Indonesia’s new president is an enthusiast for e-government, but he faces three key challenges: interoperability, skills shortages, and a small budget, according to the head of the e-government lab at Universitas Indonesia.
The three tiers of government - central, regional and local - all have different IT systems that don’t interact, explained Dana Sensuse. “There is no integration among those applications. It’s a problem right now.”
Sensuse said that the new president should push to ensure common standards and a common architecture.
Second, he said, “many of the people who run e-government in local government lack IT skills. Those who have IT training tend to be promoted, so they replace them with new ones who do not have IT skills. It’s not sustainable.”
The third problem is budgetary, Sensuse noted. “If we want to implement e-government, the budget should be sustained. We follow an annual budget so sometimes a government has difficulty in proposing budgets because [Parliament] always rejects the IT budget.”
He called for longer-term planning and investment.
The academic said that the new President, Joko Widodo, should make citizen satisfaction the measure of his success in e-government. “Our president is concerned about IT. If the stakeholders - citizens - are not satisfied with these services, he can consider that e-government has failed. The indicator of the success of e-government is user satisfaction.”
Sensuse also called on the President to do more for mobile phone users. “We don’t yet think about mobile applications - we talk about desktop applications, which we consider a priority,” he said.
There are two notable success stories that the new President Widodo inherits, however.
The e-procurement system was mandated by central government for all agencies, ensuring that they will all use the same system by 2015. Sensuse also praised officials for providing a high level of technical support to develop IT skills in local government.
Second, he said, is a mobile system that allows citizens to report problems on projects. People can complain if there is slow progress on a large project, potentially flagging corruption.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Joshua Chambers
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 14.11.2014
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