E-Govt is defined as “the use by public bodies of information and communication technologies to deliver information/services to citizens ,external organizations, elected representatives and other stakeholders in such a way to complement, replace or improve existing delivery systems (O’Donnell,2003) while Mobile Government is extending the concept of government further with delivery of information and services to the doorsteps of the citizens in a personalized way via what they already have, the mobile phone.
Mobile Government is the next inevitable direction of evolution of e-Government. It is about modernizing the public sector organizations - hence the business processes,the work and the workers - using mobile technologies, applications and services. M-government is not only about technology but rather how technology revolutionize the public sector activities and how the society adopts these technologies.
While Nigeria is still trying to implement e-Govt, they should rather be proactive to quickly see the limitations of e-govt as expensive and largely external infrastructure driven which can only be assessable with citizens with fair knowledge of ICT technologies in a country that is grappling with huge and unbelievable illiteracy statistics. E-Govt has been dragging on for 8 years now and who knows when it will start yielding dividends. Mobile government is more targeted, personalized and cheaper to deploy with high ROI in countries where its in use.
Sweden, stocklom city launched the M-City project in 2001 and was intended to run till 2004 but was extended for unlimited period because of its success. The primary goal of the M-city project was to seek out new areas to use the mobile phones in the citizen – government relationship and how to improve the living standard of the citizens via the mobile phone. It is such a success now with most of the government information and service readily available via the mobile phone. Sweden remains till date, one of the best countries to live in Europe according to the UN Statistics.
One of the major success factor for the stocklom M-City project was that the organizers first identified the needs of the users, interests and wishes of residents, consumers and Business, then develop services to suit their needs.
In Singapore, government initiated mobile government as part of its iGov2010 master plan launched in May 2006,to extend the reach of government e-services to citizens .More than 300 government services are provisioned via the SMS from road Tax notification, crime notification to passport renewals.
Judging from M-govt readiness of index, Nigeria is more than ready. With over 50 million carrier grades SMS sent daily across all the networks in Nigeria, maturity of networks with basic SMS services, subscribers interest to consume service with strong compelling contents and in case of government services, those that significantly reduces services bottlenecks and sources of bribe payments and abilities of developers to locally churn out services that meets the demands of the subscribers.
M-Govt is easier to deploy. In fact some mobile applications can be developed from the scratch and deployed within 72 hours .It has the advantages of major access component, coming cheap. Mobiles are going for as low as N2,000 ($16) in Nigeria which is fifty times cheaper than a computer which is over N100,000 ($833) without internet subscription cost, if it is available in that locality. Basic sms usage can be learnt in a day but computer lessons will take average three months with some basic literacy.
M-government services can be moved to the mobile platform and even the private sector can provide the necessary push to launch out this new thinking at a substantial profit. I will expect that Banks by now should actually have an M-Govt desk where information,concepts, ideas and subscriber needs that they can leverage on can be incubated and developed.
Mobile government can usher in an approach to government service delivery to the citizens in a cost-effective and personalized way.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Emmanuel Okoegwale
Quelle/Source: ZDNet UK, 23.07.2008
