During his presidential campaign, Joko Widodo repeatedly vowed to implement an e-government system that would strengthen monitoring, improve accountability and ultimately curb corruption.
Coming into his second year in term, the president is finding the task easier said than done, as Indonesia struggles to cope with a lack of technical and human support for its e-government plans.
The electronic system, Jokowi said in one of his campaign speeches, will include an integrated online system for central and local government budgeting, procurement, purchasing and auditing.
At the time, he infamously assured people that setting up the electronic systems would take no more than two weeks to do. The comment has come to haunt him as to this moment, hardly any of the five e-systems specifically mentioned has been realised.
But credit should be given where credit is due. President Jokowi has made a real effort to instil an e-governance mind-set in all the members of his administration, and has also pushed local administration and the people in general to move into a more digital way of thinking.
He has repeatedly reminded his public officials about the importance of building a comprehensive online system, especially in the battle against corruption. He has stressed that Indonesia could save Rp 795 trillion (US$60.42 billion) of the total budget for procurement if all central government institutions, local administrations and state-owned enterprises implemented the system thoroughly.
The president has also signed an agreement with Singapore to establish cooperation in the field of electronic governance, which will give Indonesia the opportunity of learning from a country whose e-governance system is considered to be the third-best in the world.
Though Jokowi has is yet deliver his promise of creating e-budgeting, e-procurement, e-purchasing and e-audit systems, he has initiated the use of technology in other fields. His government has established a one-stop integrated service for investment permits and licensing, computerised school exams to prevent acts of cheating, and came up with “e-blusukan” which enables the president to continue to engage in contact with citizens in different regions and countries through videoconferences from his office.
Unprepared for Change
The spirit may be willing but the expertise in technology is weak in Indonesia. The government is struggling with the mammoth task of building a system to integrate data from all regions across the mightly archipelago. It does not help that internet penetration is still only around 30 per cent of the total population.
Setting up e-government systems may be a new challenge for the central government, but for some local administrations, it is something they are accustomed to.
Indeed some local administrations have led the way and started to implement their own little e-government systems, using online systems to integrate data from districts and villages under the city administration. The initiatives are applauded, but the problems persist.
One of the most apparent problems is the people’s readiness or more accurately, the lack thereof, for such high-tech but unintuitive systems.
The electronic tax filing system or e-filing, for instance, which was introduced last year, still alienates tax payers. Many still prefer to stick with the conventional paper forms, despite the numerous pages and long queues, as they are not familiar with the new online system.
Many taxpayers complain of the lack of information, dissemination and assistance on the new system by tax officials, adding the e-filing manual booklets given out by the tax office do not do much to help them understand how to use the system.
The slow progress of e-government systems have led to suggestions that administrations are suffering from a lack of competent officials in this particular field.
The Jakarta governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, whose administration was the first to set-up an e-budgeting system, has deemed the two-years of e-budgeting implementation a failure and blamed incompetent officials as one of the key factors to its failure.
He conceded that the officials in charge of budgeting were mentally not prepared for the change and did not have the sufficient skills to operate the systems. There were even indications, he added, that some were for some reason resisting the change and mindfully slowing down the system’s development.
Anticipating Security and Legal Issues
While infrastructure and human resources are the primary challenges, they are problems that the central and local governments are working on and are likely to resolve fairly soon.
Once those problems are resolved and the e-government systems are implemented, the government must be wary of a couple of potential problems, says Muhammad Sufyan, a lecturer from Telkom University.
The first issue that must be anticipated by the government is that related to data security. Muhammad said that every electronic system will be prone to security risks, especially those that involves information integrated in networks that is centralized and searchable.
“Therefore, a security system must be set up very early on, so that there is no cracks that can be exploited. We must remember that Indonesia is a big target for cyberattacks,” he said, as quoted by weblpse.ppidkotabarukab.info, an e-procurement website of the Kotabaru administration of South Kalimantan.
Secondly, the government must also anticipate the potential legal difficulties that comes with the establishment of a new administrative field.
“What is a server and how does it work? Why is tax for software development expensive? What is the mechanism for bandwidth payment? These are new things that may not be understood by law enforcers,” he said.
If not addressed correctly, this can cause misunderstanding that would lead to unnecessary legal disruptions that would hinder the progress of the e-government programs, he added.
Dana Sensuse, the head of the e-government lab at Universitas Indonesia, believes that in order to make the e-government program successful, the government needs longer-term planning and investment. The government, he adds, must not lose sight of creating an e-government, which is to satisfy the wishes of the people of Indonesia.
“Our president is concerned about IT. If the stakeholders – citizens – are not satisfied with these services, he can consider that e-government has failed. The indicator of the success of e-government is user satisfaction,” he said, as quoted byopengovasia.com.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Ardi Wirdana
Quelle/Source: Asean Today, 19.11.2015
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