Across the world, government's role is evolving. There is a fundamental shift from the industrial model of government - centralised, hierarchal and operating in a physical economy, to a new model of governance - adaptive to a virtual, global, knowledge-based digital economy which implies fundamental societal shifts.
In governments across the globe, there is added pressure to become more efficient, faster, less costly because of budgetary pressures, as well as the need to respond to the requirements of citizens rather than be tied up in red tape and administration. In fact, doing "more for less" has become the new mantra.
While this slogan slips off the tongue quite easily, it requires major changes both inside the public sector and the way it is presented to the outside world in a fluctuating economic climate that includes new concerns for citizen services and government service delivery.
How can governments transform to e-governments? There is one common denominator: intelligence. E-government can deliver more efficient public services and significantly reduce administrative burden. Offering more services online and organising services around customer needs will ease the navigation between agency boundaries, and provide smoother paths of communication between citizens and their government.
Examples of e-government services can include e-ID, e-elections, e-services for the disadvantaged, one-stop shops for business start-ups, online taxation services, online patent applications, e-customs and well as e-procurement.
It's real!
The reason e-government initiatives fail to achieve their goals is because the implementation is pre-occupied with the technology aspect of the initiative.
Desan Naidoo is GM of the public sector division for SAS Institute South Africa
Globally, the concept of e-government is becoming a reality, but huge differences remain, according to the Global eGovernment 2007 report [1], which analysed 1 687 government Web sites in 198 different nations based on several access-to-information and interaction criteria.
North America was at the forefront, scoring 45%, while Africa was at the bottom of the pile with 26%, below Russia and Central Asia and Central America, scoring 26% and 27.8% respectively.
Like most developing countries, technology challenges do exist. There is a cost problem, and the need to maintain both new and legacy information technology systems. There are different sets of data between national, regional and local systems that are inoperable, and adding further complications are the poor levels of data quality.
When government agencies embark on the e-government journey, they must first and foremost ensure their enterprises have the technological architecture necessary to support their missions and objectives. These existing infrastructures represent major investments in key areas such as communications networks, operational and transactional systems, data repositories and business processes.
However, fundamentally, e-government is not a technology issue, but a people issue. From a citizen's point of view, there is no difference between government and e-government. It's simply having the access to the right information, in the right place, at the right time.
The reason e-government initiatives fail to achieve their goals is because the implementation is pre-occupied with the technology aspect of the initiative. Technology is merely a facilitator, enabling improvements to be made to the quality of people's lives.
Providing choice
By bringing government online, it not only offers citizens enhanced, more accessible local government services, ranging from booking a squash court to paying council tax, but it also enables them to choose how they want to interact with their council.
The only way this can be achieved is through analysing processes and transactions that make up the e-government system, which could sometimes amount to hundreds of sites, to understand the various customers across all channels. Managing these sites is a daunting process, but there are powerful software solutions that work with existing applications and that can process and analyse all the user activity, such as number of visitors and popular URLs, while maintaining 100% site availability.
By doing this, government can adjust the sites as necessary the same way a well-run business handles changing business demands. They can also provide standardised reports to Web masters and top officials on the essential parameters, such as number of visitors, most viewed pages, and their selected navigation through the e-government portal.
These insights keep government Web masters informed on the successes and failures, and greatly enhance the quality of the reports, allowing government to better monitor its e-communications.
The e-government model is one that SA is looking to adopt across all of its national and provincial government departments. The ultimate of which would be the better servicing of citizens' needs, and the ability of departments to start aggressively adopting a more business-driven approach to servicing its citizens.
[1] Global eGovernment, 2007 - analysis of 1 687 government Web sites in 198 different nations, August 2007, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA (http://www.insidepolitics.org/egovt07int.pdf)
* Desan Naidoo is GM of the public sector division for SAS Institute South Africa.
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