But a recent report in the local media got my attention. It announced that ESDLife will be scrapped--to make way for a government-run one-stop shop. The revamp of the portal is a bid to boost online access to public services through a more "customer-oriented" website, said the report.

Finally, after much griping in this column and (I'm certain) a deluge of complaints from the public, an admission that the site hasn't been "customer-oriented." How is it possible that the government has taken almost five years since ESDLife's January 2001 launch to realize the site is user-unfriendly?

The report added that blame for the site's inadequacies has been shifted to ESD Services, a joint venture between Hutchison Telecommunications and HP, and that Betty Fung deputy government CIO said the portal had failed to fully satisfy the public's needs. Fung added that ESDLife is owned by ESD Services and thus the government had a limited role in its design and marketing.

Admittedly Hutchison and HP have much to answer for as they designed, implemented and managed the much-maligned portal (by the way, according to the report, six senior executives of ESD Services are on trial for allegedly making bogus online bookings two years ago so that they could collect the government's monthly fee). Usage data on the portal is rare and, to my knowledge, no agencies have conducted any formal thorough user evaluations.

But the site is supposed to be a government public service. It was commissioned by the government as part of the "Digital 21 Initiative" and properly tendered to the private sector. But as any responsible firm outsourcing a project knows, responsibility doesn't end there.