Within the respective public services it is likely the change is partly coming "bottom-up" from the university graduates who have had access to the Internet during their studies and know the type of resources available on the net. They have joined government organisations at various levels and have applied pressure to get their organisations connected. Also the hype surrounding the Informatiuon Superhighway in the US is also attracting the need for policy attention.
The phrase Informatiuon Superhighway does nothing to assist policy development. While evocative it is not accurately descriptive and probably says more about Al Gore's attitude to his father than anything else. Gore's father having been responsible for much of the development of the interstate superhgighway complex in the US after world war 2.
Most Government agencies are inward-looking and very focussed on their immediate tasks. Their political masters don't often look past the next election. What awareness there is seems to be based on two concepts -
The core revolutionary nature of a shift from a centralised view of infomation typified by large central computers and mass media services, to peer-to-peer computing analogous to the telephone system where each individual can be an information provider has not yet become apparent to policy makers.