Governments in the region are beginning to see tangible productivity gains from their mobile government applications. On one hand short message service (SMS) alerts are creating cheaper, faster, more responsive communication channels, and then on the other, handheld computers are extending the value of fixed enterprise systems beyond the walls of the office and out into the field. In both scenarios increasingly mobile services and employees are bringing government closer to citizens. A number of the region’s governments are actively sponsoring mobile government initiatives as a way of encouraging domestic vendors, with a view to developing innovation and building the mobile skills of the wider population. South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan all have government-level initiatives aimed at using mobile government service to ‘pump prime’ their mobile technology sectors.
The Taiwan government has established a particularly ambitious programme to create a national grid of mobile applications, using municipal services as a springboard to greater public participation. Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second largest city with a population of 1.5 million, will complete its mobile application network by the middle of this year, and Mayor Frank Hsieh intends mobile government applications to position Kaohsiung as a global ‘e-city’. A range of real-time collection, analysis and broadcasting solutions are currently under development.
Service delivery
In every country in the region mobile telephone use exceeds internet use, and this gap is particularly pronounced in developing countries. With pre-paid mobile phone services, even relatively poor economies like the Philippines can have a high mobile penetration. It should come as no surprise to see that a number of countries have begun to actively use the mobile channel for their citizen communications.
"SMS is today one of the most effective ways of communication in both business and personal life. mDubai leverages the increasing popularity of mobile phones to build communication channels with the people," explains Salem Al Shair, Director of eServices, Dubai eGovernment. "The mobile phone has become an inseparable tool for most people, and it is logical to use its popularity to enhance the efficiency levels of e-governance."
In the Philippines more than half of government departments use the mobile channel to deliver public services, and over the last 12 months these have started to evolve from simple information alerts to increasingly sophisticated transactions.
The Department of Labour and Employment provides a job/jobseeker matching service called ‘Job Hunt’, the Department of Foreign Affairs now allows citizens to review the status of their passport applications by SMS, in addition to providing a directory of Filipino embassies overseas. Citizens are also able to review their contributions to their Social Security System and the Government Service Insurance System accounts.
The police in the Philippines now make extensive use of the SMS channel to solicit tip-offs from the public, and even allow victims of crime to track the progress of investigations via SMS. The country’s Civil Service Commission (CSC) has also reported some success in using the mobile channel to redress citizen grievances and uncover corruption, as part of its Mamamayan Muna (‘Citizens First’) campaign (see page 8, ‘Citizen feedback goes mobile in the Philippines’, PSTM October 2004).
A number of Singapore ministries have also been quick to leverage the SMS channel in order to engage a population that has reached saturation levels in terms of mobile penetration. Singapore residents can choose to receive text message alerts for anything from renewal of road tax, public parking season ticket reminders, national service obligations, results of medical examinations for domestic workers, to passport renewal notifications.
The wireless channel has also proven itself to be a convenient communication channel of last resort in times of crisis. At the height of the SARS crisis in 2003, the Hong Kong government sent an emergency broadcast to all 6 million mobile phones in the territory to provide information to the public and allay security concerns.
Ultimately the mobile phone has provided government departments with a highly flexible citizen service delivery mechanism: it provides a low-cost, highly scalable means of distributing content that can be easily personalised according to citizen preferences.
“Our state-of-the-art technology ensures that the message is sent to the respective department and the caller gets an instant reply over his mobile. The new ‘pull’ SMS service underlines Dubai e-Government's commitment to diversifying the channels of public interaction and use channels other than the internet," adds Al Shair.
Productivity
But mobile government is more than just a convenient communication channel. Wireless technology also has the potential dramatically improve public sector productivity. Mobilising existing enterprise applications and providing remote access to existing corporate networks allows government employees to access information at any time, whether the data they need is on the internet, on their office network, or on a portable device under their control.
However, governments in the region have been much slower to apply mobile solutions to their internal processes, partially because they have been focused on computerising government as a necessary first step.
“Mobile computing builds upon an organization’s installed PC base, by leveraging office applications, networks and data in remote locations,” says Marcus Loh, Marketing Director for Symbol Technologies, a mobile solutions provider. “This requires a certain degree of readiness on the part a public sector agency looking to mobilise its enterprise applications.”
Loh believes that in time governments will see mobile technology as a means of getting greater leverage from these existing investments.
“We have seen a number of point projects in the region, particularly with applications that improve the revenue generating capacity of government, because this is where return on investment is most transparent” Loh explains.
With as much as a quarter of public sector employees characterised as being ‘very mobile’, allowing these workers to contribute back more to the organization by keeping them connected will immediately contribute to overall productivity. A number of public sector bodies in the region are already counting their productivity gains as a result of going wireless.
Last year the National University of Singapore (NUS) extended wireless coverage to 100 per cent of its 150 hectare campus, connecting more than 32,000 students to the university’s intranet, and providing staff with real-time access to a range of management information.
"This wireless network has given us greater flexibility," says Roland Yeo, Network Manager, Computer Centre, NUS. "Overall, this translates into cost savings and a more efficient deployment and use of critical resources."
In Hong Kong the authorities have implemented mobile computing to increase their effectiveness in a number of facilities management tasks. For example the Drainage Services Department now captures information relating to inspections on handheld devices, and the Housing Department is able to monitor the results of site inspections more reliably, with a more comprehensive capture of defects and other information. The Civil Engineering Department also used mobile government applications when undertaking field mapping exercises in order to assess potentially hazardous terrain.
Dubai is typical of a number of countries that have chosen to deploy mobile technology to handle traffic violations, because increased efficiency in the issuing and administration of traffic fines tends to give the greatest ROI – sometimes as quickly as nine months after roll-out.
According to Colonel Ahmed Hamdan bin Dalmouk, Head of the General Directorate of Electronic Services at Dubai Police, more than 400 traffic department employees use pocket PCs to remain connected to the central database when out in the field handling traffic planning and accident investigations. The implementation was part of an overall police strategy aimed at replacing existing methods with more advanced and scalable systems.
Upwardly mobile
Despite a number of promising implementations within the region, and beyond, mobile government is not a panacea. Not all government applications can run on mobile devices, and wireless connectivity cannot always compete with wired connections. Mobile government can complement and extend existing information infrastructure, but not yet replace it. There remain a number of security and interoperability issues, and much hangs on the future development of 3G services in Asia Pacific.
Yet government agencies might want to reflect that mobile government is also highly visible government. In a day and age where commentators like to talk about the dangers of citizen ‘disconnect’ with the government process, not only does wireless technology hold out the prospect of making government employees more productive, but it also has the potential to shift increasing amounts of Government-to-Citizen transactions to personal, face-to-face encounters.
In this sense mobile government is more than simply a reiteration of the benefits of online government in a new and exciting channel. Mobile government is an effective new tool for increasing the level of engagement between administrative process and the real world of the citizen.
Autor: James Smith
Quelle: Public Sector Technology & Management, 27.05.2005
