1.2 - F. Turning objectives into actions

The presentation by Mr. Prasanna Meduri, the Public Sector Business Development Division of Microsoft Asia Pacific and Greater China, focused on building a roadmap for e-government. Mr. Meduri said there were many stages involved in implementing e-government, with the complexity often much greater than it appeared (Figure 7 [PDF 116KB | 1 page]). The levers for change were public service and technology. He stated that those levers were a big BET (Figure 8 [PDF 111KB | 1 page]). Much of the technology was already in place, and what was often lacking was a partner ecosystem – it was not building new systems but making effective use of what was already there that was most important. The political climate was also critical to making e-government happen, as were the economic and social conditions. He stated that to transform ideas into action required addressing issues such as: digital inclusion, integrating e-government to core government missions, interoperability frameworks, indigenous innovation, improving internal efficiencies, public-private partnerships, outreach and resorting models.

Lessons learned thus far include:

• It was important to integrate e-government into core government missions such as rural participation and education
• Interoperability frameworks and mechanisms should adopt a common standard for technology to allow them to work together
• Improving internal efficiencies might enrich the work of employees
• Indigenous innovation
• Public-private partnerships
• Digital inclusion
• Outreach and resourcing models (helping communicate the message)

Several challenges for the establishment of a roadmap for implementation existed. Those included the following:

• Establishing the value within the context of all the other things that government was tasked to do
• Blending new and existing technology
• Limited resources
• Internal technical expertise
• Citizen access and participation
• Adoption and sustainability
• Localization

Mr. Meduri said that addressing those challenges assisted smooth transformation. An example of that in action was the Open for Business Project in the United States of America which was a portal designed to attract small businesses to Pennsylvania and encourage local citizens to pursue entrepreneurship. Mr. Meduri presented it as a case study. He said its goal was to ensure SMEs had access to information and the burden of doing business with government was removed. The portal provided business information, yellow pages and online auctions where businesses could see how government worked for them. The Project also established a small business committee and developed a series of government services online. In addition, there was a concentrated outreach programme to communicate the effectiveness of what it was doing and how it was working to save citizens money and increase transparency.

Mr. Meduri next raised the issue of interoperability and gave several reasons for pursuing it, including:

• Improved citizen services
• Improved government internal efficiency
• Enhanced international collaboration

Mr. Meduri said that interoperability frameworks had been initiated by the Governments of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Australia, while New Zealand and Hong Kong, China were undertaking similar efforts. The framework was called the Electronic Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF). Such frameworks were useful because often individual government agencies ran their own business and technical systems. The e-GIF provided an agreed standard way of joining those systems together, a framework for ongoing collaboration of data.

In Singapore, community XML (extensible mark-up language) web services provided community portals where citizens could access services from business. The government-provided service was the backbone for the way business and citizens interacted online.

Mr. Meduri listed the three main ways to fund such portals:

• Business provided services
• Citizens paid for services they wanted
• Services were important from social aims of government, therefore government provided those services

Lastly, Mr.Meduri, provided guiding principles for successful egovernment. He listed the following 12 key ideas:

1. Priority development needs that require government involvement
2. ICT infrastructure
3. Efficiency and effectiveness as key success criteria of government involvement
4. Political leadership
5. Availability of funding
6. Public engagement
7. Skills and culture of the civil service
8. Plans for the development of human capital and technical infrastructure
9. Coordination
10. Partnerships
11. Legal framework
12. Monitoring and evaluation

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