Brussels, 20/07/2000 (Agence Europe) - According to Erkki Liikanen, Commission responsible for information society, the public powers must be more an example of the use of new technologies and improve the quality of their services through these new means. During a speech made in Luxembourg on best practices in e-administration, he underlined that the first generation computing tools have been used too often by the public power for their internal use; they must concentrate more on the citizen. He announced that "the public service must become the driving force for a change in organisation and attitudes, both for the Commission as for the Member States."
The Commission will soon adopt a progress report of the "Green Paper" on the role of the public sector in information society. This document underlines that access to public information can, on the one hand, reduce the gap between citizens and administrations, and, on the other hand, improves competition in companies in general. At the present time, between 15 and 15% of information that travels in e-commerce is from the public sector. Future action by the European Union should go in the direction of stimulating the benchmarking, support projects through programmes such as that on "European digital content on global networks", support sector based initiatives (libraries, geographic information). Among the Commission's priorities is IDA (Interchange of Data between Administrations), a programme aimed at stimulating the exchange of information between Member States at a trans-European level, with the administrations, citizens and enterprises. IDA was adopted in the framework of the "on-line government", part of the eEurope initiative. It contains, among others, projects in the field of employment, the environment and technical regulations.