e-Governance: Making life simpler, easier and happier for all citizens
Sunday, 8 July 2007
Samina Rizwan
One of the best demonstrations of a successful e-Governance project at work is what happened in New York City on September 11, 2001. As the twin towers of the World Trade Center came crashing down, 290 hospitals in and around New York city logged into a network called LEADERS. With the help of LEADERS, all 290 hospitals could track, accept and 'load balance' causalities to ensure no injured person went without immediate medical attention. LEADERS is Lightweight Epidemiology Advanced Detection and Emergency Response System created by Oracle and some other partners. And it saved lives!
As Bangladesh is venturing into e-Governance this is the right time to ask a few basic questions.
What is e-Governance?
What are the key requirements for e-Governance?
What can e-Governance do?
Is e-Governance equal to IT deployment in government departments?
The working group on e-Government in the Developing World under the aegis of the Pacific Council on International Policy in a conference in 2002 defined e-Governance as "Defined broadly, e-Government is the use of ICT to promote more efficient and effective government, facilitate more accessible government services, allow greater public access to information, and make government more accountable to citizens. e-Government might involve delivering services via the Internet, telephone, community centres (self-service or facilitated by others), wireless devices or other communications systems".
According to them, what cannot be labelled e-Government is "…E-Government is not a shortcut to economic development, budget savings or clean, efficient Government. E-Government is not the big bang, a single event that immediately and forever alters the universe of government".
According to another definition used by University of Manchester, UK, e-Governance has three main domains:
l Improving government processes: e-Administration
l Connecting citizens: e-Citizens and E-Services
l Building external interactions: e-Society
Respectively, these particularly address the problems that government is too costly, too inefficient and too ineffective; too self-serving and too inconvenient; and too insular.
e-Governance is definitely not about just PC deployment in government departments. At best, it is the first step towards organizing vital information in a manner in which it can be easily retrieved and processed further.
Transforming citizen services delivery
e-Governance is about transforming the entire process of citizen services delivery. It is about simplifying citizen services so that the common man does not have to spend more than a minimum amount of time in processing complaints/inquiries/ bills/ information requests with any government department. E-Governance is about making life easier and simpler for the citizen.
The vision
Oracle's 30 years of experience in working with over 2000 government projects around the world, shows that the key requirement for a successful e-Governance programme is a strong political vision and will. The senior most bureaucrats and legislators in the country need to be convinced that they want to give their people an easy and effective way of transacting with the government. There should also be a strong desire and commitment to make a paradigm shift in the way the government deals with its people.
A strong commitment to making life easier for the common man is the first step towards an e-Governed state. The second step, of course, is the creation of knowledge workers within the government departments. These knowledge workers are people who understand the requirement of citizens and know how to harness IT to meet these demands. The deployment of the right IT infrastructure is perhaps the last requirement. But it is this that makes it all happen - the tool that transforms the dream into a reality!
The ideal e-Governance project is the one in which, each of the various government departments that deals with citizens, is fully integrated both within and with all other such departments. A completely integrated system where all the concerned departments communicate with each other freely, through their IT networks, can reduce response time and transaction time drastically. And with better value to citizens, governments can expect better citizen-participation in government functioning.
Effective e-Governance can galvanize vital government functions such as revenue collection, taxation and public utility billing. This could actually lead to an increase in Government revenues and a decrease in the number of defaulters - which is a key cause for concern in most of these departments.
In Chile, the Internal Revenue Service, which is responsible for applying and administering the system of internal taxes, was till recently dependent on a traditional paper-based collection and administration process. It recently shifted into an Oracle based online transaction method. This has led to a reduction of average processing time from 25 days to just 12 hours. Moreover, online taxpayers today have 10 extra days in which to declare their taxes. When claiming money back they also benefit from the speed of the system and get their refunds a month before the paper-based claimants.
Issues
One issue that nags most leaders of e-Governance projects is the security of the system and the data. However, with e-Governance becoming a priority for Governments and administrators around the world checks and evaluation systems today ensure a 100% foolproof, tamper proof system. Oracle, for instance, has 18 independent security evaluations for various aspects of data security in its eGovernance projects.
People sometimes think eGovernance = cost saving. Cost saving is incidental to eGovernance. In the long run governments do save large amounts of money due to better and more efficient process of transacting business. Costs are saved because more work can be completed, that too effectively, in less time. And that is vital to the government departments, especially in a country that is seeing very rapid digitization and a huge increase in expectations from governments.
Keep it simple
The best use of technology is in its making human life simple and easy. The same is applicable in all eGovernance projects. The challenge is to make the complex simple.
....................................................
