E-government gets a broad strokes treatment from the Economist in a special report:  The road to e-democracy. This from the  leader:

“… But shame and beauty contests are still weak forces in the public sector. Failure in bureaucracy means not bankruptcy but writing self-justifying memos, and at worst a transfer elsewhere. Bureaucrats plead that just a bit more time and money will fix the clunky monsters they have created …

That reflects another problem. In the private sector, tight budgets for information technology spark innovation. But bureaucrats are suckers for overpriced, overpromised and overengineered systems. The contrast is all the sharper given some of the successes shown by those using open-source software: the District of Columbia, for example, has junked its servers and proprietary software in favour of the standard package of applications offered and hosted by Google …”

Well, there are plenty of reasons why a government shouldn’t simply transfer all of its IT needs to one supplier - especially one as demonized as Google - but at least D.C. is trying.