The ICT Ministry and the Software Industry Promotion Association (Sipa) have launched a "One Stop Services" payment gateway, after piloting the technology in Phuket for one year, at http://www.thaionestop.org.
The SOA (Services Oriented Architecture) based portal provides partners with a secure, low-cost and effective means to offer online or one-stop services.
More than just a payment gateway, the services oriented architecture (SOA) approach means that customers can interactively see their account status and balance.
The Sipa press release called the one stop services portal "a gateway to e-Government" and noted that people living in rural areas often lacked access to easy payment for their utilities, healthcare, immigration, education and employment services. Sipa said the one stop service SOA bus was an easy way to go online for both government and private sector companies.
The agreement with the Public Sector Development Commission was so that they could build on this platform and move towards full e-government.
The Provincial Electricity Authority said that they had first considered online billing six years ago, but the cost then was around 20 million baht for the software and only a small handful of people could access it.
Now, with the one stop service platform, they have been able to do it at a fraction of the cost and at a time when many more people are online. Initially they have set a target of one million households, out of their 14 million customers, to use the service.
Meanwhile, Pathum Thani province, which is effectively the northeastern part of greater Bangkok, has tied the service into the Pathum Thani Counter Service programme.
With kiosks located at the Zeer Rangsit department store, anyone can now carry out around 40 different transactions at the centre.
However, red tape still made for some interesting quirks. For instance, it is possible to use the service to register for a name change, but not to get married - marriage law requires that the marriage registration officer be present in person.
Sipa president Dr Arvuth Ploysongsaeng said that the Thai software industry was growing at a rate of between 20 and 30 percent a year and that projects like this would help feed that growth and lead to more people wanting a career in computer science and software engineering.
He said that Sipa had set a long term goal of getting as many Thai software companies certified to the CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) level 5 as possible.
One example he gave was that today Thailand had job vacancies for over 100,000 programmers in the field of embedded software, but the total output from Thai universities was around 20,000 a year.
Sipa board chairperson Kruewal Somana also thanked the partners present at the launch for trusting Sipa with their online payment services. She said that soon most people would be paying their bills and transactions online and thus saving time, fuel and uplifting the quality of life.
Kruewal said that the same concept of SOA was also being applied to certain clusters, such as the tourism C-Commerce (collaborative commerce) project.
She told the audience to just think of the possibilities of what could be achieved if a SOA services bus could be applied to the agricultural sector.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Don Sambandaraksa
Quelle/Source: Bangkok Post, 25.10.2006
