I have spent much time these past few weeks immersed in discussions with public sector CFOs from countries such as Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, in an effort to uncover how the role of CFOs has changed over time - their priorities, their plans for their respective organisations, and even the departmental issues that keep them awake at night.
With that, I’ll be sharing some highlights of my conversations with key people I’ve had the privilege to speak with. More detailed versions of them will appear in the next issues of the magazine so do watch our Government CFO space!
When we look back at the last decade, CFOs were largely restricted to their responsibility as the keeper of financial data and were tasked with providing the top level management with relevant information and financial projections needed to support its various activities.
At present, shifting from a focus on transaction-based activities to more strategic roles in the organisation, CFOs are now given the task to help their organisation figure out where they want to be, and give advice on what they should do to get there.
According to Susan Middleditch, CFO and Group Executive for business operations at the Department of Employment, Economic Development and Innovation in Queensland, Australia, the role of the CFO has become far more strategic now than ever before.
“When I was appointed in my first CFO role as finance manager 20 years ago, I was there to fix up any mistakes people made,” she reminisces. “My role now is very much one of being a facilitator and a negotiator. I oversee and negotiate the budget so the department can access funds in a timely manner.”
Middleditch summarised her job then as simply being responsible for “making sure that our budget allows us to do what we need to do.”
“Now, being the CFO means you have to traverse a journey along a business path. Basically, it’s not about counting money anymore, it’s about a whole heap of things and how a CFO would strategically balance them out.
“It’s far less about accounting and far more about everything else,” Middleditch concluded.
The evolution from such traditional number crunching role towards a more strategic one is sure to be accompanied by even more demanding and “nontraditional” challenges.
Apart from making sure that the books are balanced and that the correct accounting treatments are instituted, CFOs are challenged to bring costs down, whilst figuring out innovative ways for their organisation to further improve financial accountability and organisational efficiency.
In my effort to investigate common challenges surrounding public financial management, I was able to narrow down common issues such as budget allocation, regulatory compliance, lack of the necessary skill sets, and lack of an Integrated Financial Management System as departmental challenges experienced by some public sector CFOs in region.
However, as for shared challenges that are common to government ministries across the region, I’ve found it quite a bit of a challenge as they all differ in terms of the maturity of their financial management systems.
According to Shigeko Hattori, Director of the Public Management, Financial Sector, and Trade Division at the Asian Development Bank, it is difficult to cite shared institutional or organisational challenges experienced by countries in the region as it is heavily dependent on the resources made available, the location, the culture, the context in which these CFOs (or Finance undersecretaries or Directors for some) operate, the structure of the government, and many more.
With Hattori’s experience in implementing various public financial management projects in the region, she recommends public sector CFOs to leverage performance-based financial management.
“Performance-based financial management is quite important as it allows decision makers to not only look at numbers and figures but also on results which will enable them to see what they are doing, where they are now, how they should allocate their resources, and from there they can fine tune their public financial management systems,” she says.
Hattori’s recommendation echoes sentiments by Neil Arthur Edmonds, Assistant Secretary General for Finance in Malaysia’s Ministry of Works and also his counterparts from Indonesia and the Philippines.
One of the joys of being a journalist at FutureGov magazine is the opportunity to meet, network, and learn from the experiences of high-level decision makers in the public sector. As my conversations continue to build momentum, and I uncover more interesting details about the workings of our region’s public finance, I can’t help but also feel excited about FutureGov’s upcoming GCFO Summit happening this 12-13 July in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
The GCFO Summit will bring together the region’s public sector CFOs to talk about best practices and lessons learned in public financial management, and as well as issues that matter most to them, and trends that will matter to them - something that has certainly piqued the interest of the CFO’s I’ve been interviewing for the magazine.
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Fastest! Most efficient! Cheapest! Most secure! Reliable! Cutting-edge!
These are some of the words that many vendors use to get your attention. After all, vendor pitches and their brochures are designed to make each and every product “best in class”. So how does one juggle all these vendors who offer similar products? How do you determine what is the right mix of price versus performance? Is the SLA in the contract fair? Is the budget over-run justified?
After many discussions with your public sector peers, as well as with many of the vendors themselves, I wanted to take the opportunity to share what I think is are useful engagement tools when working with vendors.
Vendors can be a government’s best friend
Many vendors allocate significant resources to development and have a vast amount of collective experience in their teams. The benefit here is that public sector agencies can take advantage of all this expertise and guidance to craft a useful strategic roadmap for ICT implementation. Take advantage of the vendor’s expertise asking what they would do and what they have done; two heads are always better than one.
Identify what you want, not what they can do
Every agency in each country has slight variations in its priorities. What defines a successful project is determined by the extent to which the users - who may be agency stakeholders or citizens themselves - benefit from the technology. Irrespective of what a vendor’s product can do, agencies need to set this goal, and partner with vendors to take them along with the journey. Adopting the latest technology “just because” usually results in under-utilisation as displayed by the overwhelming redundancy that exists in many infrastructures. Get what you need, not what they have.
References, references, references
In theory, anything sounds good: Cloud computing, virtualisation, outsourcing. The real test comes in ensuring that theory equals reality. While asking vendors for reference sites and case studies is a start, ensure that the available references mimic the similar challenges that are being faced by you. Many vendors have North America or European case studies; for a start many of these agencies have budgets that are significantly larger, with a user base that has drastically different requirements. Ask what the vendor has done in this space, in this region, that is directly applicable to the current challenge at hand.
Not every standard is standard
Certain solutions such as outsourcing, managed services and cloud services are extremely promising and worthy of extensive consideration. One factor that changes pricing is the Service Level Agreement (SLA) of the contract As the needs are different, so should the solution be - for some agencies, there may be a need for a 99.999% up-time, whereas others may save some taxpayer dollars with a lower commitment. Do check with the vendors for more details on this kind of flexibility. Never take things at face value because the customer is always right!
$$$
One of the joys of procurement is the discussion on pricing. How can each agency ensure that it is getting the best pricing? FutureGov has seen some cases where the same hardware is procured at a price 100% higher within the same country! Vendors usually have a large pricing discount scheme, ranging from the quantity, type of service, time of the year and the level of relationship built with the respective agency. It is a well-known fact that some vendors become a lot more flexible on pricing as they approach their quarter end. Maximise the negotiation by centralising the procurement process with other agencies (US has the GSA) to get a government-wide costing, or consider a Shared Services model which appoints one lead agency for ICT matters. Be careful when exceeding financial limits on ICT projects, because for some, there won’t be a bail out.
FutureGov does a lot of research around studying some of the procurement trends, ICT adoption and identifying key technologies that will make a difference to the future of government. Do reach out to us with the projects you have, the challenges you face and the successes you accomplish!
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When computers first became mainstream tools, the idea that they might beat human beings at chess—a complex and organic game—seemed absurd. In 1996, however, Deep Blue, an IBM machine, beat the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a game. A certain Rubicon had been crossed, and computers, by everyone’s reckoning, would only get better at chess.
A similar thing seems to be in the works for film-making: it is predicted that computer animation will integrate digitised environments and beings so seamlessly within real ones that viewers will no longer be able to tell where nature ends and data beings.
Are there parallels in public administration, where technology has reached or will reach a threshold? A limit crossed, beyond which the technological architecture can be assumed to be pervasive and powerful enough to allow bureaucracy and administration to fade into the background, to be replaced by policy acting real-time in citizens’ lives?
OneInbox - an electronic service that allows individuals and businesses to receive correspondences from government agencies - will be inaugurated by Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority early next year, and the government plans to have about a third of the country’s population using it within three years. Meanwhile, the recently launched personal.com allows the secure management of personal data and the ability to share it selectively with individuals and organisations. Soon, we may not have to fill in forms, and will simply need to oversee the release of data to agents or entitites we authorise personally.
Automation has percolated through layers of legislative and bureaucratic inertia and reached the individual, and initiatives like these will go quite a long way in helping eliminate repetitive but necessary tasks. Citizen service delivery may be one of the first few aspects of governments going electronic to provide a fully automated, seamless, end-to-end digital experience to all stakeholders. This is not only because governments are prioritising citizen engagement and inclusion, but also because the participation of the private sector in these transactions is based on sound and extremely profitable models for the industry.
What would be the best way to reach this goal of a fully automated framework within all sectors of government activity? A fully open government would certainly help: a body that makes its influences transparent in every possible sense, and one that is willing to share what it does, but is also willing to tap into the sharing of others.
In the security space, governments using social media are in many ways hastening the process of automation, as the Dutch Police force has managed to do. Last week, Roy Mente, Chief Innovation Officer, Koninklijke Marechaussee, and Elle De Jong, Chief Inspector, Dutch National Police, Project Manager, Research & Innovation in the recently concluded FutureGov First Responder Forum, demonstrated a system they had developed.
