This week’s anti-Brown activities got me to thinking about Gordon’s   announcement at the end of last year regarding the need to ensure all public services are online by 2014. Putting the Frontline First, as the report which launched this initiative is called, makes sense, but only if a an infrastructure is in place that can guarantee excellent customer satisfaction.

The Putting the Frontline First report explains how, if all services are put online, the government hopes service will be improved and staff will be freer to deal with individuals.

When launching the report, Gordon said that within the next five years the government will shift the great majority of its “large transactional services to become online only”. Doing so, he hopes, will bring £3 billion additional savings to the £9 billion savings outlined in this year’s budget.

I look forward to finding out more from the Digital Britain Roadmap due at the end of 2010. The roadmap, apparently, will explain how services such as job seekers allowance, student loans and child tax credits will be making the move online.

Such important public services preparing to move online by 2014, does of course put high availability at the frontline. The knock on effect of failing to deliver less than 99.999% availability will be catastrophic, as the Department of Labour and Industry in the US discovered last month when its unemployment web site for the Pennsylvanian district went down, causing difficulties for people filing unemployment claims.

According to WNEP, those visiting the site were greeted with a message telling them that the online filing system “is operating intermittently”. This purpose of the site is to help claimants file for unemployment compensation services in Pennsylvania. The technical problem with the online system meant that many who were trying to file claims were understandably concerned and tried to get in contact via telephone to make sure they received their benefits.

As a result, further problems were created for the phone system because of the high numbers of calls being received from people who were worried their unemployment cheques would not be sent. Those who could not get through due to the high volume of calls had to wait until after 5pm and call again. Such downtime could result  in benefits not being paid on time and vulnerable people suffering severe hardships, their lives even potentially put at risk, due to circumstances beyond their control.

It’s easy to imagine similar scenarios for other governmental departments : imagine going to buy your car tax and the system is down, meaning you’re driving or keeping a car on the roadside illegally and it’s not your fault.

Of course, we don’t need to imagine what would happen in the student loan scenario, we’ve already seen some people having to give up university this year due to the current chaos.

Putting The Frontline First makes sense — but only if the infrastructure is in place.