Governments are introducing, managing and using digitized personal identification and authentication systems in their service relationships with citizens in addition to, and increasingly in replacement of, traditional forms of personal identification and authentication. An important question is to what extent these developments are causing innovation in the sense of a renewal of traditional institutions in the government domain. By presenting public debate with regard to the recently proposed UK National Identity Cards initiative we will show that a public administration perspective is needed to be able to detect more fundamental forms of innovation in government.