"The Korean central services portal (www.egov.go.kr) is definitely one of the world leaders in tightly integrating online government services," the U.N. report said. According to the 2004 e-government readiness rankings, the United States came in first, followed by Denmark, the United Kingdom and Sweden.
The annual report says, "The E-Government Readiness Survey 2004 assesses... how willing and ready the governments around the world are to employ the opportunities offered by Information and Communication Technology to improve the access, and quality, of basic social services to the people for sustainable human development."
In referring to Korea, the report said, "A total of 393 services can be accessed online - from the initial application to the electronic issuing of results." It added, "While the site clearly focuses on services, including transactions, it also features a host of everyday information such as up-to-date news, calendar or upcoming events, archived information, useful links and citizen feedback mechanisms."
In Korea, the Government for Citizens or G4C project was established to provide user-friendly government services without the constraints of time and space, improving administrative productivity with lower costs and higher efficiency. The G4C system allows people home access to the civil service through the Internet, as well as offering other programs on tax, insurance, education and digital signature services.
"The G4C Project aims to establish an electronic channel for government services to the public along with the system for sharing information among agencies," a report from the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs said.
The project helped reduce the bothersome process of obtaining official documents. The report said, "Previously people were dissatisfied with the way government services and information are delivered, because it took long hours due to the complicated procedures. It is often necessary to submit various verification documents, requiring service applicants to visit several agencies to obtain them."
Background
The Korean government's initiative on e-government is based on the explosion of Internet since the mid 90's in the nation. As of last year, the number of people using the Internet reached 31 million, approximately 70 percent of the total population. "This indicates the potential demand has grown up enough for electronic delivery of government services and information to citizens and businesses," a government report said.
"As people become aware of the power of the Internet and experience good service in the private sector, they will become less tolerant of poor service in the public sector. If people can buy an airplane ticket over the Internet, they will want to get the citizenship certificate issues the same way," it said.
The unique culture of PC Bang or public PC room accelerated the penetration rate of the Internet. The high speed Internet can be easily accessible for a meager 1,000 won per hour on average everywhere.
"Rapid growth of the 'PC bang' industry had been due, in part, to an economic crisis in 1998, when many young people had been forced to be out of jobs. New business opportunities were searched for and created by Internet," the report said.
High speed Internet companies have allied themselves with companies who build apartments. "Construction companies have enjoyed incentives provided for apartments with high-speed Internet access," the report said.
"Communication carriers also have been able to find business opportunities to put cables underground to apartment complexes where there are enough potential customers within a compact area."
The stiff competition among dot-com companies also contributed to the spread of the Internet as they provided services favorable to customers, including free email services. "Email communications have become popular even to primary school students. They are heavy Internet users, sharing information among their classmates and teachers on homework and after-school activities," the report said.
Government officials thought that given that the rapid development of Information Technology and Communication, it was never too early to start building e-government. "We had a kind of fear that failure to build an information infrastructure would hurt the Korean government to the point that it might not be able to compete in the global context, leaving the nation farther behind developed countries," the report said.
Objective & Task
In the future, the Korean government will keep on making strenuous efforts to build one-window portals which provide services according to events which affect people's lives. "We need to pay attention to life-event portals which focus on certain life situations like birth, marriage, retirement, building a house, starting up a business, and so on," the report said. "Information and services can be aggregated and presented to citizens as life events."
Previously, Web applications used to be simple collections of links to related Web sites. Government portals have been designed and organized based on the structure of governmental bodies, not on the stream of life-cycle events from the point of a user's convenience.
Therefore, by browsing the life-event portal provided by the G4C, citizens can easily apply for various public services and obtain related information, with fewer trips to government offices and with less verification documents submitted.
The government introduced four tasks to be a world leader of e-government as follows:
- The first task is the establishment of government portal sites so that civil services can be provided anytime and anyplace. They are arranged systematically following the life-cycle or sequence of events as a matter of convenience. This map is to play a role of navigator for site visitors.
- The next task prepares the framework for information sharing where an integrated system is to be established for information groups in the five sectors. When information is shared across governmental bodies, they cannot only increase convenience, they can also avoid the need to enter data multiple times, thus reducing errors involved in data input.
- The third task is to build up infrastructures such as electronic authentication and electronic payment. This includes the establishment of public key infrastructure that prevents forgery and falsification of issued documents, development of DTD (data type definition) for electronic documents, and construction of a DB security system to detect intrusion, hacking and information drain, etc.
- The last task involves revising laws and regulations so they are able to meet the conditions of online delivery of services and information. Many codes of laws and regulations had been identified to be updated, encouraging information sharing among government bodies, verifying the legal status for electronic documents. Laws and regulations are to be revised so that they do not unintentionally interrupt the successful implementation of the project.
Autor: Jin Hyun-joo
Quelle: The Korea Herald, 28.02.2005
