Slowly but surely, e-government is becoming an essential part of the countless possibilities and services that the Web offers. Upon the initiative of His Majesty King Abdullah II and with his direct support, the ambitious program aims at providing citizens with online information, assistance, and important services. Ultimately the goal is to improve the government's performance and efficiency, reduce cost, ensure transparency, develop the IT sector and the skills of the public sector, and boost e-commerce activity in Jordan.
The e-government program was not designed overnight. It started with the wider REACH initiative through a report presented to HM King Abdullah in 1999. The core of the milestone document was the acknowledgment of the power of information and communications technology (ICT) and the social and economic progress it can help achieve. From there, REACH developed into an effort to restructure and automate many governmental services and processes.
OFFTEC, a leading Jordanian provider of IT solutions, is one of the companies involved in designing and developing systems for the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology (MoICT), the government entity in charge of implementing and supervising the e-Government Initiative. Integrating the various income and sales taxation procedures into the e-government project - another major component of the whole government automation concept - is the work of another Jordanian company: Estarta. OFFTEC, however, is currently in the lead in terms of the number and importance of e-government projects awarded. Basim Said, OFFTEC's managing director, and some of its senior staff spoke to JBM and provided enlightening information.
One of the first projects OFFTEC delivered this year to MoICT is the Drivers and Vehicles Licensing Department (DVLD) component. Today, the public can go online to www.dvld.gov.jo and obtain vital information concerning their vehicles, the penalty points they may have accumulated from traffic tickets, the cost and the documents requested for numerous procedures, and so forth. An Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system is installed to guide citizen's inquiries through the telephone. Arabic and English versions of the site and IVR system have been made available. Drivers may also visit the DVLD in person for related services, where they will find newly optimized and re-engineered processes, and a queuing system installed to ease congestion. All inquiries are channeled to a newly installed inquiry tracking system to make sure they are handled on time.
The IVR automated telephone service is an integral part of the e-government scope. It allows the driver to obtain the information he or she requests in an interactive manner, with the system "understanding" what the caller is saying, answering him, and guiding him step by step to the appropriate information based on his voice input. The voice-driven flight information system at Queen Alia International Airport works in a similar manner. It's like in science fiction movies, where you start a discussion with a robot and it leads or guides you to your destination or required answer.
The official completion of the first phase of the DVLD project was the subject of an official ceremony that was held in Marka on September 13, 2005 in the presence of Prime Minister Adnan Badran; Minister of Information and Communications Technology Nadia Saeed; and Major General Muhammad Majed Al Eitan, director of the Public Security Department; as well as OFFTEC officers. Basim Said explained that most of the e-government services available today and those that will be made available in this first phase are of the informational type and not yet transactional. Simply put, this means that renewing a document like an ID card or a passport online, and having it sent to you by mail, is not ready yet, although expected to come in the next phase. For now the services on offer include information and various forms, although income tax forms can now be filled out online.
Fida Dawani and Tarek Qubain are the senior managers at OFFTEC in charge of the projects known as HEAT (Help-desk Expert Automation Tool) and the Contact Center (which provides training and technical support services to government entities) as well as the DVLD. They explained that e-government is far from being only about Web-based online services. It also involves better analysis of government procedures and formalities in order to transform them into smooth, streamlined, and standardized processes, whatever the platform that supports them: online, on-site, or over the phone. "The e-Government Initiative," added Mr. Said, "is most importantly about rigorous and thorough methodology. It's the only way to reduce wasted time."
Dawani and Qubain stressed the importance of the ongoing implementations of HEAT, the DVLD, the Contact Center, and the Department of Lands and Survey (DLS) projects. One of the possibilities that the DLS project will give citizens, for instance, is the ability to view plots of land online. Mr. Said and his team also spoke about the Secure Government Network (SGN), which links 18 ministries and institutions, in the e-government drive. Its aim is to ensure the security of the data traveling between the various locations, and perhaps even more importantly, its consistency, so as to make it easily shareable and usable by all official entities. He expressed his satisfaction with current project's progress, particularly with the positive results obtained during the training of government staff assigned to work on these projects using the systems that are being developed.
If the first phase - referred to as Fast Track Projects - seems well on its way, citizens will be anxious to see the development and activation of the next one, whereby more transactional services will be offered within the framework of the e-government.
However thrilling the idea of seeing one day (soon?) the e-government initiative fully implemented, asking the public at large may return a slightly different image. Not only are some phases of the project still in the pipeline, waiting to be executed, but also parts of what has already been done require extensive fine tuning and polishing, albeit these are minor parts. Logging on the DVLD Web site, for example, and switching from the Arabic to the English home page displays texts that could have been translated in a more professional manner, to put it mildly. Some people feel that a novel concept introduced more than five years ago should have been completely installed, tested and operational by now. Five years is a very long time by IT standards, and what we have today is simply not enough. Time is the fourth dimension in our world, and it cannot be ignored.
Autor: Jean-Claude Elias
Quelle: Zawya, 05.12.2005
