The UK Government Gateway, launched in January, was demonstrated in Seattle to an audience of 400 government officials from 80 countries to show how citizens and businesses can interact with government over the Internet. The demonstration was presented by e-Envoy Andrew Pinder, and Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and chairman.Electronic transactions from the Inland Revenue, HM Customs and Excise and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food will begin to arrive at the Gateway during April. Other organizations planning to put services into the Gateway in the near future include the Department of Social Security, Department of Trade and Industry, the Northern Ireland and Scottish Executives and the Welsh Assembly. The Gateway will be rolled out through about 200 central government departments and agencies and 482 local government institutions over the next five years in the drive to have all of the government online by 2005.

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Public sector leadership is moving towards crisis and prompt action is needed stop the drift. This is the conclusion of a report by the Cabinet Office’s Performance and Innovation Unit. The problem is not a decline in the quality of leadership, but a slowness to respond to the changing world. Leaders in the 21st century are facing demands to modernise public services and orient them more closely to the needs and wishes of customers. There are also higher expectations on the part of the general public, who expect public services to keep up with private ones. Other radical changes include increased opportunities, and requirements, for partnerships both across the public sector and with private and voluntary organizations and pressures to harness new technology and deliver government services electronically.Welcoming the report, Prime Minister Tony Blair called for action to strengthen and support leadership across the whole public sector.

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Noordegraaf MThe International Journal of Public Sector Management, (UK), 2000 Vol 13 No 4

Start page: 319. No of pages: 14

Observes 12 Dutch public managers to determine the managerial competencies of real life public managers. Briefly examines the literature on managerial behaviour, commenting on the difference between theory and reality and then combines a modified garbage can school approach to decision theory with the leader behaviour school to develop a research framework. From observation discovers that public managers manage issue streams amidst political struggle by ensuring that written and spoken texts flow upwards. Identifies the three dimensions of attention allocation – actor attendance, actor attention and issue attention – and lists the mechanisms used to treat big issues, going on to discuss the professional competencies displayed by public managers. Concludes that competent public managers can perceive cues and relate them to issue streams, adding that they are able to initiate issue streams and bring them ahead.

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