Called ComProNet, it integrates GIS, Twitter and other social media networks with their in-house monitoring system to trace, track and eventually arrest law-breakers. The system will depend on citizens providing accurate data using their smartphone cameras, tweets and other multimedia or crowdsourcing tools. The system will go live by the end of this year, and as far as integrated technological platforms are concerned, it can be argued to be almost aesthetically “beautiful” in its simplicity and wide ranging applicability.
In 2003, Grady Booch (a pioneer in the field of Software Architecture) from the IBM Software group outlined nine factors that determine the uppermost limits of what technology is able to accomplish:
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The laws of physics
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The laws of software
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The challenge of algorithms
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The difficulty of distribution
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The problems of design
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The problems of functionality
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The importance of organisation
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The impact of economics
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The influence of politics
The laws of physics are impossible to change and human beings can only discover the algorithms that their collective intelligence can handle. Organisations, though - especially governments - can closely examine the way they handle factors four to ten. If the most difficult parts (one to three) are taken care of and the technology does exist out there to bring a real change to the way governments operate, they will then be able to make optimal use of it.
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Thailand right now is facing the worst floods in half a century. At present, local authorities in Bangkok are advising residents to evacuate as floodwaters threaten southwestern neighbourhoods in Thailand’s bustling capital.
The national death toll from floods since late July has reached 536.
With the crisis in Thailand far from over, the government and various participating groups are streamlining their efforts in order to help victims get needed aid at the right place and at the right time. During these efforts, quite a number of crowdsourcing platforms have emerged and have proved to be mission critical for the Thai Government, first responders, and citizens.
(Listed below are crowdsourcing applications relating to the flooding in Thailand. Take note that all these websites are only available in Thai, so it is advised that non-Thai speakers navigate them using Google chrome’s online translator.)
· Thai Crisis Planner and Reporter - An application that was developed through a joint collaborative effort by the Chulalongkorn Univeristy and Thailand’s Ministry of Information and Communications Technology. The system integrates the ICT Ministry’s flood-report system with the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) developed by Chulalongkon University to enable users provide real-time situation reports, post floodwater levels, waterflow trends, and photos of the flood situation.
· Is my house flooded? – Is a website where Bangkok residents who evacuated their respective homes can simply enter their postal address and find out the flood situation near their homes.
· Gamling.org – The website is named after the royal project that deals with detaining water. It allows users to log-in on Facebook to report flood situations by putting pins on the map available in the website. Users can also contribute information on floodwater levels and also photos of flood situations in their area.
· Thaiflood.com – The website was organised by a citizen group has since then coordinated the largest flood relief efforts. The website enables users to pledge relief donations and participate in various other relief activities listed in the website.In addition, it highlights areas where there is an urgent need for emergency assistance.
By simply tweeting or posting a picture on the abovementioned websites, citizens are given an opportunity to easily and effectively be involved in helping and facilitating relief and emergency efforts in the country.
Recently, there has been much talk about the numerous benefits of crowdsourcing or Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). Although volunteered data has always been present in some way or form, it has never before existed on such prolific scale as evidenced from the plethora of emerging online platforms that allows users to generate and share both spatial and non-spatial data.
This has proved to be a powerful source of novel data, particularly in areas such as disaster management, public safety, and also areas where there is not much information available. It is especially important in developing countries and areas where reliable spatial and non-spatial data is scarce and the digital divide is more delineated.
These emerging social media platforms - combined with crowdsourcing - breeds useful conversation and interaction, which can help crisis teams and official responders, arrive at well-informed decisions at such critical times.
Location-aware social networks for example, have a huge potential for enabling people in a community to help themselves during a crisis by visualising reports on hot spots and trends, thereby helping users validate incidents and also increase the overall situational awareness.
Going forward, emerging social media platforms presents a door of opportunities for public sector organisations to explore what can be done to turn crowdsourced data into even more actionable information, one that can be visually translated into something relevant and is easy for users to understand. At present, as we are just beginning to take advantage of these technologies, I cannot wait to see what’s in store for crowdsourcing/VGI in the future, and since governments are fully leveraging online and mobile platforms to incite citizen engagement, now I can’t help but wonder - what’s next? Crowdsourcing via SmartTV perhaps?
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First of all, we would like to congratulate the winners of all 17 categories of FutureGov Awards 2011! Each trophy represents the vision, the hard work and the commitment for better efficiency and improved service delivery within the public sector.
The geographic spread of winners came as a (pleasant) surprise – the judges did not expect that so many countries would be recognised while drawing the shortlist and doing the final round of judging.
This year, Australia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan each bagged two awards home. Among the winners are also agencies from Bahrain, India, Korea, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.
That said, we should celebrate not only the Award winners, but the shortlisted agencies, and many others who have dedicated hard work towards public sector modernisation. We can’t make everyone a winner of FutureGov awards, but we are committed to continuously celebrate the successes in Asia’s public sector.
Without boring you too much with my monologue, here is the list of winners:
Government Organisation of the Year
Housing Development Board, Singapore:
Redefining business landscape with boundary-less IT ecosystem
Education Organisation of the Year
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University:
3C
Healthcare Organisation of the Year
Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, Singapore:
IT-enabled faster, safer, hassle-free patient care
Technology Leadership
Beijing municipal bureau of city administration and law enforcement:
Map Service Mode Based on Innovation 2.0 for City Administration
Wireless Government
Ministry of Fisheries, New Zealand:
Project IKA
Connected Govt
Hong Kong Police Force:
Unified Digital Communications Platform for Hong Kong SAR Government
E-Government
Seoul Metropolitan Government, Korea:
Seoul GIS Portal System for citizens
Service Innovation
Taipei City Government, Taiwan:
UI-Taipei
Information Management
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare:
METeOR metadata online registry
Green Government
Dhurakij Pundit University, Thailand:
Back Office Service project and “DPU COOOL PRINT” project
Business Process
Controller General of Account, Government of India:
Central Plan Scheme Monitoring System
Govt Transformation of the Year
Haining Bureau of Justice, China:
Weibo Gong Wen (Official Documents Exchange via Microblogging)
Public Sector Organisation of the Year– ASEAN
Da Nang Department of Information and Communications, Vietnam:
Development of E-government platform for Da Nang City, Vietnam by 2015
Public Sector Organisation of the Year – North Asia
Financial Data Centre, Ministry of Finance, Taiwan:
e-invoices
Public Sector Organisation of the Year– SAARC
Department of Pensions, Sri Lanka:
ePensions
Public Sector Organisation of the Year – Oceania
Government of South Australia, Australia:
Ask Just Once
Public Sector Organisation of the Year – Middle East
Bahrain eGovernment Authority:
National Authentication Framework
FutureGov team would also like to thank the sponsors of the awards - Crimson Logic, Fuji Xerox, HP, Intermec, Motorola, RIM, SAP and Visa, with whose generous support the campaign, which lasted for the entire year involving multiple complex operations, was made possible.
The winning projects will be profiled in FutureGov magazine; and we will invite winning agencies to participate in upcoming FutureGov conferences to share their experiences, as well as pain points in the journey.
Nomination for FutureGov Awards 2012 will be open very soon. If you have any enquiry about the awards, please feel free to get in touch with me jianggan.li@alphabet-media.com
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It definitely was a privilege to be in the FutureGov Summit, to have an opportunity to engage high-level delegates from over 20 countries in thought-pondering conversations about their modernisation initiatives and development goals , and also co-facilitate the Digital Inclusion table with Abul Rizvi, Deputy Secretary of Australia’s Department of Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy, has given me the perfect vantage point to watch how regions are developing and how different they are from each other– basically, I had the best front row seat to the region’s modernisation development and it doesn’t get any better than that.
The FutureGov Summit is the longest-running and most prestigious, by invitation only, public sector modernisation event in Asia. For more than seven years, the Summit has brought together senior-level decision makers from across Asia Pacific, Europe and North America to share experiences and insights on public sector modernisation.
On the Digital Inclusion table, Haiyan Qian, Director of the Division for Public Administration and Development Management at the United Nations (UN), shared to us how countries can leverage ICT, most especially today’s mobile technologies, to improve public governance and to increase efficiency in achieving the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.
“Digital Divide is a major hurdle in overall national development, however with today’s innovative technologies, this gives us an opportunity to address this issue,” she said.
Early this year, the UN declared internet access as a human right. This includes free information flow and as well as access to infrastructure—cables, modems, computers and software.
It likewise encouraged states to include Internet literacy skills in school curricula, and support similar learning modules outside of schools.
True enough, and based from our conversations with the delegates in the Digital Inclusion table, governments at present are headed to that direction.
Delegates from Vietnam, Thailand, India, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia shared their accomplishments in their use of telecentres to make internet more accessible to citizens located in rural areas.
On a personal note, I was very much interested to learn how these telecentres (or community e-centres for some) can be self-sustaining, so when our delegates shared how their telecentres are growing, I eagerly listened as they talked about how their telecentres are “revolutionising” the services they offer (e-health, training,etc) so they can generate revenue and be more sustainable and not rely on government funds.
