IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Let’s examine the hypothetical case of a large firm that is under pressure to improve its performance. The organisational structure consists of a large headquarter responsible for corporate functions including finance, HR, etc, and over 30 business-units who operate autonomously. All of the business units have internal IT teams led by individual CIOs, who operate independently from the corporate IT team.

As part of its overall turn-around strategy, the firm’s leadership team has decided to revitalise business operations through deployment of IT. An IT strategy and high-level implementation plan has been prepared for the firm. The various corporate functions and business units are granted complete autonomy to implement the IT strategy at their respective level. Due to lack of incentives or corporate policies, there is no attempt to collaborate among the business-units to synergise the IT investments.

It does not take a Nostradamus to foretell that the future IT landscape of this enterprise will resemble a spaghetti plate. If we replace this fictitious enterprise with India, the corporate functions with central government ministries and the business units with the states, the above hypothetical scenario closely resembles the Indian e-governance program. While a National e-governance plan (NeGP) exists in India, it appears to be high on intent and low on execution details.

Given that the Indian taxpayer is paying for the e-governance investments and the gargantuan size of the planned e-governance investments (over Rs 26,000 crore), it is imperative that the current approach to implement e-governance in India undergoes a through and holistic approach.

Some suggestions for revitalising the Indian e-governance programme:

Enabling legislation: any e-governance implementation will result in multiple interactions, that is, G2C, G2B, G2G, etc. These interactions are likely to generate issues whose redressal will require legal reform to avoid miring the e-governance initiatives in a sea of litigation.

Need for nodal body: to ensure a systematic and successful e-governance implementation in India, a statutory body responsible for e-governance implementation needs to be created. This nodal body should be equipped with requisite regulatory powers to enforce standards, plans, budgets and decide project priorities at both the state and central government levels.

BPR of e-government processes:

There is little doubt that Indian government processes are archaic and have been out-of-step with the changing demands of its consumer’s. Therefore, all government processes targeted for e-governance should undergo a detailed BPR exercise to rationalise and improve the existing processes.

Outcome-based assessment : benchmarking the actually achieved outcomes against the expected outcomes should be used to measure the success of an e- governance initiative.

Reusability: states can be encouraged to adopt reusability by proposing incentive models including offsetting the cost of development.

Infrastructure optimisation: to optimise the infrastructure investments, infrastructure sharing should be promoted and enforced.

Out-of-box thinking and innovative implementation models are sine qua non to ensure that every rupee invested in e-governance ultimately improves the citizen’ quality of life.

Autor(en)/Author(s): Rajdeep Sahrawat

Quelle/Source: The Financial Express, 03.07.2006