Laurence Millar, the former Government Chief Information Officer of New Zealand, sparked the debate with a question to a panel of senior officials on the future of governance and spend management.
He pointed out that Malaysia, India and Saudi Arabia each take a different approach to driving e-service uptake among citizens and businesses - they offer incentives, make their use mandatory or deploy a combination of the two.
“Which method works best, and why?” Millar asked the panel.
Avinash K. Srivastava, Joint Secretary at the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) in India, said that the launch of the MCA21 programme, which saw business registration automated in one of India’s biggest e-governance projects yet, would not have been so successful if electronic filing had not been compulsory.
Under MCA21, companies no longer need to visit MCA’s offices in person, saving time and an estimated 4000 trees a year in paper use. The project was part of the Government of India’s vision to introduce a service-oriented approach in the design and delivery of government services, and to make India more competitive globally.
Srivastava denied that the mandatory introduction of e-services had met resistance from end users. “None that I know of,” he said. “Digital penetration is large in India’s business community, and the project has been a success so far.”
By contrast, Dr Nor Aliah, Deputy Director General of the Malaysia Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU), said that the low internet penetration in Malaysia (26 per cent) has meant that obliging citizens or businesses to interact with government online would exclude too many.
This is why MAMPU’s e-Card system, which enables government services to be paid for over the internet, is optional for Malaysian citizens, said Dr Aliah.
“We cannot force people to use e-services,” she said. “The digital divide is still too wide in Malaysia and low IT literacy remains a problem.”
Dr Aliah added that a lot of effort needs to go into promoting the benefits of e-services and to “hand hold” citizens new to e-government.
MAMPU’s “No wrong door” eKL initiative, which claimed top honours at the Government Technology Awards on Friday night (October 9th 2009), has seen significant funds spent on advertising to inform ‘wired’ Malaysians living in the Klang Valley of the benefits of e-services.
Saudi Arabia’s Director General of the kingdom’s e-Government Program, Ali Al-Soma, took a similar view, and stressed the need for e-services to be of obvious value to citizens and businesses. “An e-service must sell itself,” he said.
The government of Saudi Arabia has issued citizens with free laptops, held ICT training seminars, and promoted services using funds from online transaction fees to encourage the uptake of e-services, he added.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Robin Hicks
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 11.10.2009
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