The National Broadband Network (NBN) was also a topic which was of great interest with the delegates. Delegates from Bahrain, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Pakistan, and Australia shared their respective experiences and challenges in leveraging the NBN to better streamline public services.
It was also very interesting how delegates from countries with nearly 80-90 per cent internet penetration rate are currently using NBN and their plans in a few year’s time – South Korea for example, is leveraging their high-speed broadband internet access to provide telemedicine in rural areas.
On imparting the benefits on NBN, Abul Rizvi shared this video with me on how the NBN can transform day-to-day living, I found this very interesting, and hope readers of this blog will do too.
Overall, the event was a huge success. The use of IDT tables encouraged more in-depth conversations with the delegates and the speakers to share best practices and lessons learned with each other – with some delegates approaching me to schedule one-on-one meetings with speakers/ fellow delegates for more detailed and technical conversations and consultations.
With the success of this year’s biggest public sector modernisation event, I can’t wait to find out what surprises and learnings are in store for next year’s FutureGov Summit!
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In the past, when the government identified a problem, it would make a plan, do necessary studies, consult the experts, and carry out the implementation.
That was because the government had the best resources in the society, and was able to mobilise these resources most effectively for the benefits of addressing specific challenges. Think about how government IT started in the 70s and 80s - teams of in-house implementers were built to handle the projects which private sector did not have the capacity of doing.
However that is the old approach; following the strong growth of the region’s private IT sector, crowdsourcing, getting the interesting and innovative ideas from the public from even before the conception stage of a programme, has been gaining ground. This is a natural evolution, especially when more and more people are realising the benefits of open government and jumping onto the bandwagon.
One interesting example to cite is challenge.gov, an online challenge platform by the US General Services Administration that empowers the US Government and the public to bring the best ideas and top talent to bear on the nation’s most pressing challenges, the latest milestone in the Administration’s commitment to promote innovation.
On Challenge.gov, government agencies post challenges where the public can propose a submission, discuss the challenge, and show support with incentives to encourage citizens to participate.
And as governments open more datasets to the public, we see a lot of data “mashup” competitions; way back 2008 by the UK government until recently by New Zealand and Australia. This month, Taipei City Government is going to announce the winners of its own App development contest, based on the open data platform it just launched.
These competitions serve as practical demonstrations of the benefits of open access to government data, engaging and challenging users to provide innovative ways to mash up public information. In one word, it is a very cost effective way to reap the benefits of opening government data, for businesses, citizens, government itself and the society as a whole.
As more enabling technologies become available, the further need for innovation follows. These government-public collaboration on innovation not only takes in ideas to make the government perform better, but also improves the relationships between the government and the public, and makes engagement more effective.
At our social media training for government, we often hear stories from participating delegates that involving the citizens right from the beginning of policy formulation or project conception actually would win government more supporters than they previously had.
In an interview which was featured in the August 2011 issue of FutureGov, James Kang, Singapore’s GCIO, says that co-creation between the government and citizens is the best way moving forwards to solve the complexity that the government could not single-handedly deal with.
Plato once said that “necessity is the mother of invention”; but in the age where man has created almost everything he could possibly need, the new challenge lies in innovation.
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The editorial team at FutureGov are in a very privileged position to be able to watch the development of the region’s public sector from the vantage point of the magazine - but nothing gives us more insight in to the real world developments occurring within government, education and healthcare organisations than the annual review of nominations for the FutureGov Awards.
Since its inception in 2007, FutureGov Awards have attracted 2480 nominations from more than 20 countries across Asia Pacific. The evolution of FutureGov awards reflects the public sector’s modernisation in the region in the same period. Civil servants are moving beyond building platforms and connecting dots, to delivering real value to citizens, businesses and their colleagues. This is what the awards are intended to recognise.
It was a very rewarding, yet rather difficult, process to shortlist from the many deserving projects from different parts of the region; and I am pretty sure it will be equally hard, if not harder, to select the winners from this list: each year it is a common refrain among the judging committee that separating winners from runners up has become more difficult. The quality of the nominations, already impressive over the past few years, continues to improve. We also see many good and commendable projects coming from some of the emerging countries. That is certainly very encouraging.
The winners will be announced at the FutureGov Awards Gala Dinner, held on the 14th of October in Putrajaya, Malaysia, in conjunction with the annual FutureGov Summit.
Without boring you too much with my monologue, here is the shortlist, arranged by category – let’s wish them all the best!
Government Organisation of the Year
Centre for Good Governance, India:
Online recruitment processing system for Andhra Pradesh Public Service Commission
Housing Development Board, Singapore:
Redefining business landscape with boundary-less IT ecosystem
Ministry of Finance, Thailand:
Ministry of Finance Operation Centre
Coast Guard Administration, Taiwan:
Establishing information security events for efficient information security management
Adelaide City Council, Australia:
Adelaide City Council Business Model
Education Organisation of the Year
National Institute of Education, Singapore:
Research data centre
Centre for Instructional Technology, National University of Singapore:
Social Personal Learning Environment
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University:
3C
Dhurakij Pundit University, Thailand:
Back Office Service project and DPU COOOL PRINT Project
I-Shou University, Taiwan:
Campus Sustainability
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology:
HKUST strategic plan (2011-16)
Healthcare Organisation of the Year
Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, Singapore:
IT-enabled faster, safer, hassle-free patient care
Integrated Health Information Systems, Singapore:
Close-loop medication management system (CLMM)
Hospitals in Kegalle District, Sri Lanka:
Hospital Health Information Management System
Kwong Wah Hospital, Hong Kong:
IT-enabled patient access to services
Kaohsiung Veterans General Hospital, Taiwan:
Healthcare enhancement and leverage platform
Technology Leadership
Financial Data Centre, Ministry of Finance, Taiwan:
e-invoices
e-Government Innovation Centre, Brunei:
e-Government Innovation Centre
Housing Development Board, Singapore:
Redefining business landscape with boundary-less IT ecosystem
Beijing municipal bureau of city administration and law enforcement:
Map Service Mode Based on Innovation 2.0 for City Administration
Bahrain eGovernment Authority:
Silah Gulf (National Contact Centre)
Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation, India:
Off-site real-time monitoring system
Wireless Government
Government of South Australia:
EzyReg Mobile
Gangnam District, Seoul, Korea:
healthy city project
City of Alaminos, The Philippines:
Wireless internet-based governance project (WINGS)
Ministry of Fisheries, New Zealand:
Project IKA
Singapore Civil Defence Force:
Emergency Wireless Alert Notification System (EWAN)
Connected Govt
Revenue Service of East District, Kaoshiung City, Taiwan:
KKP (Kaohsiung County, Kaohsiung City, Pingtung County) Resources -Integration Project of Vehicle Inspection
Taipei City Government, Taiwan:
The 1999 citizen hotline of Taipei City Government
Ministry of Education, Brunei:
e-Hijrah
Bahrain eGovernment Authority:
National Enterprise Architecture
Ministry of Finance, Singapore:
Alliance for Corporate Excellence
Hong Kong Police Force:
Unified Digital Communications Platform for Hong Kong SAR Government
E-Government
Department of Pensions, Sri Lanka:
ePensions
Seoul Metropolitan Government, Korea:
Seoul GIS Portal System for citizens
Government of South Australia:
EzyReg Mobile
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare:
MyHospitals.gov.au
Ministry of Industry and Trade, Vietnam Electronic:
Certificate of Origin System
Service Innovation
Taipei City Government, Taiwan:
UI-Taipei
Seoul Metropolitan Government, Korea:
Information Centre for Seoul Real Estate
National Archives of Australia:
RecordSearch Forum
Ministry of Defence, Singapore:
NS Mobile
Singapore Police Force:
iWitness
Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault Prevention Committee, Ministry of the Interior, Taiwan:
The 113 Protection Hotline
Information Management
Health Services Division, Ministry of Defence, Malaysia:
Malaysian Armed Forces Dental Services Information System
General Office for Popluation & Family Planning, Ministry of Health, Vietnam:
Population and Family Planning Management Information System
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare:
METeOR metadata online registry
Singapore Land Authority:
GeoSpace
Singapore Civil Defence Force:
Fire Safety Online Processing System
Green Government
Canberra Institute of Technology:
CIT print management solution
Dhurakij Pundit University, Thailand:
Back Office Service project and “DPU COOOL PRINT” project
I-Shou University, Taiwan:
Campus Sustainability
Christchurch City Council, New Zealand:
New integrated printing project
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Vietnam:
The integrated data centre project
Business Process
Haining Bureau of Justice, China:
Weibo Gong Wen (Official Documents Exchange via Microblogging)
Controller General of Account, Government of India:
Central Plan Scheme Monitoring System
Taipei City Government, Taiwan:
