Shortly after career diplomat Sir David Wright was appointed to head a new effort to promote British business abroad, he received a shock. Surfing the web to see how Britain's competitors were using the internet as a promotional tool, he spotted the Swedish Trade Council's site, and that of its French counterpart.

A few minutes online was enough to convince him that the UK had a problem on its hands. A recent proposal by the British government to set up a battery of call centres to better co-ordinate the nation's export promotion efforts was just not going to be enough. "I was very depressed," says Sir David. "We were in a very sorry state. And it's a good job nobody noticed. It became clear that the UK was terribly behind our competitors and the market leaders in all of this were the Swedish Trade Council, which has a very good site. The French were also better than we were, so we had some pretty clear objectives to make up for lost time," he says. "Did we really want to have a great hangar full of people sitting up in Scunthorpe or somewhere, all answering telephones, when there was this new technology rapidly overtaking us?"

That was just over a year ago. Today, a body headed by Sir David known as British Trade International is spearheading efforts by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to promote British business abroad via the internet. The specific aim, according to a BTI report produced late last year, is to "add value to UK exporters through the application of electronic business technologies to increase UK competitive advantage".

The main weapon in this fresh assault on world markets is a web-based initiative that is transforming how BTI delivers FCO and DTI services. The effort is primarily focused on one site:www.tradepartners.gov.uk, launched in May last year and managed by Unitas, a consortium involving ICL, a unit of Fujitsu of Japan, and CMG, the British IT group.

Through the site, British businesses have access to a panoply of services 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A section called The Gateway, for instance, provides country reports on the market that a business may be researching, and up-to-the-minute information on the market segment it is interested in. It is even possible to commission online commercial officers in a particular country to carry out targeted market research on a specific piece of business - delivered by e-mail, of course.

In the old days, this exercise would have taken weeks of expensive telephoning and faxing, often involving fruitless trips overseas. BTI charges a fee for this service, which can amount to much less than the fees proposed by private business consultancies operating abroad.

Overseas exposure

Another feature offers businesses, free of charge, the possibility of having details of their products and services put on a database that is made available to overseas buyers.

Similarly, businesses can receive e-mailed details of the latest contracts and tenders being offered in an overseas market - this is called the "sales lead" service. Over 2,000 leads are fed to a subscriber base of 14,000 British businesses per month. The service is managed by Bright Station, the UK IT group.Up to March this year, £1.6m ($2.5m) will have been spent on establishing Trade Partners. On top of that, £20m ($31m) of investment is earmarked for e-commerce over the next three years.

The initiative is, inevitably, having a dramatic effect on the way commercial officers in the British foreign service do their jobs. "The whole machine had become fixed on promotional activity. You know, let's try and promote markets in Latin America, and tomorrow something else. Or the Jumbo [jet] full of 300 businessmen, that sort of thing. It wasn't very strategic," says Sir David, who is a former British ambassador to Japan and South Korea.

Staff in the over 200 commercial missions overseas are an increasingly modern breed. They are more likely to be hunting down business opportunities and e-mailing them directly back to British businesses than worrying about the guest list for the evening's embassy cocktail reception. They will probably be researching detailed reports on specific market segments, commissioned by British businesses by e-mail. And they will shortly be plugged into what's happening back in London via a worldwide IT platform that will give desktop access to the internet and an FCO intranet.

Accompanying this shift to web-based activities is a whole new vocabulary. FCO officials talk of "customers", "value-added" and "delivery". Rob Lally, head of the commercial section at the British embassy in Vietnam, recently e-mailed details of an aircraft maintenance contract that Vietnam Airlines was looking to award. Within a week a British company had flown to Hanoi to pitch for the business. "For a place like Vietnam, it [the internet] makes you feel so much closer to your customers in the UK, and you're able to service them so much more quickly," says Mr Lally.

Although it is perhaps difficult to measure precisely how much business has been generated as a result of the push into e-commerce, it is clear that business has responded enthusiastically. And, equally important, says Sir David, is that perceptions of the FCO's commercial efforts have changed. "When they [businesses] first looked at it [the site], people said: "You can't be a government site", or "We assumed this was a private sector outfit","" he says. "That's good, we're very happy with that."

E-mail Jeremy Grant at jeremy.grant@ft.com