Official oversight in the Government's information technology drive has ended up in screaming newspaper headlines again, as a frustrated headmaster raised his case in the media over the weekend.
A recent consignment of laptop computers for a public primary school in North Point do not fit in with other existing audio-visual equipment.
Ming Pao, the most popular Chinese-language daily on campuses, played up the oversight in its front page on Saturday. Minor as they are, this kind of hiccup often eclipses other government advances in realm of IT.
Official set-ups have indeed made significant inroads into cyberspace over the past couple of years. The Justice Department, for instance, has already set up a Bilingual Laws Information System.
Meanwhile, taxpayers can now have a clear idea of how much salaries tax they are expected to pay by simply keying in their personal particulars in a digital form available at the Inland Revenue Department's home page. It only takes the Salaries Tax Computation programme a split second to finish the calculation.
Government press releases, transcripts of key officials' replies to media questions, and consultative documents are often posted in the Government Information Centre on the Special Administrative Region's official Web site as soon as they are issued.
The authorities, however, need to go beyond swift dissemination of information over the Internet to maximise the benefits IT has to offer.