The 1999 citizen hotline of Taipei City Government
eGovernment Authority, Bahrain:
Integrated Workflow Management System
Ministry of Finance, Singapore:
Alliance for Corporate Excellence
Govt Transformation of the Year
Haining Bureau of Justice, China:
Weibo Gong Wen (Official Documents Exchange via Microblogging)
Financial Data Centre, Ministry of Finance, Taiwan:
Individual income tax e-deduction statement project
Songpa-gu Office, Seoul, Korea:
U-Songpa Safety Service
South Australian Government:
Community engagement to update South Australia’s Strategic Plan
Ministry of Finance, Singapore:
Alliance for Corporate Excellence
Public Sector Organisation of the Year– ASEAN
Singapore Land Authority:
GeoSpace
Ministry of Finance, Thailand:
Official Document Workflow Integration
Da Nang Department of Information and Communications, Vietnam:
Development of E-government platform for Da Nang City, Vietnam by 2015
Local government unit of Tagudin, the Philippines:
e-Tagudin
Integrated Health Information Systems:
Close-loop medication management system
Public Sector Organisation of the Year – North Asia
Haining Bureau of Justice, China:
Weibo Gong Wen (Official Documents Exchange via Microblogging)
Hong Kong Police Force:
Unified Digital Communications Platform for Hong Kong SAR Government
Financial Data Centre, Ministry of Finance, Taiwan:
e-invoices
Seoul Metropolitan Government, Korea:
Seoul GIS Portal System for citizens
Taipei City Government, Taiwan:
UI-Taipei
Public Sector Organisation of the Year– SAARC
Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation, India:
Off-site real-time monitoring system
Department of Pensions, Sri Lanka:
ePensions
Controller General of Account, Government of India:
Central Plan Scheme Monitoring System
Centre for Good Governance, India:
Housing On-line Monitoring and eGovernance System (HOMES)
Centre for Good Governance, India:
ePASS
Public Sector Organisation of the Year – Oceania
South Australian Department of the Premier and Cabinet:
South Australian Electronic Cabinet Online
Government of South Australia, Australia:
Ask Just Once
Adelaide City Council, Australia:
CityChat
Ministry of Fisheries, New Zealand:
Project IKA
National Archives of Australia:
RecordSearch Forum
Public Sector Organisation of the Year – Middle East
Central Informatics Organisation, Bahrain:
Bahrain Locator
Bahrain eGovernment Authority:
National Authentication Framework
Central Informatics Organisation, Bahrain:
Ministry of Social Development Web GIS Application
Technical & Vocational Training Corporation, Saudi Arabia:
TVTC Online admission System
Bahrain eGovernment Authority:
National Enterprise Architecture
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Millions are mobilised, leaflets are posted in every street corner, radio broadcasters repeat announcements. War? Election? No, it is national census, ladies and gentlemen.
Each country might collect slightly different set of data through this complicated endeavour, but the usefulness of census in understanding the population, household structure, employment and education status as well as home occupancy is undoubted. Such information (and the accuracy of it) plays a vital role for a country to plan for national and social development polices and master plans.
Because of its complexity – censuses are often conducted with a ten year interval. The government obviously does not have that much manpower, so a lot of provisional employees are employed. In the recent Hong Kong Census, 18,300 temporary staff participated. The endeavour cost the government HK$520 million (US$67 million).
In China, six million surveyors were employed last year for the census which cost the government RMB8 billion (US$1.25 billion). The population count was 1.37 billion.
For a census to be meaningful and useful, cooperation of the population is very important. That’s why the governments spend lots of effort publicising about censuses. Technology and internet give authorities opportunities to complement traditional means of neighbourhood posters, TV advertisements and radio announcements. In January, I took a flight from Shanghai to Mexico City. On every boarding pass, it is printed “In Mexico we count ourselves”. Hong Kong’s Census and Statistics Department (CSD) advertised on the home page of Yahoo!.
“Such channel is considered an effective means for publicising the census having regard to the large number of Internet visitors, who should be amongst the potential users of the online e-Questionnaire newly introduced,” CSD’s Assistant Commissioner Alvin Li explains.
Social media platforms are not spared. Australia this year uses Twitter to broadcast satire to promote its census. And Indian Government’s Census 2011 Facebook page is ‘liked’ by 21,645 people as of the 6th of September – not many Indian agencies are on Facebook, but tens of millions of Indians are.
The internet is not only used for promotion of censuses, but also its undertaking. Self enumeration online is used for both Hong Kong and Taiwan in their recent censuses. Australians were given the option of ‘eCensus’ in 2006, and 8.4 per cent of the households logged their data online. The peak hour saw 72,000 online forms submitted. This year (Australia conducts census every five years) eCensus is again an option.
And GIS has been extensively used in census. For this year’s census Hong Kong has spent HK$1.5 million (US$ ) on enhancing a Digital Mapping System, which will be explained in detail in a feature interview in the October 2011 issue of FutureGov Asia Pacific magazine.
CSD, before this year’s census, had also tested some mobile data collection software for field workers. The system was, however, not used in full scale as the Department could not find a device which is as easy to use as pen and paper.
The key here is to make sure the device is easy to use, and the data input is accurate. With the current pace that mobile user experience evolves, we can see such convenient tool emerging from the horizon.
A friend, who recently retired from a government CIO position in Taiwan, tells me that the government has proposed to use tablet computers for surveyors for the next census.
Census takers, who might or might not be government employees, sometimes have to travel to remote areas to conduct surveys. Personal safety is always an issue. Hong Kong equips some surveyors with sticks and ultrasonic dog chasers. Government also exercised extra cautions for surveyors going into areas with recorded cases of molestation. Incidents still did occur. Two surveyors were injured while being chased by dogs, and there were reports of molesting cases against female surveyors. In China, the surveyors even caught a few wanted criminals while conducting their business.
“In future the surveyors should have better communications capabilities,” my retired-CIO friend from Taiwan says. “Perhaps an emergency button as what first responders have on their walkie-talkies.”
Such design has already become sophisticated – allowing users to reach to ask for help easily in real emergency, and prevent them from sending alarms by mistake under normal circumstances. I’ve seen studies about people’s stress level during emergency, and how important the system they use is intuitive in such time.
In fact, the two Hong Kong surveyors had dog chasers with them – but in a highly stressful situation they forgot to use them.
In addition, how to equip everyone with such a device could be a challenge. As we do with the cloud for desktop applications nowadays, in future why can’t people use devices they are comfortable with, while the bulk of data and applications sit in the cloud?
Census data was among the first social statistics to be studied and in 1850s sociologists had already derived patterns from it. With analytics being increasingly introduced to different area of government operations, the census, which accumulates much valuable data about the demographics, could offer much more value than before.
Obviously, there is debate on whether censuses remain relevant, since people are much more mobile than they were twenty years ago. A few weeks ago the Economist ran a full feature on this. Many believe that once-every-ten-year exercise could hardly be meaningful in an era where maps have to be updated every three months.
A few countries which have sophisticated population registration system have ditched comprehensive survey to sampling of a certain percentage of the population. Increasing privacy concerns also make surveys more difficult.
India’s Unique ID project, when reaching to the entire population, will offer a solid database of population-related information. Censuses will probably continue, but with less workload and better accuracy – and more opportunities for meaningful data.
In fact, regardless of the methodologies we use, the population data collected through censuses (or other means) would remain and even become more relevant.
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The corner convenience store is now the last-mile connect for technology services.
In Taiwan, Family Mart, the country’s second-largest convenience store chain, recently launched a new service that allows Taiwanese nationals to submit applications for extending their travel documents to enter China. With large numbers of Taiwanese visiting China in recent years, Family Mart has jumped in to take advantage of this lucrative business opportunity. Family Mart’s service at NT $499 (US$17.2) per application is cheaper and more convenient than applying directly to a travel agency which costs between NT $500 - NT $600.
There are almost 10,000 convenience stores in Taiwan, which has a population of 23 million.
It always impresses me when I visit Taipei, Bangkok, Hong Kong or Singapore, that convenience stores and self-service kiosks can be found at almost every street corner. Often operating 24 hours a day, the stores do brisk business selling a range of frozen and ready-to-eat food, medicines, chocolates, magazines and liquor. And the interesting bit is that they keep adding new services, from bill payment to photocopying & printing, or charging mobile phones.
Convenience stores developed in Japan in early 1970s, taking a lead from those in the west. Over the years, Japanese-style convenience stores have influenced stores in other Asian countries such as in Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea and China. Popular chains include 7-Eleven, Lawson and Family Mart among others. In Japan, any bill (phone, cable or tax) can be paid at a convenience store. You can also buy sushi and book airplane tickets at the same time! Some convenience, that.
Many governments in the region have relied on post offices or commercial banks to deliver some of these services, especially payments, leveraging their extensive network of branches. However, increasingly, the likes of 7-Eleven are offering even broader coverage and more extensive coverage. There is no reason that governments could not deliver their services creatively through these channels.
