In November 2000, Forrester conducted in-depth research with 14 UK government agencies, grading these departments on the vision, implementation, partnerships and savings sharing of their eGovernment efforts.

According to Forrester analyst Caroline Sceats, "All government agencies suffer from gaps in knowledge and understanding, and the inability to implement innovative services is holding the government back. By mid-2002, the government will drop the go-it-alone strategy, opening up business processes and service opportunities to new partners. The government will adopt the eBusiness network framework, where a resilient structure of interdependent players co-operates in real time over the Net to get a job done. This will require the government to share its savings on data and financial transactions with the private sector, creating a commercial market worth £730 million by 2005."

According to the report, Established eCommerce Integrators (eCIs) will dominate business payments, and pre-processing business taxes will result in £11 million in government fees per year by 2004. Technology giants will partner to build financial-management hubs. But the area of greatest opportunity in an eGovernment network will be for the small, fast-moving technology vendors that create a layer of continuously moving data flows. The fees available for successfully migrating data matchmaking to the private sector will cost government £207 million per year in 2005.

Forrester interviewed a representative sample of government departments which were scored against 12 criteria across four categories -- long-term vision, functional capability to deliver on that vision, strategies for building external partnerships and understanding of potential savings. Each criterion had a maximum score of five and a minimum of one, giving a maximum category score of 15 and a potential total score of 60. Overall scores were then graded between an A (53-60 points) and an F (12-20 points). Feedback was also invited from graded departments, and grading results were returned to interviewees before publication for comment and correction of any factual errors.