E-government means different things to different governments. To some, e-government has been limited to providing access to basic services online, but more developed countries have evolved to transformational government, or t-government.
This according to Mike Coppin, senior director of Oracle's public sector industry business unit in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
“Transformational government entails not only the automation of existing processes, but also the transformation of business processes and the organisation,” explains Coppin. “It encourages the adoption of new radical ways of deploying ICT in the pursuit of policy objectives,” he adds.
Like many other governments around the world, SA faces an increase in demand for services from its citizens, and the challenge of providing these services within the budget constraints imposed by government, states Coppin.
“As a result of this increase in demand for services, and budget constraints, government is faced with an option of migrating from many IT legacy systems to commercial off-the-shelf solutions, or developing new IT systems in-house,” he explains.
The problem with the deployment of new systems is that it requires a great deal of planning, change management and training, Coppin argues. This presents significant challenges in terms of choice of technologies and applications, implementation, skills availability, maintenance and cost.
According to Coppin, SA represents an ideal opportunity for the adoption of the Smart City concept. “It is necessary to obtain a single view of the citizen. This, in turn, necessitates the deployment of the relevant inter-agency integration in order to be able to present a single view of the citizen.”
The Smart City initiative addresses the ever-increasing need to provide citizens with a single contact point to engage their local authority, through any channel, for any purpose, concludes Coppin.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Leigh-Ann Francis
Quelle/Source: ITWeb, 30.09.2009
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