In fact, some post offices now rely on convenience stores to sell stamps, send couriers and collect parcels.
Actually, Taiwan’s government has been experimenting with service delivery through convenience stores for a while. Taoyuan County Government, which pioneered the services, now offers more than 60 services through the chains, including application of permits in addition to making transactions. Ministry of the Interior, the country’s biggest ministry whose responsibilities include land registration, policing, immigration and population registration, is at final stages of preparations to offer some of its services through convenience stores as well.
In Singapore, self service kiosks with multiple functions are deployed across the island - payment of bills & tax and some applications can be easily done through these terminals.
In addition to offering convenience to citizens and reducing government transaction cost, the greater use of corner stories also demonstrates the fact that governments in countries such as Taiwan, Japan, Thailand and Singapore regularly collaborate with the private sector: sharing information, increasing efficiency and productivity.
Taiwan’s government also procure large amount of coupons from convenience store chains, through open tender, to distribute to civil servants as welfare benefits, taking the public private collaboration one step further.
For countries like India, where established chains are not as pervasive as in Singapore or Taiwan, there are still possibilities for the government to leverage the small businesses at street corners. The huge success from the telecom sector and the few fruitful implementations of private-run tele centres have demonstrated that. The only challenge here is that it take the government more time to establish such service centres, rather than doing tender or bulk deals with a big chain and having the rest taken care of.
By opening mobile banking for the world’s largest social security scheme NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), it certainly looks as though the Indian government is heading in the right direction. Building blocks could be in place for large developing countries’ own convenience store technology story. All that is needed now is a new legal framework, investments and access to new skills and technology.
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Web 2.0 technologies are no longer new to governments in the region, although some are still concerned by their risks, many agencies and public sector organisations in the Asia Pacific region have already established online presence to reach out to the increasing population of netizens.
From simple conversations between government officials and citizens, more and more government processes have moved to social media. Crowdsourcing has become more popular and eventually part of the official process of establishing government vision, policy making, and even amending a constitution .
A handful has effectively used the popular tools as more than just two-way communication platforms, hence the emergence of collaborative governments. And as more governments head to this direction, few explore what comes after social media; what is the next step?
We have seen amazing creativity from governments, not only to keep up with the fast developing technology, but also with the changing behaviour of the citizens.
Australia definitely went out of the box with their 2011 Census Twitter account, using satire and humour to catch citizens’ interest. Completely different from the 2011 Census official website, the candid tweets aim to ease the burden of the census as a responsibility, instead, making it something citizens would want to be part of.
Jin Zhongyi, Director of Justice Bureau at China’s eastern city of Haining, has mandated that all government document exchanges (with the exceptions of confidential ones, of course) to be conducted over Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service similar to Twitter. “Complete transparency by default” - as he puts it. The policy casued huge uproar in the country when he first announced it, scepticism abound. And after almost half a year - you know what? - not only has the transparency initiative gone through, microblogging has also become a habit for almost every employee of the bureau, taking lots of praises from the public.
In the meantime, sentiment analysis or, on a higher level, social media analytics is making its way fast to government agencies. Mining and analysing social media conversations is becoming the new trend and key to keeping up with the changing variables in citizen engagement.
Seoul has incorporated social media analytics into its ‘Smart Seoul 2015’ vision, as the City’s CIO, Jung-Song Hwang, recently told my colleague Clarice Africa.
The tool helps agencies identify areas of improvement, in order to maintain, if not improve, engagement levels. Not only that, this type of analysis has now found its use for security as the US Government did.
The Hong Kong Government Youth Portal, launched three years ago by the Government’s Efficiency Unit, will soon be overhauled, with citizens’ sentiments as a major consideration, incorporating new technologies for better user experience.
Engagement is taking another leap, now, to be much more meaningful than simply listening and communicating.
It is a difficult task to match the pace of technology, more so with the users’ behaviour in mind, that’s why it is vital that government agencies recognise the need to keep their platforms up to date and interesting to continue engaging with citizens effectively.
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“We are a little surprised and absolutely delighted that Asia’s inaugural Government Technology Awards received 212 nominations from 14 countries for the nine separate award categories.” We wrote this in the September 2007 issue of the magazine as we announced the shortlist of that year’s inaugural FutureGov Awards.
The awards have certainly grown since them - and if you haven’t submitted your nomination yet - please tell us your most proud projects/achievements over the last year. Nomination information can be found on the Official FutureGov Awards web site.
The editorial team at FutureGov are in a very privileged position to be able to watch the development of the region’s public sector from the vantage point of the magazine - but nothing gives us more insight in to the real world developments occuring within government, education and healthcare organisations than the annual review of nominations for the FutureGov Awards. It was out of our desire to formally recognise the very best of Asian public administration that the Awards were born - and the funny thing is, once you push a good idea down the slope it just continues to gather momentum. In 2008 we received 455 nominations; in 2009 we received 550 nominations - and last year, we hit a staggering 765 nominations from the wider Asia Pacific, including a significant number of nominations from Australia and Korea for the first time.
Although the competition is certainly fierce, happily we have also been able to increase the number of awards categories - ensuring that this year more agencies than ever before will be publicly recognised. There will be 22 awards winners this year - and for the first time each winning agency will receive a scholarship to attend a FutureGov Academy training course in 2012.
In the first year (2007), the winners for the nine categories came from Hong Kong, India, Korea, Singapore, UAE. I remember vividly the passionate speech Clarence To, the charismatic Assistant Commissioner (Information Systems) of Hong Kong Police, made after receiving the Wireless Government awards for their third generation command, control and communication system.
With 28,000 unfiormed officers and 6000 civilian staff, it is not hard for one to imagine why the Police Office near more than 200 people to work in its telecommunications department. Wireless & mobility is again a hot topic, enabled by better network and more capable devices.
First year’s Technology Leadership Award went to Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS), for its Inland Revenue Interactive Network (IRIN) programme, which helped push Singapore’s tax e-filing rate to 92 per cent, reduce cost of collection to US$0.64 cents per dollar, and improve value added per employee from US$67,000 in 2003 to US$93,000 in 2006. Since then, IRAS has pushed the e-filing rate up to 96 per cent.
While Singapore has been performing very well in FutureGov Awards throughout the years, largely owning to its relentless quest for innovation and excellence, they are not the only one shining. In the very first year Korea, India and UAE also bagged trophies from the ceremony.
Fast forward to last year (2010), and Korea and Sri Lanka were the biggest winners, each taking home three awards. China demonstrated that it is a rising power when it comes to public administration and took home two awards - and Taipei City Government also took back an award to Taiwan. Overall, last year’s winners came from 11 countries - a real testament to the breadth of the awards.
While the full list of past year winners can be found here, I have a few vintage copies of the December 2007, December 2008 and December 2009 issues, where the awards are reported in detail. It’s available for our new government readers on first come first serve basis. please write to me at jianggan.li@alphabet-media.com
I look forward to reviewing this year’s nominations alongside my other members of the judging committee, all of whom are distinguished currently serving or former public servants. I wish you all the very best of luck!
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Governments in Asia are emphasising openness and fairness in building their e-procurement systems.
Procurement plays a central role in delivering all government priorities – from the free drugs and medicines at public hospitals, the public school buildings, desks and chairs, to the guns and ammunition of the military and police etc.
The government spends hundreds of billions to buy the goods and services it needs to operate the bureaucracy, carry out projects and deliver services to its citizens. The activity also plays a very important role in ensuring the health and development of the economy. This was seen during the recent crisis, where government increased spending to boost economy.
My colleague recently had a chat with Jolly Wong, Chief Telecommunications Engineer of Hong Kong Police Force, who manages a 200+ team delivering communications capabilities to more than 33,000 police officers in the territory. He said that the moment government launches a tender, GDP of the country will be affected. Therefore, the effectiveness of the government procurement body greatly affects the whole economy.
This, I find, is an interesting area that academics should be looking into.
“For Malaysia, transparency in public procurement is very important as procurements are directly exposed to mismanagement and abuse of power and this reflects the overall identity and business conditions in the country,” Datuk Shukor Ibrahim, Director of Malaysian E-procurement project under the Ministry of Finance, recently told me.
With electronic procurement system, the government can efficiently streamline public procurement and achieve massive savings. But among the main benefits e-procurement brings is, it enhances transparency in procurement practices and administration, thus promotes healthy competition and dynamics in economy. And transparency should be rooted in e-Procurement systems design. Besides, such an important system inherently needs to be transport in order to be creditworthy.
Malaysia’s e-procurement system, called ePerolehan (eP), is also designed to help the government eradicate the negative perception of public among the public agencies and services in the country.
Certain features are being developed by governments to make procurement activities as much as possible available to the public. One of which is the electronic bidding functionality.
The eBidding has three underlying features namely price transparency, stimulation of greater competition and innovative government procurement procedures.
