The high level of confidence puts Malaysia among the top countries in the world in terms of perception of online government safety, just behind Denmark (40%) and Singapore (39%), equal to Finland, and ahead of Norway and Sweden (both 32%).
The irony is that Malaysians lag far behind the citizens of those countries when it comes to actually using e-government services.
With between 49% to 57% of their people using online government services, Sweden, Norway, Singapore, Denmark and Finland are among the heaviest users in the world.
In contrast, Malaysia – together with Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Hungary – is in the bottom five of the survey, with only 12% of its trusting citizens having used e-government services in the past 12 months, according to the survey.
The study did not provide possible explanations for the low-usage rate, but TNS Malaysia managing director said: “More needs to be done to assess why the uptake of online services (in Malaysia) is slow.”
“The public will still need to be encouraged and educated on the benefits of using the Internet,” she added.
But the public can hardly be made to bear the entire blame for such lethargic use of e-government services. According to another global e-government study, the “usability” of local e-government services could also be questioned.
Released in May, the Benchmarking E-Government: A Global Perspective study by the United Nations’ Division for Public Economics and Public Administration (UNPAN) and the American Society for Public Administration surveyed e-government sites of 190 UN member countries.
While praising Malaysia’s e-government infrastructure as above the regional average, the study found that local e-government services were “barely above interactive level”, with “citizen-centric components ... only minimally present”.
The study defined interactive e-government sites as those displaying “sophisticated levels of interaction between service providers and users is present, like e-mail and post comments features.” These sites also let users search specialised databases and download forms and applications, and submit them. The content and information on such e-government sites are also regularly updated.
Not surprisingly, countries with high e-government use – as ranked by the TNS survey – were placed in the higher category of sites with transactional presence by the UNPAN study.
The study said countries such as Singapore, Norway and Finland had transactional sites that provided “complete and secure transactions like obtaining visas, passports, birth and death records, licences, and permits, and where the user could actually pay online for a service like parking fines and car registration fees.”
So, until the day Malaysia’s e-government sites provide such features extensively, it would be safe to expect no dramatic change in their use, even if Malaysians are a trusting lot.
Quelle: the star
