"Digital Bangladesh" is an all-encompassing idea. It is not just e-commerce, e-education, or e-banking or e-governance. But among all the components e-governance is the most important for the initiative of "Digital Bangladesh."
UNESCO describes e-governance as the public sector's use of information and communication technologies with the aim of improving information and service delivery, encouraging citizens' participation in the decision-making process and making government more accountable, transparent and effective. People's participation in decision-making and at the implementation stage is vital for any development project to be successful.
E-governance involves a change in the philosophy of governing the people of the country. It is not the mere idea of using ICT to provide services to the door steps of the citizens, but how the service will be provided and how the citizens can participate in the system. It is not really the use of IT for governance, but it is a tool to ensure good governance. It is a political decision which involves the change of the attitude of the government officials. Government officials need to understand that their very job is people oriented, to ensure that the government is working for the people. A shift of attitude of the government officials is very important to establish the e-governance and whole government mechanism needs to be reigned in to make it people oriented. Citizens' voice need to be incorporated in the process not just at the time of elections. Technology will perform miracles if it is designed to incorporate all the necessary inputs- public opinion, attitude of government officials and elected representatives and most importantly the desire to make government accountable to the citizens.
There has to be an integrated system in the government. Any system is composed of several sub-systems and various components. The system has to perform as a synergy among the various sub-systems and components. That is why it is very important to define the system first. And then the components have to be designed which will be integrated under the system. The idea of integration has to be kept in mind while designing the sub-systems. Otherwise, it will be more time consuming and costly if the components were designed without thinking of integration at the later stages.
The present situation of ICT structure in government of Bangladesh is far from the integrated system. The government is establishing different components of the system to provide different services. From the website (www.digitalbangladesh.gov.bd), it can be seen that Bangladesh government has taken various projects to implement Digital Bangladesh. But all can be depicted as sub-systems. Due to resource constraints it is not possible for the government to establish the whole system, but the idea or design of the integrated system has to be kept in mind. And the sub-system has to be implemented in a way that makes later integration in the system possible.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Samiur Rahman
Quelle/Source: The Financial Express Bangladesh, 22.01.2011
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