"We admit that promotion and awareness should be enhanced in the future. Apart from the right funding on this, the e-government should have its own marketing resource team tasked to promote e-government actively," said Hj Azhar Hj Ahmad.
The deputy permanent secretary cum Overall Government Chief Information Officer (CIO) made his remarks at the THiNKBIG Technology Forum, with regard to the "unsatisfactory" progress of e-government in Brunei over the past decade. "Spending millions on a project will be useless if it (the project) is not being used or adopted," he said.
Hj Azhar said a promotion programme was needed to "sell the benefits of e-government" and make a compelling reason for the public to use it.
With the focus of the e-government initiative now turning to delivering citizen-centric services, he stressed on the need for Brunei to capitalise on other media to reach out to the population.
One such area that should receive attention was capitalising on mobile services considering the Sultanate's high mobile penetration per capita.
"Apart from using it as a communication tool and to reach out to the public, having government services over the mobile phone or `mobile government' would be advantageous as this is also the avenue that people today are comfortable with," the deputy permanent secretary said.
Hj Azhar added that the government has identified "new" channels to reach the public and increase "e-participation", such as social networking sites, blogs and mobile media.
"Once the government starts embracing social networking sites, it will make the people more at ease with communicating to their government. This will also allow the government to take a more active role, instead of passively waiting for people to check out government websites," he added.
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Quelle/Source: Bru Direct, 28.10.2010
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