IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

e-government is not an electronic version of existing documents, procedures and services, but a fundamentally new, integrated and complete channel of delivering services using all possibilities of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) according to Diyaa Zebian, Regional Manager, Middle East & Egypt, eSolutions BEA. “It is not about government but about government customers, the citizens, companies and public servants,” he said. Zebian was addressing the two-day Middle East e-government Summit hosted by Dubai eGovernment in Dubai from April 26 to 27, 2004. “e-governments have turned citizens into customers. Earlier administrations used to be structured around rules, and citizens were just part of the processes. Today, administrations are reorganised based on customer needs and expectations. These customers demand total solutions; they are not interested in the different administrations and authorities that are involved. Instead, they need integrated services. e-governments should therefore evolve and work out new ways of doing things rather than limiting developments to the electronic delivery of services as they currently exist,” said Zebian.

ICT represents just 20 per cent of the overall development of e-government oragnisations; the rest is business process reengineering, adapting procedures, regulations and structures. The key lies in implementing the appropriate software to make the complex job of e-governance simple and uncomplicated. e-government cannot be achieved if it is approached service by service. It is about integrating the back office first, to offer a unified client view of all services.

Zebian added that the absence of e-government architecture will bring about duplication of efforts and will fail to meet citizen’s expectations for service delivery, thus resulting in complaints and wasted public funds. Therefore the role of e-government essentially involves automating end-to-end processes across applications, providing real-time access to applications and information and implementing an IT platform that can change at the speed of business.

“Simplification through standardisation holds the key to success in e-government. BEA’s WebLogic Enterprise Platform 8.1 the first truly integrated application platform in the industry, has solutions that help e-governments to migrate to the highest levels of efficiency. It is designed to help any developer build service-oriented, enterprise-class Web applications and Web services with high productivity levels,” commented Zebian.

The BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform 8.1 provides a unified, simplified and extensible application infrastructure that allows customers to realize significantly faster time-to-value on their mission critical business integration projects. It is a leading edge integrated development framework that empowers all application developers to rapidly create, test and deploy enterprise-class Web service applications on the BEA WebLogic Platform.

Quelle: CPILive, 12.05.2004