"Its in the pipeline and we are hoping to achieve something within this year," said the acting director of the e-Government National Centre (EGNC).
Hjh Mariah Hj Mohd Taha disclosed this to The Brunei Times yesterday during the three-day International Conference on e-Government and Administrative Simplification, co. organised by the Prime Minister's Office and OECD Korea Policy Centre.
In a previous interview, the acting director had said that they were in the process of implementing the "One Government Portal", which would be "an integrated coordination of all government, business and citizen clusters in a single portal and is a gateway to e-government services".
She spoke briefly on the development of the portal yesterday, saying that it would be information-based at first, aimed at giving greater ease to the public to locate specific government services from a single website.
She said that, at present, the website of the Prime Minister's Office serves this purpose to some extent. The EGNC is currently trying to consolidate all the existing government services onto the portal, she added.
Hjh Mariah also said they would then look towards making the portal transaction-based, but this would have to wait for the government e-payment facility to be ready.
She noted that facilities such as Internet banking services were already available but to "pay online, we need to have that (e-payment) infrastructure in place".
She shared that the Ministry of Finance was currently looking through the financial regulations, changing and upgrading them, where necessary, to facilitate the e-payment methodology.
The acting director also hinted that the portal could include a facility for "e-participation". 'We would like the public to also have a say in what they want from e-government," she said.
Previously, the EGNC encouraged ministries and departments to improve and update their websites to make it easier for users to navigate and connect to the websites of other government agencies from the government website they first visited.
The "One Government Portal" was among the areas of Brunei e-government drive that the EGNC were focusing on this year.
"Based on our e-government strategic plan that we launched last year, we are more or less on track this year," Hjh Mariah said when asked how far along the Sultanate was in its e-government initiative.
She highlighted that they were also currently focusing on the aspects of security and capacity-building.
She said that they were working with government IT security provider ITPSS, or Information Technology Protective Security Services, on providing e-government security for various ministries.
Hjh Mariah acknowledged that the aspect of security was a top public concern as proven with the results of the e-government citizen survey released earlier this month.
It was found that almost seven in every 10 (or 67 per cent) of the nearly 1,500 respondents said that the risks associated with access to sensitive personal details by non-authorised persons and cyber crimes may affect their willingness to use e-government services in Brunei.
The acting director remarked that she was happy with the results and the participation of the survey. "(Security) is also our first priority in e-government."
Hjh Mariah shared that they were targeting to train half the population of the civil service over the next two years. At present, there are more than 40,000 people employed in the civil service.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Ubaidillah Masli
Quelle/Source: Bru Direct, 13.05.2010
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