Critics may contend the initiatives were long overdue. But for many others, it was a time when a new vision for improving the business of government—and a practical way to achieve it—were gaining momentum.

That vision—to use the Internet and other information technologies to better serve the public and advance the work between agencies and suppliers—unleashed a wave of productivity improvements. For example:

Grants.gov, in just 13 months (ending this past July) saw the number of application packages posted online expand eightfold, while the volume of applications received from grantees multiplied 15-fold.

Or take the old Web site for the Office of Personnel Management. It used to confound, more than attract, the 20,000 visitors that came to the site each day. Today, Recruitment One Stop pulls in an average of 300,000 visitors per day looking for work across government.

Meanwhile, OPM officials estimate that E-Payroll, by vastly reducing the number of redundant payroll systems, will save the government more than $1 billion over 10 years.

Perhaps farther-reaching, as the story beginning on Page 12 suggests, is the degree of collaboration that the E-Gov initiatives have engendered—not only among agencies, but also among financial, acquisition and human capital managers within agencies.

But some formidable challenges now lie ahead suggesting that the e-government revolution is reaching a crossroad.

Foremost among them is how to sustain support for e-government. From the beginning, e-government was always about more than just the technology. It was about delivering government services from the citizen’s point of view; defining common standards for common business practices across government; reducing duplicative work and redundant systems; and building a framework to support a broader enterprise-wide approach to government.

Yet too often, the discussion surrounding e-government has gotten lost in the language of technology.

Broader support will be especially important as agencies move beyond the adoption phase of e-government. The time has come to bite the bullet and abandon many legacy systems that these new initiatives were de- signed to replace.

Perhaps the greatest challenge, though, is the growing concern—and the risk of waning support—within Congress over the funding of e-gov initiatives. While agencies have effectively “passed the hat” to fund these programs, the idea that appropriations may be flowing between agencies has Congress feeling uneasy.

That’s why if e-government transformation is to be realized, it will take more government leaders to step up and demonstrate its value to Congress. It will also take promoting a better funding mechanism to support common cross-agency functions, such as a transparent pay-for-service fee arrangement that agencies can work with.

That means re-energizing efforts to persuade more government leaders—especially those on the Hill—to embrace the “e” in e-government to mean effective enterprise-wide operations rather than electronic systems.