The country’s administration has achieved a high degree success with its government IT projects as a result of strong support from the top of government, a clear demarcation of responsibility for e-government planning, and one of the world’s best developed communications infrastructures. Between 1998 and 2001, government spending for information technology doubled, from US$544 million to US$1.1 billion. IT spending currently represents 1.4 per cent of the government’s total budget, and counts among the government’s top ten expenditures.
Korea has made pursued IT development in the public sector as a major enabler of a knowledge-based economy, believing that an increasingly IT-literate population will demand greater participation in how they are governed, and how they access government services.
However, even though Korean government is the country’s primary consumer of IT, it is not the smartest consumer. The speed of technology change is faster than the ability of the government bureaucracy to incorporate the new opportunities. As a result, the country’s public sector has benefited from a series of initiatives to create government technology ‘centres of excellence’ responsible for mapping out the future direction of government IT for the wider administration. It is this structural approach to managing the e-government learning experience that has enabled the Korean administration to become a leading user of technology both in the region, and on a global basis.
Institutionalising the vision
The Special Committee for E-Government (SCEG) was created to promote inter-agency cooperation. The committee is a joint civilian-government body that lies within the supervision of the Presidential Commission on Government Innovation, an executive branch of the President.
SCEG was established with a clearly defined goal for the administration’s government technology efforts. E-government is a service-led concept, aiming to galvanise the public sector to offer more convenient and reliable services for citizens, provide the best environment for businesses, and achieve productive, transparent, and democratic government.
SCEG was specially formed to mobilise leadership and expertise on two bottlenecked areas for expanding e-government efforts: coordination of inter-agency collaboration in information sharing across government and completion of the infrastructure for e-government within a reasonable time frame.
To ensure that the special committee successfully carries out these tasks, the following basic strategies were formulated.
- Initiatives are to be fundamentally pertaining to national interest
- Integrate inter-agency initiatives into a single government-wide initiative
- Maximise the sharing of information across agencies and eliminate overlap of duties
- Promote the use of information technology based on Business Process Reengineering
To achieve these basic strategies, following general directions were adapted:
- Meetings for monitoring the progress of each e-government initiative must be held weekly
- A standard method of interconnecting the different e-government projects must be set as early as possible and implemented across agencies
- The judicial and legislative framework supporting the e-government initiatives must be set in place before internet-based government services begin
To move forward with these strategies, SCEG required coordination at the ministerial-level, and ultimately strong leadership support from the President himself. SCEG’s status as a committee under the Presidential Commission on Government Innovation ensured that this critical support was forthcoming. SCEG directly reported to and received instruction from the President as a body independent of ministerial agendas.
To function effectively SCEG needed to balance technical expertise with political authority. As a result the committee was composed of civilian IT experts, Vice Ministers and Directors of ministries and agencies. To support the committee, two coordinators were appointed: a civilian expert, the President of the National Computerisation Agency, along with the Presidential Secretary of Policy Planning, a high-ranking official.
Under the strategies formulated by SCEG, extensive administrative processes that impeded government services have been refocused to provide a more user-oriented experience. This has been made possible through an expansion of information sharing across government agencies.
To date SCEG has made concrete progress in a number of areas:
- The Government for Citizens (G4C) system has been established to connect the hitherto silo-based databases in the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs (MOGAHA), Supreme Court of Korea, Ministry of Construction and Transportation (MOCT) and other public bodies handling resident registration, real estate, and vehicle registration
- The Home Tax Service (HTS) allows taxpayers to file tax returns, receive bills, and process payments from their homes via the internet
- With the establishment of the Government e-Procurement Service (GePS), procurement processes involving bidding, contract agreements, and payment for services or supplies take place live online
- The National Finance Information System (NAFIS) offers real-time financial information to high-level government employees by interconnecting the independent financial systems residing in each public agency
- The databases for health insurance, pension insurance, industrial accident compensation insurance, and unemployment insurance policies which are the four major social insurance systems in Korea have been consolidated into a single network
The limits of institutional reform
However, the goal of Korea’s e-government initiatives is not merely focused on building a system that will deliver online government service. Rather, the primary goal is to provide an online service that is widely used by citizens. Citizen take-up of government services has been disappointing to date. 98 per cent of the online population use e-banking; only 5 per cent of the online population uses e-government.
In the future, the e-government services that have been established must be upgraded into a comprehensive service with practical benefits to citizens so that a higher proportion of the general public want to use the services. Government services need to be integrated into one-stop services, designed from the citizen perspective.
Government also needs to keep pace with evolving technology habits. New technologies, such as 3G and 4G mobile multimedia technologies need to be harnessed to enhance accessibility, and convenience of government services.
Government needs to begin by listening to citizens’ voices, giving attention to their interests and lifestyle choices. This has to be a systematic process to gauge user requirements. Perhaps this is an opportunity for government to leverage the internet to deliver a more targeted range of services to particular groups within the population – such as the disabled, the elderly, foreign residents. One thing is for certain, the next stage of e-government innovation needs to be a demand-led process.
Autor: Sun Phil Kwon, Department of Public Administration and Information, South Korea
Quelle: Public Sector Technology & Management, 21.03.2005
