The trick is to balance profit and results.
Anyone who has spent hours waiting in a queue in a government building can appreciate the difference that technology could make to their lives.
Imagine the incredible distances travelled and intense discomfort suffered by senior citizens who queue for hours for their pensions; the frustrations of youngsters trying to secure bookings for their driver’s licence tests; the traveller who spends hours or even days between departments for an emergency passport; the recuperating patient living in a rural area who has no link to his healthcare provider; and so on.
Information and communications technology (ICT), coupled with effective human resources, is vital for improved service delivery to all South Africans and, considering the recent news headlines, success in this field is needed sooner rather than later.
The public sector is under growing pressure to deliver on its promises of improved service delivery.
By 2009, the government hopes to have advanced its suite of eGovernment solutions to the point where citizens will see and experience meaningful benefits. ICT is one of five service delivery streams that will make up the government’s single public service plan.
It is this plan that is driving the interactions between the government and ICT giants such as GijimaAst, which aim to improve service delivery to the citizens of South Africa, and at the same time ensure that technology investments deliver positive returns while meeting service delivery imperatives.
The trick is to strike a balance between the private sector’s profit motives and public sector deliverables.
eGovernment promises to deliver better, more efficient public services and improve the relationship between citizens and the government. But the logistics of achieving this call for a dramatic re-engineering of the way the public sector and private enterprise do business.
The resulting benefits to the quality of life, industrial competitiveness and society can only be realised if administrations change the way they operate.
Adding ICT to government services alone does not produce eGovernment: new technologies must be implemented hand in hand with organisational change and skills development. Only then can truly people-focused services follow.
If implemented correctly, eGovernment offers much more than shorter queues.
It has the potential to make other changes in the lives of South Africans, including:
- Reducing costs for business and government, thus lowering the tax burden and boosting competitiveness;
- Making the public sector more transparent, thereby making governments more comprehensible and accountable, improving civic involvement in policy-making and reinforcing democracy at every level;
- Creating more people-centred administrations that provide full-time services;
- The development of secure sites and payment mechanisms so that mundane tasks such as applying for ID books, passports, birth and marriage certificates and the like can be done online;
- Creating an environment of inter-operability, privacy, security and accessibility to ensure that services are accessible to all on a variety of platforms, though each national, provincial and local government department will have its own needs; and
- Reducing costs and speeding up procurement processes through electronic public procurement. Savings of only 1% of such costs will translate into savings of tens of billions of rands per year.
As the technology landscape broadens to encompass all facets of our daily lives — at work, at home and on the move — we can expect to see an assortment of intelligent systems communicating and interacting with their surroundings, breathing life into the manner in which government interacts with and serves its citizens.
eGovernment is already under way and there are a number of examples of successful implementation that bode well for South Africa’s plans.
eGovernment will significantly increase the quality of public services, helping to increase the transparency of public administrations, fight corruption and encourage better implementation of public policies.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Livingstone Chilwane
Quelle/Source: The Times, 04.11.2007