Price transparency by selection based on the lowest price has avoided the conclusion of overpriced procurement contracts. The real-time bidding features provide a level-playing field for all suppliers thus increasing their participation in government procurement.
The eP system also has an electronic tracking Audit Trail functions to ensure the efficient management of government supplies or enable government agencies and auditors to track the procurement process and transactions.
Malaysia is certainly not alone in using e-Procurement to reducee corruption and increase integrity in public procurement systems. Another good example is the Korea’s Public Procurement Service—Nara Marketplace.
Nara Marketplace is a unified channel of Korea’s public procurement that handles the entire procurement process of registration, bidding, contract and payment online. It is used by more than 40,000 public institutions and 190,000 enterprises.
The Korean government ensure that the system reveals all information on procurement service real time, securing transparency and cutting costs on procurement transactions.
Same goes with the Philippines. I have spoken just couple of days ago with Rosa Cemente, Director of the Philippine Government E-procurement system (PhilGePs) on how the system helps the government promote transparency since its inception in 2000.
PhilGEPS is the single e- portal for registration of suppliers and advertisement of bid opportunities in the country.
The Philippines’ procurement system used to be described as cumbersome and prone to corruption as there were many outdated and inconsistent laws and many agencies dealing with issuance of guidelines and procedures in procurement.
The procurement process across all government agencies, from all branches of government, to local government units and public schools and universities, now involves announcing and advertising all procurement opportunities, inviting qualified parties to bid, evaluation of bids, awarding of contracts, monitoring of delivery and performance and payment. The whole process is recorded and posted electronically for others to see.
Through the use of the PhilGEPS, transparency in government procurement is enhanced since opportunities to trade with government and the ensuing transactions are provided online. Information on changes in terms of references, bid schedules and on the winning bidder and contract amount are all accessible through the system.
In addition, the electronic catalogue, which provides information on pre-approved cost of commonly used items, will help government auditors check that supplies purchased by a government agency are not grossly over-priced.
As of September 2010, the PhilGEPS hosted bid opportunities posted by 11,147 government agencies and accessed by 45,955 goods and services providers. Over 1,080,000 bid notices have been posted by various procuring entities
“If there is transparency (of services) we will be able to increase competition (in the bidding process)which result in getting more quality service and better prices and also it helps the government to implement the law. ”
Like Malaysia, the Philippine government also plans to launch the eBidding feature by the end of the year to enable online submission and opening of government bid projects.
“Information will become transparent not only in the bidders but also in the civil society organisation, the auditors; even the public can see information in the system,” Clemente told me.
A local government in China even went a step further. In addition to having an electronic system, all subsequent meetings with providers are monitored real time by high resolution video surveillance system, making under the table transactions very difficult.
To achieve all these is of course not easy. As Clemente said, compliance from the government side is greatly needed. “If no one is using the system, it will be unsuccessful”.
That is why, the issuance of administrative order of the President which requires all the government agencies in the country to use the PhilGePS in their procurement activities will create a big push for the government to promote transparency.
The World Bank, a development partner, cites that for the past four years, an average of Php121 billion (US$2.8 billion) worth of infrastructure, equipment, materials, supplies, and services pass through government procurement processes each year which accounts for 15 per cent of the country’s annual budget.
“We also hope to level the playing field. It’s not the IT which solves the corruption, we cannot do away with it, we should improve transparency to minimise corruption,” she said, stressing the importance of design to correctly leverage e-procurement systems.
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A few days ago, I attended an Executive Symposium on National and Local Government Spatial Data Infrastructure, part of the ESRI User Conference in San Diego. One of the concepts shared to overcome the challenges of data sharing is to adopt an “Open Library” concept.
When we look at a library, it’s all about borrowing books, the institution itself makes it a point to provide the public with a useful wealth of information to help users enrich their knowledge in a particular subject.
Now say for example publishers or notable authors like {insert your favourite author/s here} keep their masterpieces to themselves, nobody will be able to read them, nobody will learn about {insert what you’ve learned from your favourite author}.
In the same context, if public sector organisations make their data available online to the public, users can browse those data and make valuable use of it. Now, in any case that some of the data is classified or deemed confidential, those are what we call the “reserved books” where users have to ask for special permission to borrow the book.
Having this concept in place, it is important that the government sets in place the necessary mandates or policies to make sure that the “environment” is conducive for sharing data.
Now why do we need to share data? Why do we need to share it to the public? Many people believe that sharing is good, but they often find it hard to articulate the actual social economic benefits of sharing.
In Paul Romer’s New Growth Theory, the American economist argues that innovation and new technologies don’t simply occur by random chance. Rather, it depends on the number of people seeking out new innovations or technologies and how hard they are looking for them.
In addition, people also have control over their knowledge capital (“what to study” and how “hard they should study it”). If the profit incentive is great enough, people will choose to grow human capital and look harder for new innovations.
Simply put it, the more data we share, the more information made available to the public, the more we pave the way towards our economy to be knowledge-based.
Economic growth doesn’t arise just from adding more labour to more capital, but from new and better ideas, supported of course by more data.
Dept of Housing and Urban Development
I also heard from Assistant Secretary Raphael Bostic of the US Housing and Urban Development, who shared some insights on how public sector organisations can garner support for open data sharing and its other GIS initiatives.
According to Bostic, policy makers often have no expectations that GIS and maps should be useful or could be useful in decision making.
“They have no expectations or whatsoever. They’re happy about what is does but that doesn’t lead to an on-going engagement expectation that leads to a decision-making paradigm,” he said, adding that technologists, many of them have little to no understanding of what it means to be actually useful.
“When the tech guys talk, the policy people’s eyes glaze over and they’ll be like what are they talking about?”.
(I am sure we’ve all had experience of this.)
“Policy people talk in non-specific way about general issues, that’s why a lot of it boils down to the importance of language, most people have no idof ea what some technical terms mean, for example, enterprise, what does it mean to be an enterprise? How about cloud? Do people know why it’s useful?”
Bostic said that in the US, there is this notion for the need to have a single GIS platform: “they’ve been working on this platform for five years and nobody knows it exists save for the 45 people involved in it.”
“One of the challenges is to have policy makers recognise its value and be willing to invest in it,” Bostic continued. “We need to try to be more purposeful in creating a GIS infrastructure that provides solutions, so what I decided to do is to develop the necessary tools and show it to fellow policy makers and let them have a first-hand experience on how it will actually help public services to be more impactful.”
Cultivating a supporting mindset I think is important for public sector organisations as it determines how they will get to achieve maximum efficiency and maximum effectiveness. And how do we cultivate this mindset?
The willingness to share data, or the lack thereof, is one of the biggest challenges confronting public sector organisations. Some of the US government officials I spoke to told me it made them want to bang their heads against the wall out of sheer frustration.
This refusal is partly driven by the fear of ‘letting go’: that once the data moves from their custody, it may be used wrongly, and that they will be liable for the consequences. I believe it’s also driven by a failure of imagination: a hesitation to greenlight data sharing unless the specific use of that data is mapped out in advance.
There are known unknowns, and unknown unknowns - the most successful value-for-money public sector initiatives that I came across during the ESRI User Conference in San Diego were the result of civil servants setting aside fear and hesitation in order to venture into unknown territory. Data sharing may be outside your comfort zone - but increasingly it’s the path to delivering genuinely transformational outcomes.
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If you were to count the number of times India’s Unique Identification Number (UID) or Aadhaar (foundation), as it has been named, has appeared in the print/web media after its inauguration, you could end up with the number of individuals the exercise has set out to count.
The UID project has been lapped up by the media as a one-stop solution to all the ills facing this country’s governance. An ambitious project, it will provide a 12-digit unique identification number to all residents, including infants. The UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) website says it will enable identification and universality that will, over time, be recognised and accepted across the country and across all service providers. It will, however, not establish citizenship.
For people in a massive, chaotic country with the unenviable reputation of having issues of Jugaad (read bribery, manipulation, nepotism) within the public sector, this concept of universality is irresistible.
Even with all the requisite supporting documents, applications for identification documents are sometimes turned down citing trivial reasons. Doing it for several documents such as the passport, driving license, ration card, voter ID, Permanent Account Number (PAN) card, an account in a nationalised bank, etc is a drain on resources: time, money, and the day’s wage for the labourer who lives a hand-to-mouth existence.
Moreover, the fact that UIDAI is being headed by a former co-chairman of Infosys Technologies, Nandan Nilekani, has made the educated middle class believe that the project would not be marred by bureaucracy.
The UID seemed to be the answer to all the ills plaguing this system. And therefore, when I saw the slip with the designated date and timings slid through my door, I made sure I turned up at the enrolment centre on time. A long queue greeted me and I realised I was not alone in the pursuit of an Aadhaar.
I overheard a few young men talking about how the police may end up using their number to record each time they violated a red light on the traffic signal and that they may be stripped of their Driving Licence after too many violations. So awestruck were most of the people there with the enormity of the project that they could not help but smile at the seemingly paranoid deliberations of the young men. I too set my apprehensions aside and proceeded with the enrolment.
