facts. It means using deep customer insight to inform the design of big government initiatives to improve the odds of success. And it means adding new channel management capabilities to the public sector workforce, hitherto nonexistent in government, to improve the efficiency of service delivery without diminishing accessibility.

"While today's economic climate may not strike most government leaders as particularly ripe for reform, the reality is that customer-centred transformation can produce substantial cost savings. As counterintuitive as it may seem, organizations trying to cope with what could turn out to be some of the worst years in recent memory for government finances can reduce their costs without negatively affecting the level of service they offer their customers," the report says.