For the 10 new European Union accession countries, the road to eGovernment can be as simple as ABCD, or at least relatively simpler than the experiences of their Western counterparts. Happily, the majority of these accession countries do not suffer from the complicated legacy IT systems that have plagued Western European governments, hindering the effective process of key governmental functions, such as law and health provision.
Modernizing the legacy systems of the West to create "joined up" governments continues to be a difficult undertaking, when we consider the number of disparate services that governments provide to their citizens and which have grown up as individual departments such as social services, environmental health, planning and building control. Typically, the supporting IT systems use customized applications making it increasingly difficult for systems to "talk" to one another.
Trying to unravel and modernize the existing architecture is expensive and can require significant organizational and, in some cases, legislative change. As a result, for every euro spent on technology in the West, 80 cents is estimated to go for maintenance of legacy systems alone, with only 20 cents spent on new technology.
In the accession countries, however, the whole 100 cents can be spent on innovative technology solutions that require very little ongoing maintenance. Consequently, Central and Eastern European countries (CEE) have the advantage over their Western counterparts of starting their government systems from scratch using the Internet as the underlying infrastructure.
Oracle estimates that by 2005-06, CEE governments will be as close to achieving eEurope as most of the current EU members and a structured ABCD approach could be the key to achieving eGovernment with relative ease.
Accountability
The first step that CEE governments should take in modernizing their government systems is to achieve accountability. This requires implementing systems that can make transactions between government agencies, citizens and employees transparent. According to the European Commission the reform of public administration is a critical issue for many of the accession countries. Hungary and Lithuania were cited as having made significant headway in making reforms. Estonia was highlighted as having a satisfactory administration but needed to do more to increase transparency, whilst Romania still needs to make a huge effort to modernize.
Furthermore, according to Fabra Vallés, President of the European Court of Auditors, the systems must make the public administration "capable of managing and scrutinizing financial transfers from the EU budget" that is provided to help the accession countries achieve economic stability. As well as measures to automate financial administration, accountability can be improved through the implementation of a human resource management system to enhance government to employee (G2E) communications, ensuring that all policies and procedures are carefully explained within the dynamic legislative and regulatory environment of accession.
Budget Control
Once the back-office administrative system is built to be transparent, budget control measures can be implemented to ensure internal efficiencies so that monies are correctly appropriated. In the last phase of EU enlargement the economic success of accession countries was very much dependent on the way that the EU financial aid package was managed.
According to the Economist Corporate Network, December 2002, the criteria for post-accession growth are good policies to keep the economy stable, and continued restructuring and investment in future development -- all dependent on carefully controlled budgets. Ireland followed this framework and almost doubled its per capita GDP as a percentage of the EU average to 116 percent. Greece, on the other hand, initially did not put into practice such policies and now spending is monitored carefully to avoid corruption and wastage on prestige projects with little economic effect. Improved budget management requires data sharing across the entire organization so that a complete view can be achieved. This can only be facilitated through Web-enabled systems that share a common data model to allow different systems to automatically exchange and share data. For citizens, government employees and businesses, the benefits will be to carry out tasks such as paying tax returns and state sales taxes online, applying for permits and licenses or registering a new venture, without having to liaise with multiple departments.
Citizen Service
Only when the back-office technology foundation is securely in place should governments begin to focus on automating their external relationships between citizens (G2C) and between businesses (G2B) to ensure citizen-centric service. This can be done through the provision of a portal. The portal is "the single point of contact" and acts as the window to government. In accessing this, businesses, suppliers and citizens can engage with their municipal, local or national governments.
The World Markets Research Centre, which surveyed 2,288 government websites in 196 nations concluded that, "Portals offer many advantages as they reduce the need to log on to multiple websites, provide citizens with one point of access and encourage a more uniform approach by government agencies that often do not share a common navigational system or presentation style."
An added benefit is assessing citizen transactions at the portal using customer relationship management* technologies. This strategy can enable the accession countries to become more citizen-centric by providing services that meet the needs of citizens and businesses.
The first services to go online should be revenue generating such as the payment of state sales taxes and other businesses taxes. This approach is most sensible because firstly, businesses will typically be the first to interact with government via the Internet and secondly, these transactions tend to occur more frequently. Businesses will have to pay state sales taxes on a monthly basis while citizen tax declaration is an annual occurrence. Once a government has put these services online it can begin to focus on the more citizen-centric processes such as citizen tax declaration, allowing online notification for a change of address or facilitating an online job search.
Deployment
The final stage is the deployment strategy. Central to a successful strategy is the provision of multi-channel service delivery, be it phone, PDAs and other hand-held devices, e-mail, interactive information kiosks, as well as the more traditional channels of postal communication and personal interaction. In doing so, a government is able to provide services to all citizens, whether or not they have access to Internet technology and the skills to use it.
In Central and Eastern Europe, the rate of Internet adoption varies greatly. According to the Baltic News Service, Estonia leads the playing field with 38 percent of the population using the Internet, followed by the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic with 28 and 24 percent respectively -- all levels comparable with Western Europe. While a new study by market analysts IDC claims the percentage of the population using the Internet at least once a month in Central and Eastern Europe is expected to reach 17 percent in 2003 and 27 percent in 2006.
In fact, mobile may well become a dominant channel in the accession countries. The CEE countries have been aggressive in adopting new mobile technologies because it requires fewer resources than traditional land structures. Fixed-line penetration in these countries is at only 32-38 percent. Poland was offering its inhabitants GPRS* as early as January of 2002 - much earlier than countries such as Austria, which obtained GPRS capability in late 2002. In the CEE countries there were about 50 million mobile phone connections at the end of 2001, and Gartner Dataquest predicts this will grow to about 139 million by 2006, an annual growth rate of 16 percent.
Quite simply, accession governments would be well advised to look to their alphabets. By taking the ABCD phased approach to eGovernment, starting with the technology foundation and improving administrative processes through to alignment with a front-end portal, CEE governments can enjoy a robust, scalable, multi-channel solution that covers each transaction between the government and its citizens, businesses, employees and other government agencies -- ultimately creating eGovernments that will rival and could even leapfrog the administrations of those in the West.
Terminology
Definitions excerpted with permission from The Computer Desktop Encyclopedia by Alan Freedman.
Customer Relationship Management: (Also called "citizen relationship management" in a government context.) An integrated information system that is used to enable a customer to interact with a company through various means including the Web, telephone, fax, e-mail and postal mail and receive a consistent level of quality service. The integration of all activities means that an order or transaction placed by phone can be tracked on the Web and vice versa.
GPRS: (General Packet Radio Service) An enhancement to the GSM mobile communications system that supports data packets. GPRS enables continuous flows of IP data packets over the system for such applications as Web browsing and file transfer. GPRS differs from GSM's short messaging service (GSM-SMS) which is limited to messages of 160 bytes in length.
Quelle: Center for Digital Government
