IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Employees on probation and those who require to be physically present in their offices for work will not be part of the e-work system.

Ajman has approved a remote working system permanently for government employees. Sheikh Ahmed bin Humaid Al Nuaimi, the representative of His Highness the Ruler of Ajman for Administrative and Financial Affairs, has issued a decision stipulating that the system be applied to all local government agencies.

The first, quite openly admitted, theme is that that Australia is way behind the world in terms of embracing telework, and needs to move quickly to formally embrace the trend to unlock its latent benefits. The second, less perfectly stated but implied by the pitch and the nature of the event, was that the NBN is the way to close that gap.

It's part of an electronic government initiative being cheered on by Mayor Larry O'Brien that is aimed at helping the city cut $100 million in operational costs over the next three years.

The introduction of high speed broadband across the UK in recent years means that 80% of the adult population now has easy access to the internet either at home or at work. But so far, this has made surprisingly little difference to the way in which healthcare services are provided by clinicians and nursing staff.

Despite a lot of talk at healthcare conferences, the reality is that you need to look hard to find examples of where telemedicine – as internet-enabled healthcare is known as within the NHS – is starting to make a difference.

“Government employees may have to Work from Home”, “Government planning 15-day Work from Home for its employees”, “Work from Home to be new normal in government offices” – these are a few of the many headlines reported by various print and web-based news agencies as the Government of India prepares itself for a long stand-off with the COVID-19 pandemic, writes Dr Yudhishthira Sapru, Senior Consultant, Chandigarh’s State eGovernance Mission, National eGovernance Division (NeGD), MeitY, Government of India

In the era of Digital India, almost all government organizations have IT resources which they use for public services. Various Central Ministries are already fully or partially using the eOffice platform (an online platform developed by National Informatics Centre (NIC) for electronic processing of files). A few State Governments have also some solution in place to process government files electronically. Others are also preparing themselves for a work from home (WFH) culture by taking their IT applications and processes out of the secured government environment.

Students can pose questions by audio or email

Scores of rural Common Entrance Test (CET) candidates who envied the unfair advantage their urban counterparts enjoyed with preparatory coaching, now have something to cheer about: Satellite-linked Nemmadi centres in their villages, complete with live, interactive classrooms offering CET coaching.

Officials from divisional commissioner to the collector, even tehsildars will be connected through the Maharashtra State Wide Area Network (MSWAN).

“I never knew how a child is born until I came in contact with the Classmate PC about a month ago. Now I know it and many other things.” With that remark, Mohammed Ahmed, 14-year-old student of Junior Secondary School Deidei in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) confidently took his seat and with three clicks on his laptop, beginning with the subject, ‘Integrated Science’; he showed the reporter ‘how it happens’, interactive simulations and all. “The classmate PC enables a student to go ahead of his teacher”, he added.

The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) and the Ministry of Manpower are in discussions to see how they can potentially increase the number of work-from-home options with the arrival of the Next Gen NBN (Next-Generation Nationwide Broadband Network), said Acting Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts Lui Tuck Yew.

Almost one in five workers in the world's most advanced economies spent at least one business day per month working from home in 2006, according to the report, published ahead of an OECD ministerial meeting on the future of the Internet economy on 17-18 June in Seoul.

In a Europe where the Internet is by far the easiest way to get hold of information, completely new demands are being placed on ordinary people, demands that an individual can sometimes find difficult to meet. Many Europeans do not have an Internet connection at home and must instead make use of public places with Internet access, sometimes known as ‘telecentres’. These centres are often libraries and schools and can also provide other technology as well as an internet connection in order to enable users to access information electronically.

LB Barnet is starting a three year project to overhaul its IT infrastructure to allow all of its staff to work remotely, according to a senior official from the authority.

The £20m infrastructure will cover over 4,000 staff from street cleaners to HR services. All departments across the council are to put together plans for mobile working projects so that staff can access databases from anywhere in the borough.

Midlothian Council’s employees should see benefits from the teleworking solution enabling people to work at home and have the same corporate voice and data connectivity as they do in the office. This will extend and improve communications, give employees a flexible work/life balance and improve customer service by extending office opening hours.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a massive move to telework for government workers and opened up new avenues for hackers to infiltrate systems — and it’s a situation that’s lasting longer than anyone expected.

Jim Weaver, chief information officer of Washington state, refers to the pandemic as the state’s new chief innovation officer. “It is demonstrating to agency leaders the transformative opportunities that some technology tools bring to how business can be done as opposed to how it has always been done,” he said.

But securing and managing the information technology that enables work from home is a top challenge during the pandemic, respondents indicated.

Most federal employees believe telework is here to stay, but figuring out how to manage information technology systems will be a top challenge for mass federal telework in the long term, according to a survey.