It was during the school summer vacations this year and a room in a school in the neighbourhood was used to record the details. I handed over the verification document with my details to the enroler who then entered the data into the system and asked me to verify the same. He first clicked a photo of my face and then used iris and fingerprint scanners to scan my eyes and left and right hand fingers respectively. The fingerprint scanner was then used to capture both the thumbs together. The enroler signed the data using his thumb impression and handed over an acknowledgement card to me with the promise that my UID would arrive by post in 2-3 months.
While the scheme has seen several supporters, it has been questioned by an equal number of cynics.
Many eminent researchers have questioned the utility of the project and cited the absence of a cost-benefit analysis to show that though the project talks of better implementation of government schemes, especially for the poor, they have yet to see the claims backed by authentic research. While the government moves forward with digital inclusion, its transparency measures have yet to catch up, according to Professor Rajnish Das of the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad).
On the UID being tipped as being similar to the Social Security Number (SSN) of US residents, R. Ramakumar of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences has been quoted as saying that the two can’t be compared, because SSN was “guided by extremely stringent privacy laws.” This argument suddenly seems to ring true in the wake of the Mumbai blasts on 13 July. Other fears include any violations in the name of security and curbs on personal freedoms.
Yet another factor is that biometric identification may not be able to serve its purpose in case of labourers with fading finger prints due to years of manual labour. The very purpose of linking the UID to social schemes of the government would then be jeopardised.
While the debate rages on, the UIDAI is gradually putting numbers to faces. Let’s wait and watch how it pans out.
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The wireless broadband standard is not only alive, but also thriving in Taiwan.
Remember 2006, 2007, when everyone was excited about WiMAX and trial projects were announced, if not executed, across Asia?
Things have gone much quieter then - normally it is a sign that people stop talking buzz and get on with actions. Not necessarily in this case because, frankly, not much has been happening. Apart from Korea which has been having widespread WiMAX coverage (they started with an indigenous standard called WiBro which was then harmonised with WiMAX), not many pilot projects managed to sustain themselves, let along propagating. A study carried out and published September 2010 found that only 364 WiMAX operations were actually offering active services.
This high-speed wireless technology has been promoted globally as a speedier replacement for the Wi-Fi technology. It met lots of obstacles, among which competition from other standards favoured by telecom operators.
Nevertheless, the government of Taiwan, with a big industry sector at stake, has been a strong and important backer of WiMAX standard. Back in 2007, even though the market was not yet mature, the government issued licenses to six WiMAX operators, provided them with generous research grants and co-investments, to help jumpstart services creating digital opportunities and enhancing the country’s industry and global scalability.
I recently had a long chat with Sheng-Ching Cheng, Executive Secretary of Committee of Communications Industry Development (CoCID), Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), the ministry which is giving WiMAX the strongest backing. He was adamant that the potential of WiMAX could not be underestimated, as it could assist a diverse range of services— antiterrorism, surveillance, disaster recovery, airport and harbour safety as well as healthcare and even cargo management.
This has expanded coverage to include libraries, university campuses and museums.
As part of the M-Taiwan programme announced in 2005, the government has implemented the national WiMAX Blueprint for expanded wireless broadband services and products to ensure all citizens—including those living in remote areas have equal access to internet.
The M-Taiwan programme has already created several metropolitan broadband wireless networks, and completed a WiMAX ecosystem in Taiwan. Now about 80 per cent of global WiMAX CPEs (customer-premises equipments) are produced by Taiwanese companies.
A particular example Cheng mentioned to me happened in the village of Nantou, where mobile learning was made possible by WiMAX connectivity.
“Nantou County is famous for its tourist landscapes, but it suffers from resource scarcity as it is located in a fairly remote area with no easy access to resources. With WiMAX, students are now able to log into courses available on the interactive distance-learning platform,” Sheng said.
Sure - you might say - but many countries had that kind of pilot years ago , and normally the deployment would stop there.
Sheng in fact noted that this year, two ministry agencies— Technology Development Fund of MOEA’s Department of Industrial Technology, and the National Police Agency of the Ministry of the Interior—which began using WiMAX in the Taipei area have demonstrated successful results.
“They are operating a WiMAX two-way broadband mobile video system. Real-time images are captured by a camera eye capably of moving in a 360 degree angle that are then transmitted to the command center, instantly dispatching law enforcement to the scene.“
Everyday life in Taiwan is also connected to WiMAX, Sheng-Ching said. In taxis, riders can enjoy the broadband, mobile and open standards of the WiMAX telecommunications network service on touch screen panels. This provides GPS, entertainment and dining details at the fingertips of foreign guests and local shoppers. It offers a truly mobile lifestyle.
Seeing the benefits of WiMAX, the MOEA approved a WiMAX development plan last year that will see the government invest an estimated US$215 million in developing the country’s WiMAX infrastructure over the next three years.
Cheng also claimed that WiMAX will not fail during calamities - making it more useful in the disaster-prone world we live in now.
“Consider the recent disasters and tragedies in Japan,” he noted. “Almost all of the broadband wireless services failed or minimally functioned, but not WiMAX. It was the only network able to deliver uninterrupted service to its customers when needed at the most critical time.”
In the vertical market, WiMAX is a cost efficient solution, Sheng-Ching added.
To consider one of the best examples is the joint effort among the MOEA, Industrial Technology Research Institute, infolink, Sunny Technology, Oriental Institute of Technology and Taiwan Power Research Institute to deploy the new SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) remote control system.
The system transmits in real-time the visual and water quality data information of individual dams back to the monitor and control centre from various remote locations simultaneously.
At the end of this year, WiMAX services will be provided on Taiwan’s high-speed rail trains. During tests, WiMAX successfully demonstrated the world’s first broadband internet access through mobile WiMAX on a high-speed train travelling at speeds of 250 to 300 kilometers per hour.
With its telecommunications networks among world’s most advanced, Taiwan has long been concentrating on technology making the country now a leading high-tech centre in Asia Pacific. Undoubtedly, it has been very progressive in its efforts to liberalise the WiMAX technologies.
For Taiwan, WiMAX has been helping the government to serve the citizens with daily convenience and equal digital opportunities. While many governments might have other practical concerns regarding wireless broadband standards, they could certainly learn a lot from the entrepreneurial spirit and practical innovations Taiwan has demonstrated in riding on the WiMAX bandwagon.
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Trends in Analytics technology
Recently, I attended the SAS Premier Business Leadership Series Antwerp, and I found it smart that they compared the process of making diamonds to analytics; taking rough data of unknown value and applying the skills and capabilities of the resources at hand, producing something that provides clarity in decision making, strength and robustness in ability to make teams confident in the direction they are going, and real lasting value to consumers.
As the uses of analytics continue to unfold across different sectors, my conversations with industry experts gave me a glimpse into how analytics has implications on budget, health, education, and security. At the same time, the constant improvement of technology in terms of hardware as well as software architecture has revolutionised analytics in a number of ways.
SAP has just introduced its own in-memory appliance that combines software components optimised on hardware: the SAP HANA appliance.
The appliance is an integrated solution that enables organizations to analyze business operations based on large volumes of transactional and analytical data as it develops and to instantly explore and analyze the data from virtually any source in real time.
Analytics in Government
In a brief conversation with Jim Goodnight, SAS CEO, we discussed the significant role analytics plays in fraud detection, saving governments millions of U.S. dollars. In fact, a case study mentioned the Philippine Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) getting a 400% ROI in VAT collections with the use of analytics.
“More and more governments are turning to analytics to understand the massive data they collect everyday. That’s where we come in, helping making sense of the data. Like in the Philippines, for example, analytics helped bring in money by identifying which entities are not paying taxes properly,” Goodnight explained.
According to BIR’s CIO and Deputy Commissioner of the Information Systems Group, Lilia Guillermo, about 7 billion pesos (more than US$125 million) has been generated from the process: 200 million pesos uncovered from Bureau of Customs data, 3.2 billion pesos collections from under-declarations that we identified, and 3.6 billion of additional voluntary declarations.
Goodnight also talked about a police force intelligence SAS helped developed which tracks criminals and compiles their data, including history and records, arrests and trials.
Later in the conference, SAS Executive Vice President for Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific, Mikael Hagstrom told me of the healthcare improvements analytics has brought in Asia Pacific.
“In India, analytics help with the analysis of healthcare data; health issues, the affected population, and cause, then come out with preventive measures, in turn providing more specialised and effective healthcare services,” Hagstrom said.
Another Asian innovation Hagstrom mentioned is the use of analytics in education in which the agency aims to minimise unemployment and maintain competitive salary levels. The predictive capabilities provide the relevant data, on which the agency can decide upon what jobs will be in demand in the future and the corresponding curriculum needed for them.
