eGovernment is the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve the activities of public sector organisations.
Some definitions restrict e-government to Internet-enabled applications only, or only to interactions between government and outside groups. Here, we do not - all digital ICTs are included; all public sector activities are included.
In our definition, then, governments have been practising e-government for more than 50 years: using that first mainframe in the Statistics Office was "e-government". We just didn't give it that name 50 years ago.