The approach to e-government in Germany has been to pursue city wide, open source solutions.

Maybe this is part of the necessary solution in the UK - for the smaller local authorities, they need to work in partnerships in order to maximise the economies of scale and create the necessary critical mass of technical skills. In terms of ´efficiencies´ (whatever that means) it would be much more efficient to develop central applications which each authority could access, rather than have each local authority develop their own. If this was done using open source solutions, then a central team of people could run the whole lot - a bit like the admin for SuperJanet IV.

At a recent Microsoft conference I went to, I was struck by how anxious the Microsoft sales managers from Germany were about the development of open source. At least one person said that the problem was one of ´politicians pursuing these agendas without understanding the full implications´ (of what, one wonders?).