e-Governance Strategies

Technology policy is encouraged by government, business change is distributed by government, customer and corporate services are dependent on government, and democratic engagement is also exploring by government. Moreover modern governments with serious transformational intent see technology as a strategic asset and not just a tactical tool. Technology alone does not transform government, but government cannot transform to meet modern citizens’ expectations without it. So strategy’s vision is about better using technology to deliver public services and policy outcomes that have an impact on citizens’ daily live through greater choice and personalization, delivering better public services, such as health, education and pensions; benefiting communities by reducing burdens on front line staff and giving them the tools to help break cycles of crime and deprivation; and improving the economy through better regulation and leaner government. There are new information assurance risks like terrorists, organized criminals and hackers threaten information and services, and theft of identity and of personal data is of increasing concern.

The world is changing around us at an incredible pace due to remarkable technological change. The future of public services has to use technology to give citizens choice, with personalized services designed around their needs not the needs of the provider. Within the public services we have to use technology to join up and share services rather than duplicate them. Modern government both in policy making and in service delivery relies on accurate and timely information about citizens, businesses, animals and assets. Information sharing, management of identity and of geographical information, and information assurance are therefore crucial. To achieve the vision will require following strategies-

· Services enabled by IT must be designed around the citizen or business, not the provider, and provided through modern, coordinated delivery channels. This will improve the customer experience, achieve better policy outcomes, reduce paperwork burdens and improve efficiency by reducing duplication and routine processing, leveraging delivery capacity and streamlining processes.
· Government must move to a shared services culture in the front office, in the back office, in information and in infrastructure and release efficiencies by standardization, simplification and sharing.
· There must be broadening and deepening of government’s professionalism in terms of the planning, delivery, management, skills and governance of IT enabled change. This will result in more successful outcomes; fewer costly delivery failures; and increased confidence by citizens and politicians in the delivery of change by the public services.

Prospects virtually every public service depends upon large scale processes and technology, particularly the large and complex transactional systems that support individual front line public services. Most public services would simply not function at all without their reliable operation. Many of these systems are also old and custom built, use obsolete technologies, are relatively costly to maintain by modern standards, and hence stretch the capability of the whole technology industry when it comes to amending or replacing them. In addition, until recently, most technology investment has been on transactional or back office functions and not on systems to support front line staff doctors and nurses, teachers, police, social workers and many others. Systematically engage with citizens, business and front line public servants to understand and then specify the transformational changes which service providers need to meet learning from the best practice already within the public sector, from other governments and from the private sector.

As a part of e-governance strategy to create a service transformation board whose role is to set overarching service design principles, promotes best practice, signpost the potential from technology futures and challenge inconsistency with agreed standards. Develop modern channels for citizen and business access to services, and actively manage the shift in channels towards the most efficient and effective. Customer service centers, such as those for customer contact or payment processes, where there is significant scope for rationalization through sharing, particularly if central, local and other public sector bodies can team up. Human resources, finance and other corporate services, where improved professionalism, standard systems and processes and effectiveness of these corporate functions should achieve efficiency gains across the whole public sector and in the functions themselves, as well as enhancing the employee experience and realizing indirect efficiencies from better financial, personnel, knowledge and asset management. Common Infrastructure, where as government services converge around the citizen and organizations adopt commercial off shelf technology solutions, the ability to share items of common infrastructure increases. Common technology will enable joined up solutions, leverage investments and shorten the implementation timeframe of new reforms.

Data sharing is integral to transforming services and reducing administrative burdens on citizens and businesses. But privacy rights and public trust must be retained. There will be a new Ministerial focus on finding and communicating a balance between maintaining the privacy of the individual and delivering more efficient, higher quality services with minimal bureaucracy. Information management is to facilitate the move towards more collaborative working on issues that involve a range of government organizations, common standards and practices for information management will be developed, with an effective range of tools to allow the most efficient use and sharing of information to all those across government that have a legitimate need to see and use it.

Information assurance despite the difficulties of a fast moving and hostile world, underpinning IT systems must be secure and convenient for those intended to use them. The risk management model based on strategy will extend a simple, tiered architecture for its own networks to support this model in practice, with an updated application of the protective marking scheme for electronically held information. Government will also play its part to promote public confidence by leading a public/private campaign on internet safety and by a new scheme to deliver a wider availability of assured products and services.

Identity management is a holistic approach to identity management, based on a suite of identity management solutions that enable the public and private sectors to manage risk and provide cost effective services trusted by customers and stakeholders. These will rationalize electronic gateways and citizen and business record numbers. They will converge towards biometric identity cards and the National Identity Register. This approach will also consider the practical and legal issues of making wider use of the national insurance number to index citizen records as a transition path towards an identity card. Technology standards and architecture to ensure that government’s technology is cost effective in terms of public and private sector best practice. Legacy systems will be progressively refreshed by taking advantage of open standards, commercial off the shelf products and asset reuse, expenditure will be reduced and capacity freed for the transformational agenda. A regular forward look at demand and supply of IT services and an agreed forward sourcing strategy, including action to ensure capacity and competition in the market. Active management of strategic IT supplier intelligence, relationships and performance across government, using a standard assessment framework. An agreed performance plan for each major purveyor to improve that purveyor’s delivery, capability and partnering with current and future public sector customers. Support of the use of standardized contracts, services and service boundaries, and contracts and service management models. Generally IT strategies formulated by the administration have focused on the establishment of the IT infrastructure as well as the dissemination of IT related equipment. From this point in time onward, however, it is necessary for us to raise the level and improve the utilization of IT, and start taking significant steps toward the revolution of our society using the structural reform powers of IT.

When considering information technology, it’s easy to remain focused on advanced technologies rather than the people who need to use these technologies. We believe, however, that it is essential to formulate IT policies in terms of IT users and people. It is also preferable that IT technologies become infrastructures that users can utilize forgetting these technologies are even there much like air and water. In other words, IT technologies should exist in such a way that people will experience convenience and feel their outstanding effects in all areas of their lives. And, through these various improvements in our daily lives, a society will emerge in which various intellectual and cultural values will be created out of the interactions and collaborative activities that occur between people of differing backgrounds and through an environment whereby knowledge and information is freely and easily circulated and exchanged. The effective policy will help in following ways-

· Development of infrastructure that can easily connect to networks that anyone can use at anytime from anywhere for any purpose and that has no digital divide the world’s most secure IT society.
· Development of human resource bases with an eye towards the next generation education and human resource development that will produce human resources that will be competent anywhere in the world.
· Promotion of R&D that will form the foundations for the next generation IT society International contribution by providing problem solving models.
· Technologies have emerged into widespread use for instance the mobile phone and other mobile technologies which government services have yet properly to exploit.
· Sophisticated, holistic policy solutions, such as those set out in the government’s election manifesto, rely upon effective and pervasive technology systems across government and beyond for instance to support offender management through offender profiling and managed rehabilitation plans and to deliver patient choice in the health service.
· Public use of the internet and telephone continues to rise. As people experience excellent services in parts of the private and public sector, so their expectations of public services rise across the board.
· Citizens, businesses and the voluntary and community sector benefit from the better regulation, reduced paperwork and lower costs from a leaner, modern, more effective public sector.
· Public servants have better tools to undertake their jobs, and the opportunity to provide better service as a result.
· Policy makers will be better able to achieve intended outcomes in practice.
· Managers are able to free resources from back office to the front-line.
· Citizens feel more engaged with the processes of democratic government.