There are known unknowns, and unknown unknowns; things we don’t know, and things we don’t know that we don’t know. Korean e-government has successfully negotiated the former – over the last 20 years rolling out full informatisation across central government, and achieving consistent recognition from the United Nations and other bodies for the excellence of the country’s e-government delivery.
Jung-Hyub Kang is Assistant Minister, Information Strategy Office at the Ministry of Public Administration & Security (MOPAS), a role that is equivalent to GCIO. He says that the next step will be to take a series of leaps into the dark: putting in place a greener, environmentally sustainable approach to running the machinery of government; moving toward a broader engagement with the wants and needs of citizens; and perhaps most transformational of all, making the enabling power of government ever present in citizens’ lives.
What follows is the story of Korea’s transformation journey in the words of a man who has played a key role in charting its course.
The role of MOPAS Our ministry (MOPAS) is in charge of overseeing the informatisation of the Korean government, which broadly serves two main aims: delivering services to citizens, and increasing government efficiency.
The road to informatisation Informatisation became a familiar term in Korea 20 years ago. We began with electronic systems that help make work processes in government more efficient.
In 2005 and 2006, much effort went into further boosting IT infrastructure and capacity – we needed to ensure the foundations for informatisation were laid. We have now deployed IT to cover all government services, so our informatisation work is complete within government. Then we looked more closely at security and back-up. We then moved on to apply information technologies that improve the lives of the average citizen wherever possible. We refer to these technologies as ‘Ubiquitous-IT’ (U-IT), a good example of which is RFID. They facilitate a broad range of ‘intelligent’ government services, from child protection to the handling of refuse collection.
Automating existing processes Before informatisation we needed to think seriously about Business Process Reengineering (BPR). But before we could implement BPR, we needed to analyse what the work environment should be, and based on this analysis we can take the next step, which in our case is the Information Strategy Plan. The system works in such a way that existing processes can easily be reviewed and updated.
An important precondition for informatisation is that the organisations involved cooperate and collaborate. We had to establish what was needed and what was wanted by all the partners involved. It is critical that the points of view of each party are taken into consideration – it is often the case that these views differ markedly, so there is a need for flexibility.
Every four to five years we go through a review process to see what needs to be updated and, where necessary, expanded. Naturally, with the rise of IT in government we have become more efficient and the quality of services has increased. But while we have saved money through the use of IT, it is undeniably an expensive investment. We are exploring new ideas for how to lower the cost of IT, and the most popular focus area right now is cloud computing.
This focus is not new, however. In Korea’s case, our interest in the cloud started about five years ago. Back then, we called the phenomenon utility computing. On the hardware side, all of our systems are now fully unified and consolidated. Five years ago, all of the data centres operated by individual ministries were consolidated into two data centres.
It’s better to share Our databases are still operated locally, but we have consolidated many of our services. We go by the principle that where information is not secret we try to encourage inter-departmental pooling of information. Currently, about a third of data is shared between all government ministries. For example, MOPAS has responsibility for citizen registration data, but this can be used all the other ministries – and by the finance sector. Korea’s public sector is actively trying to share information, for example transport-related data, which isn’t particularly sensitive and can easily be shared. Meanwhile, we hope that new services will be driven by the private sector. This means a shift of focus to open data.
Open data presents Korea with a tremendous opportunity to further modernise our government. This is new territory. But we think that openness and sharing – with those outside government as well as within it – is the right path for public sector modernisation.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Robin Hicks; Interview: James Smith
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 20.07.2010
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