In the Global E-government Readiness Report 2005: From E-Government to E-Inclusion, which measures e-government readiness in 176 countries, Malaysia managed only a low score in both categories, with 0.3048 and 0.5679 index points respectively.
This implies that while there are on-going initiatives to modernise the delivery of e-government services, extra efforts need to be put in to enable Malaysia to keep up with the leaders of the pack.
These include reinforcing its e-government programmes and initiatives, and providing more emphasis on end-to-end cross-government services that are citizen-centric.
Based on the report, the United States still tops the e-government readiness chart with 0.9062 index points, followed by Denmark (0.9058) and Sweden (0.8983).
The fact that the top 25 positions in the global e-government readiness ranking are dominated by developed countries indicates that they have been making serious efforts to boost their e-government services implementation and delivery.
Nevertheless, on the whole, the performance of Asia-Pacific economies was good in 2005. Three countries, Republic of Korea (5), Singapore (7), Japan (14), are among the top 25 world leaders, while seven out of its 15 countries had e-government readiness higher than the world mean of 0.4267.
With a score of 0.5706, Malaysia is ranked fifth among 15 South and Eastern Asia region after the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Japan and the Philippines.
According to the UN report, part of the reason for the high e-readiness in the Asian economies is past investment in, and development of, infrastructure to support ICT development. For example, The Republic of Korea, Singapore and Japan have high levels of fixed line, mobile phone and Internet penetration, which is reflected in their high e-readiness ranking.
The report also indicated that the income factor very much determines the e-government readiness in a country. As reflected in the e-readiness rankings, high-income countries have the resources and the infrastructure platform to build on the potential of information technologies to support their e-government programmes.
In terms of relative performance, some regions managed to do better than others. In this respect, North America and Europe were leaders in all four indices that were used to measure e-government readiness. Both were not only the regional leaders, they also clocked the greatest access to ICT infrastructure, highest level of education and the greatest provision of products/services through their respective national e-government programmes.
Autor: Izwan Ismail
Quelle: The New Straits Times, 17.04.2006
