Imagine the incredible distances travelled and intense discomfort suffered by a senior citizen queuing for hours for their pension, the frustrations of youngsters trying to secure bookings for their driver’s licence tests, the traveller who spends hours or even days between departments for an emergency passport, the recuperating patient living in a rural area who has no link to his health care provider...
SA’s public sector is under tremendous pressure to deliver on its promises of improved service delivery at all levels. By 2009, Government hopes to have advanced its suite of eGovernment solutions to a point where citizens will see and experience meaningful benefits. ICT is one of five service delivery work streams that will make up government’s Single Public Service plan.
It is this plan that is driving the interactions between Government and local ICT companies, to improve service delivery to the citizens of SA, and at the same time, ensure that technology investments deliver positive returns while meeting service delivery imperatives. The trick is to strike a balance between private sector’s profit motives and public sector deliverables.
eGovernment promises to deliver better, more efficient public services and improve the relationship between citizens and their governments. But the logistics of actually achieving this go way beyond lip service and calls for a dramatic re-engineering of the way the public sector and private enterprise currently does business.
The resulting benefits to the quality of life, industrial competitiveness and society can only be realised if administrations change the way they operate. And despite these challenges, the public sector along with the custodians of ICT IP in South Africa, have an incredible opportunity to tangibly showcase the incredible potential that the government of South Africa’s future can deliver to both citizens and businesses.
Adding ICT to government services alone does not produce eGovernment - new technologies must be implemented hand in hand with organisational change and skills development. Only then can truly citizen-centric services follow, powered through the harnessing of technology, ICT and people.
If implemented correctly, eGovernment offers much more than shorter queues:
- Reduced costs for both businesses and governments thus lowering the tax burden and boosting competitiveness.
- Public sector will be more transparent, delivering governments which are more comprehensible and accountable to citizens, improving civic involvement in policy making and reinforcing democracy at every level across South Africa.
- Administrations will be more citizen-centric, providing 24/7 personalised services to everyone.
- Secure sites and payment mechanisms mean that mundane tasks, such as applying for ID books, passports, birth and marriage certificates and the like can be done online.
- While each national, provincial and local government department will have their own unique needs, e-government will create an environment of interoperability, privacy, security and accessibility - ensuring that services are accessible to all citizens on a variety of platforms.
- Electronic public procurement will reduce costs and speed up procurement processes. Saving just 1% of such costs means saving tens of billions per year.
As the technology landscape broadens to encompass all facets of our daily lives - at work, at home and on the move - we can expect to see an assortment of intelligent systems communicating and interacting with their surroundings, breathing life into the manner in which government interacts with and serves its citizens.
eGovernment is already underway and there are a number of examples of successful implementations that bode well for SA’s plans. eGovernment will significantly increase the quality of public services, helping to increase the transparency of public administrations, fight corruption and encourage better implementation of public policies.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Livingstone Chilwane
Quelle/Source: Computing SA, 26.10.2007
