Governance

2nd ARC on e-Governance

Recommendations of 2nd ARC on e-Governance

Building a Congenial Environment

• Building a congenial environment is a sine qua non for successful implementation of e-Governance initiatives. This should be achieved by
  • Creating and displaying a will to change within the government
  • Providing political support at the highest level
  • Incentivizing e-Governance and overcoming the resistance to change within government
  • Creating awareness in the public with a view to generating a demand for change.

Identification of e-Governance Projects and Prioritisation

• The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has defined four stages of e-government Projects, each one more demanding than the next. These are:
  • Information: Putting information on web-sites
  • Interaction: Allowing citizens to enquire about services, procedures etc. and filling up forms and submitting them online
  • Transaction: Allowing payments online
  • Transformation: A mix of all the above and allowing the citizen to participate in governance through ICT.

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR)

• The basic idea behind such re-engineering is to avail of the opportunity provided by ICT in transforming governmental processes and not just in modifying them.
  • For every function a government organisation performs and every service or information it is required to provide, there should be a step-by-step analysis of each process to ensure its rationality and simplicity.
  • Such analysis should incorporate the viewpoints of all stakeholders, while maintaining the citizen-centricity of the exercise.

Capacity Building and Creating Awareness

• The success of an e-Governance project would depend on building human capacities in terms of necessary knowledge and skills to conceptualize, initiate, implement and sustain e-Governance initiatives across government as also on the ultimate use by citizens of the facilities created.
  • Capacity building efforts must attend to both the organizational capacity building as also the professional and skills upgradation of individuals associated with the implementation of e-Governance projects.
  • Each government organization must conduct a capacity assessment which should form the basis for training their personnel.
  • A network of training institutions needs to be created in the States with the Administrative Training Institutes at the apex.

Implementation

• Breaking up entire e-Governance projects into components/ activities
• Planning each activity in detail
• Allocating resources, both human and financial
• Commencement of activities as per the plan and continuous tracking
• Need-based mid-course correction

Monitoring and Evaluation

• Monitoring of e-Governance projects should be done by the implementing organization during implementation in the manner in which project monitoring is done for large infrastructure projects.
• Evaluation of success or failure of e-Governance projects may be done by independent agencies on the basis of parameters fixed beforehand.

Protecting Critical Information Infrastructure Assets

• There is need to develop a critical information infrastructure assets protection strategy.
• This should be supplemented with improved analysis and warning capabilities as well as improved information sharing on threats and vulnerabilities.