e-Govt works back to front

By Leon Engelbrecht for SAP
Johannesburg, 14 Apr 2008

e-Government requires hard slogging in the back office rather than fancy Internet initiatives if it is to work.

"What is e-government about? It is about improving service delivery," says SAP Public Services SA industry solution manager Hannes Venter.

"One of the reasons e-government fails is people approach it from the front side," he adds. "You need to get the back in place first." Venter and SAP Business Objects business intelligence solution manager Michael Jones says this means a hard slog to map and improve business processes, link disparate databases and put the administrative basics in place.

Speaking on the fringes of an e-government conference, co-hosted with the Gauteng Shared Services Centre (GSSC), Venter said it could take several years to "stabilise the back office" and, in the case of SA, long delays with the Integrated Financial Management System (IFMS) meant it would be several years more before meaningful citizen self-service arrived.

But, in the meantime, government could improve service delivery - the e-government touchstone - by better using the data back office improvements made available, even without the IFMS and billing systems being in place.

Jones says business intelligence (BI) is being used elsewhere to orient government performance management away from a budget focus to one based on outcomes.

"In the past, departments were judged by their budgets and whether they had over- or underspent. The Public Finance Management Act mandates a system that is more outputs-based," Venter adds. The question is how many hospitals were built or how many kilometres of road tarred. The answer must be in terms of value added rather than money spent.

Jones says the focus is increasingly on "quality of service", moving beyond outputs to outcomes. "In the case of an anti-crime drive you can throw budget at it, but if it is output driven, you just end up with more people in jail. If it is outcomes based, the outcome would be reducing the re-offender rate by 10%. You want fewer criminals, not more people in jail," he says.

"You have to be careful what you measure. It is not just quantity, but quality. It is one thing to spend a budget, but it is only money well spent if it met an outcome and improved service delivery."

Jones and Venter say SA is still largely budget oriented, because most state agencies still do not have systems in place to move to outputs let alone outcomes. "No doubt there`s huge pressure coming from the citizenry as a whole," says Jones. The attitude is 'I don`t care what you do with the budget; where is my quality of service?`"