This is the year of electronic government. In January, over a million people submitted their tax returns electronically using the Inland Revenue website. Last month’s Budget was available on digital TV. This April, 40,000 UK learner drivers will book their driving test on the web.

By the end of the year, the government hopes to reach its target of having the majority of our public services available online. But is the electronic reproduction of print-based communications really the best a government can do to serve the needs of its citizens? If print and information and communication technologies (ICTs) are so different, why are we trying to simply replace one with the other?

Research has shown that those who develop online services go through three phases: a focus on the technology itself (the ‘bells and whistles’ approach); an emphasis on content provision (the reproduction of print materials, or unread newsfeeds); and an eventual focus on interaction and the people who use the technology for a particular purpose.

Until now, the UK e-government services that are available on the web portal Directgov have focused on content provision and the reproduction of print-based services on the web. We can renew our passports or report benefit fraud using the internet. So far so good. But what if we want to do something that has not been done before?

We ought to want to do this. ICTs offer so much more than print; they can provide services that have a degree of immediacy, network integration and personalisation that is not possible using print alone. By exploiting these characteristics, we could create e-services which, for example, benefit the recently bereaved so that the registration of a death automatically forbids new junk mail, or allows multiple government agencies to be informed by a single communication.

Such services are already a reality in the Netherlands, Finland and Iceland, where child benefit payments are triggered by birth registration. Instead of reproducing the forms associated with a single service, these e-government provisions mediate information exchange across services and rethink service provisions with the needs of citizens in mind.

To stimulate innovation in this area, the Cabinet Office is asking service developers to begin not by replicating existing services, but by thinking of the needs of customers. With this user-centric approach, Ordnance Survey is creating ‘land-form profile plus’, a geographical database which will allow citizens and businesses to discover if individual properties are at risk of flooding.

 Similarly, the National History Museum has created the ‘plants postcode database’, a tool to help gardeners identify the plants that are indigenous to a particular region, with the aim of encouraging local wildlife. Both of these resources offer new possibilities for citizens to positively influence their lives and their environment.

By starting with the needs of the user – not as a transacting customer, but as a citizen with both rights and responsibilities in relation to multiple life events and government agencies – we can use the web, and other technologies, to do things that have not been possible before. In other words, we can bring innovation to the worlds of government and citizenship.