The writer is Regional Director, South Asia Growth Economies (West), Oracle Corporation
One of the best demonstrations of a successful e-Governance project at work is what happened in New York City on September 11, 2001. As the twin towers of the World Trade Center came crashing down, 290 hospitals in and around New York city logged into a network called LEADERS. With the help of LEADERS, all 290 hospitals could track, accept and 'load balance' causalities to ensure no injured person went without immediate medical attention. LEADERS is Lightweight Epidemiology Advanced Detection and Emergency Response System created by Oracle and some other partners. And it saved lives!
As Bangladesh is venturing into e-Governance this is the right time to ask a few basic questions.
What is e-Governance?
What are the key requirements for e-Governance?
What can e-Governance do?
Is e-Governance equal to IT deployment in government departments?
The working group on e-Government in the Developing World under the aegis of the Pacific Council on International Policy in a conference in 2002 defined e-Governance as "Defined broadly, e-Government is the use of ICT to promote more efficient and effective government, facilitate more accessible government services, allow greater public access to information, and make government more accountable to citizens. e-Government might involve delivering services via the Internet, telephone, community centres (self-service or facilitated by others), wireless devices or other communications systems".
According to them, what cannot be labelled e-Government is "…E-Government is not a shortcut to economic development, budget savings or clean, efficient Government. E-Government is not the big bang, a single event that immediately and forever alters the universe of government".
According to another definition used by University of Manchester, UK, e-Governance has three main domains:
l Improving government processes: e-Administration
l Connecting citizens: e-Citizens and E-Services
l Building external interactions: e-Society
Respectively, these particularly address the problems that government is too costly, too inefficient and too ineffective; too self-serving and too inconvenient; and too insular.
e-Governance is definitely not about just PC deployment in government departments. At best, it is the first step towards organizing vital information in a manner in which it can be easily retrieved and processed further.
Transforming citizen services delivery
e-Governance is about transforming the entire process of citizen services delivery. It is about simplifying citizen services so that the common man does not have to spend more than a minimum amount of time in processing complaints/inquiries/ bills/ information requests with any government department. E-Governance is about making life easier and simpler for the citizen.
The vision
Oracle's 30 years of experience in working with over 2000 government projects around the world, shows that the key requirement for a successful e-Governance programme is a strong political vision and will. The senior most bureaucrats and legislators in the country need to be convinced that they want to give their people an easy and effective way of transacting with the government. There should also be a strong desire and commitment to make a paradigm shift in the way the government deals with its people.
A strong commitment to making life easier for the common man is the first step towards an e-Governed state. The second step, of course, is the creation of knowledge workers within the government departments. These knowledge workers are people who understand the requirement of citizens and know how to harness IT to meet these demands. The deployment of the right IT infrastructure is perhaps the last requirement. But it is this that makes it all happen - the tool that transforms the dream into a reality!
The ideal e-Governance project is the one in which, each of the various government departments that deals with citizens, is fully integrated both within and with all other such departments. A completely integrated system where all the concerned departments communicate with each other freely, through their IT networks, can reduce response time and transaction time drastically. And with better value to citizens, governments can expect better citizen-participation in government functioning.
Effective e-Governance can galvanize vital government functions such as revenue collection, taxation and public utility billing. This could actually lead to an increase in Government revenues and a decrease in the number of defaulters - which is a key cause for concern in most of these departments.
In Chile, the Internal Revenue Service, which is responsible for applying and administering the system of internal taxes, was till recently dependent on a traditional paper-based collection and administration process. It recently shifted into an Oracle based online transaction method. This has led to a reduction of average processing time from 25 days to just 12 hours. Moreover, online taxpayers today have 10 extra days in which to declare their taxes. When claiming money back they also benefit from the speed of the system and get their refunds a month before the paper-based claimants.
Issues
One issue that nags most leaders of e-Governance projects is the security of the system and the data. However, with e-Governance becoming a priority for Governments and administrators around the world checks and evaluation systems today ensure a 100% foolproof, tamper proof system. Oracle, for instance, has 18 independent security evaluations for various aspects of data security in its eGovernance projects.
People sometimes think eGovernance = cost saving. Cost saving is incidental to eGovernance. In the long run governments do save large amounts of money due to better and more efficient process of transacting business. Costs are saved because more work can be completed, that too effectively, in less time. And that is vital to the government departments, especially in a country that is seeing very rapid digitization and a huge increase in expectations from governments.
Keep it simple
The best use of technology is in its making human life simple and easy. The same is applicable in all eGovernance projects. The challenge is to make the complex simple.
....................................................
The writer is Regional Director, South Asia Growth Economies (West), Oracle Corporation