According to Novell Asia-Pacific’s corporate technology strategist John Phillips, for a government to be effective in providing e-services to its citizen, it must deliver the right information to the right people at the right time. He defines e-government as the delivery of government services to the citizens, foreigners, businesses or to anybody with personalised access to information and on-demand. Governments want e-business instead of face-to-face communication because of the many benefits it can offer, such as cost and time savings.
Challenges. For most governments, the main challenges revolve around responding to a rapidly changing global environment and providing citizens with more convenient access to information and transactions.
“To do this, they need to improve inter-agency and inter-level co-ordination to meet citizens’ demand for a more transparent process and to respond to time-sensitive, cross-jurisdictional issues such as those involving national or international security,” Phillips says. The biggest concern, however, in implementing e-government are privacy and security. “It’s about trusting the information such as where the data, username, passport and credit card information are stored,” he says.
For a government to address the above challenges, Phillips says it needs to adopt a more holistic, enterprise view of its IT resources and leveraging enterprise best practices in areas such as collaboration, security, citizen relationship management and IT consolidation.
However, a major problem for many governments in realising the above challenges is that their IT resources are often fragmented and scattered across many ministries and departments, resulting in information silos.
“The promise of networked business will not be realised until we rapidly and dynamically interoperate. These government departments need to break down the silos and start to share and collaborate information,” Phillips says. Addressing the issues. To move forward and address the issues in e-government implementation, four major factors need to be addressed. These are personalised portals, integration of disparate applications and data, policy-based security, and core foundation technologies that support reliable and cost-effective operation, and offer the freedom to choose open source.
Phillips says the four factors are highly interdependent on one another other and must work flawlessly to deliver the effective e-government services.
He says Novell, through its exteNd solutions, enables portals to be personalised for more efficient interaction among government agencies as they provide a single, personalised access point for all the applications and processes that citizens, suppliers, and government employees use.
Phillips says Novell is also bringing in the concept of Content Aggregation to the e-government model. “It brings in all the information from anywhere, leverage all the existing system, policies, interchange, authorisation, customisation, the portal must aggregate from all those services,” he says.
Data integration, meanwhile, creates bridges among applications and data silos, permitting governments to leverage current systems in new and dynamic ways. Security is important as the public confidence and adoption rates for e-government services rest on the trust that information will remain secure.
“We need to set up levels of security. In some cases, Malaysia has an advantage with its MyKad system. It’s a good starting point, and unifying all these access to a single point can make it a lot easier for the citizens to use the e-government services,” says Phillips.
The core foundation is like the best plumbing infrastructure. “So when you turn on the tap, you’ll get all the information. You need the best plumbing underneath, and that is where all these technologies are coming from,” he explains.
Enterprise integration. Novell is able to bring together data from a whole array of legacy systems. “The system, be it mainframe, database, applications CRM (customer relationship management), can be integrated and the information can be delivered to the portal, and making it part of B2B (business-to-business) transaction model,” says Phillips.
In terms of foundation, he says one of the biggest initiatives locally is to move forward with the open source adoption policy from Mampu and OSCC. “Linux has become the key component as an open source platform in e-government implementation, addressing many of concerns around proprietary nature of open source,” he says.
Open source addresses the major budgetary and infrastructure considerations. It cuts costs by lowering licensing and maintenance fees by enabling deployment on less expensive hardware platforms.
Phillips says Linux applications have a set of industry standards and strict level of assurance to ensure reliability, performance, and security. “A big component of Linux is security and evaluation assurance level (EAL) certification, which is a set of standard built by 14 member nations, a common criteria in ISO standard,” he says.
Malaysian scene. Phillips says Malaysia has in some way started to implement e-government services through projects such as the Government’s official portal (www. gov.my), Sarawak electronic government and Virtual City in Ipoh. He says the challenges are still big for the Government to promote its e-government initiatives. Firstly is about access to information. “People need to have access to the Internet, but many still don’t have that privilege yet. More work on the last mile integration needs to be done,” he adds.
Education is also an important factor. “More efforts are needed on educating the people on what they can do with Government portals, where they can go, how they can use it. The www.gov.my portal is available, but no awareness campaign on using the site is available,” he says.
In terms of technology literacy, Phillips says efforts on bringing people up to the right level must be carried on. “They need to understand what it means by security and trust this identity management concept,” he says.
Finally, the portal content. “There’s no point of having the top three if you don’t have the relevant content in the portals. In the early days of e-business, everyone put up a Web site, but they were static. Being able to deliver the right content is key. If you give people too much information in one go, they won’t be able to handle that, but if you feed them the info in the right manner and at the right time, then they are able to use it and move forward,” he says.
Autor: Izwan Ismail
Quelle: e-Media, 05.09.2005