“It’s very hard to put a finger on one area, there’s a lot that probability can address. Analytics is an enabling technology,” Hagstrom pointed.
There are countless uses of analytics in every public sector issue imaginable. We now have social media analytics which agencies use for population sentiment analysis. Another is a definite breakthrough, mobile analytics, which puts do-it-yourself, real time analysis in users’ bags and pockets.
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I rarely need to put a headset throughout almost the entire duration of a conference, but FutureGov Forum Vietnam turned out to be one of the most meaningful events I have been to.
At the forum, I moderated three panel discussions at the forum, through the diligent (and excellent) work of our interpreters who sat in the black boxes at the back. Language did not become a barrier – I was deeply impressed by the officials’ professionalism, and their down-to-earth to tackling challenges and sharing with their peers.
To set the stage, Dr Nguyen Minh Hong, Vice Minister from the Ministry of Information and Communications, shared the country’s vision to become a leading country in e-government by 2020. Concrete plans have been made to achieve this strategic objective, including policies, procedures and a number of national databases being built. Dr Hong reminded the attending officials about a few new policies/services to be rolled out, which government departments are required to adhere to. An example of those is the digital certificate for online transactions, mandated in a recent government circular.
While giving a detailed introduction of ICT applications by his ministry, Nguyen Linh Ngoc, Vice Minister from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE), emphasised that leveraging ICT was both ‘targets and means’. His Director General for IT, Nguyen Huu Chinh, joined a panel on “managing and sharing information” in the afternoon and shared on how GIS databases were built and shared with other government departments. Almost ten years ago the government mandated that no more standalone GIS platforms were to be built, all the data had to be collected and imported onto MONRE’s platform – avoiding a key challenge that many governments across the region are now facing.
GIS aside, Phung Bao Thach, Director General of ICT centre, Ministry of Science and Technology, commented on the same panel that while in many areas policies and procedures are in place, including Government Interoperability Framework, sharing of information was still limited across the central ministries and agencies. Believing that there are more to do be done, he threw the question to other panellists and the audience.
Taking the question, Dr Nguyen Quoc Anh, Director of Centre for Population Information and Documentation at Ministry of Health’s General Office for Population & Family Planning, shared his experience in effectively collecting and updating population database, a constant process that involves working with many local authorities.
Naturally the process of standardised data collection and sharing is still a challenge for many government IT departments, but through openly identifying their problem and soliciting answers/inspirations from their peers, the officials are on the right track to achieve their objectives.
A key differentiator of FutureGov Forum series was to bring relevant international experiences to the country. Rachel McClure, Vice President for Public Services of SAP Asia Pacific & Japan, shared a whole list of projects across the world to make citizen delivery. I glanced through the hall during Rachel’s speech: people, including the Deputy Ministers present, were listening, and nodding in approval. Clearly this was what they would strive to achieve as well.
Joining Rachel to share experiences and perspectives are regional speakers from countries such as Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. K Latha, Head of Business Facilitation Division of Singapore’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA), shared their experience in bringing one stop e-registration service to businesses. Not only have they integrated all the government services needed for a business to be set up, the Authority also works with a number of commercial banks such that business account opening can be done through the same portal – making the service truly ‘one-stop’.
Summarising her 30 odd years of experience working for the Authority, Latha believed the most difficult challenge was still the change of registration process from manual to online – as it really fundamentally overturned the processes civil servants in the Authority had been operating on for decades. Nevertheless, despite all the challenges, the project went through and played a key part in making Singapore one of the easiest places to do business in the world. Latha said what really culminated their achievement was a comment made by a businessmen at a seminar she went to. The entrepreneur had an once-in-a-lifetime deal in front of him and he did not have a company registered to sign the contract. He said to his counterpart “wait fifteen and I will have a legal entity to take the businesses.” He then switched on the computer, went to the ACRA web site and the process was indeed completed within fifteen minutes, to the amazement of his foreign business partner.
Vietnam has also, since adopting a market-oriented economy in late 1980s, strived to facilitate businesses. Tran Huu Linh, Deputy Director General, E-commerce and IT Agency of Ministry of Industry and Trade, shared a few successful projects that the ministry has undertaken to facilitate trade, including the Electronic Certificate of Origin issuance system and the Dangerous Chemicals system. Linh highlighted that although the services are well established in major cities such as Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City; they do not yet cover small cities and provinces very well – a priority for the Ministry over the next few years.
The event was also a chance for regional IT directors, many of whom old friends with each other, to meet and discuss. Nguyen Anh Tuan, Deputy Director of Department of Information and Communications of Ho Chi Minh City, was a good friend of Pham Kim Son, Director of Department of Information and Communications of Da Nang City in central Vietnam. The cities and provinces across the Central and Southern part of the country were eager to understand the progress Da Nang had made under a multi-million dollar World Bank funding scheme to develop comprehensive e-government infrastructure and services. Obviously every encounter was a meaningful exchange for them to bring the experience to their home province/city.
A key concern of local officials is how to extend government’s reach to all citizens, many of whom live in difficult terrain, such as those rural residents of Long An province in the Mekong Delta. Le Van Bich, Director of Department of Information & Communications of Long An Province, shared how to mobilise local resources to reach out to villagers in the province, half of which is flooded in the monsoon season.
The panellists on digital divide also listened attentively to Shan-Min Han, Deputy Director of Computer Centre from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education (MOE). The Ministry has successes rolled out 174 ‘Digital Opportunity Centres’(DOCs) in many parts of the country, empowering people, especially rural residents, to leverage the digital opportunity. What interested the Vietnamese panellists the most was how DOCs are made sustainable, through private sector involvement and government’s careful planning.
Rong-Guey Ho, Director of MOE Computer Centre, was also in Vietnam, visiting Taiwanese schools and helping them with e-learning materials. Vietnam is one of the major investment destinations of Taiwan businesses, with many Taiwanese families living there. The Ministry hopes that through these e-learning materials, the students could easily adapt Taiwan’s education system when they eventually go back.
There were indeed a lot shared at the forum, such that at the end of the day, almost 100 officials still remained in the room. While it is hard to summarise everything here, why don’t you come and join us at the next FutureGov Forum Vietnam?
And - Quý vị có câu hỏi nào không?
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6,000 years ago, the governors and kings of Sumer’s city-states probably had the same core concerns as today’s governments: maintaining law and order, and creating conditions for prosperity amongst their people. In terms of communication within the government, it is likely that efficiency has always hinged on the unobstructed flow of raw data from the bottom up, and the percolation of policy decisions from the highest levels of the hierarchy to the lowest, with minimal distortion.
Some of today’s public sector concerns, however, would have been completely alien to them. Because while political systems and structures come and go and offer lessons for posterity, technology-enabled government seems to be an endless buildup in which everyone has to learn as they go along.
But what is it a buildup towards? And what key points on this exponential graph can we extrapolate from, to predict reasonable outcomes for the current trends?
In the FutureGov Forum in Singapore last month, the theme of sharing and collaboration emerged as the focal point of public sector ICT concerns. It reminded me of a presentation I had heard from Martin Stewart-Weeks, Director, Public Sector (Asia-Pacific), Internet Business Solutions Group, Cisco at the FutureGov Forum India almost exactly one year ago, and the massive changes that have occurred since then: we have had Wikileaks come and go, social media engagement has exploded, and there have been sweeping global changes across the political spectrum, with implications on government transparency and accountability.
In his presentation, Stewart-Weeks talked about Paul Baran, from The RAND Corporation, who, in conjunction with the United States Air Force, conducted seminal research on distributed networks in the 1960s. Baran was attempting to design a communication system that would be robust enough to withstand attacks; Stewart-Weeks took those basic premises and models of communication into a very interesting and unexpected territory – the realm of government information sharing architecture. “And we are genuinely and somewhat ambitiously suggesting that we are witnessing the emergence of a new public sector,” he had said.
As I looked again at Baran’s research paper after the 2011 Singapore Forum, it was difficult to miss the fact that with ICT effecting greater communication within and across governments, the natural progression of the way public sector shares data roughly resembles the development of computer networking in general, as Stewart-Weeks had suggested.
And in my estimation, we are looking towards a final scheme of intra- and inter-governmental communication that is a dense, somewhat homogeneous network of well-connected nodes. The challenge, already, is no longer access to information, but the aggregation and processing of information.
The parallels with the evolution of governmental communication structure are striking. When information was a precious and a somewhat unwieldy commodity, and the predominant governing ethic was to “rule”, the structure of public sector communication resembled figure (A): a central core that dealt directly with geographically or functionally outlying nodes. Soaking up information was less important than rulings and laws being strictly implemented.
As nations have gotten larger and a centre-heavy system has become too ungainly, government communication architecture has slowly morphed into structures described most accurately by model (B): a federal body to direct long-term and large-scale vision, with local municipalities acquiring greater power to expedite on-the-ground change. Similarly, information gathered on the ground over urgent, non-policy-related issues can be immediately put to use.
But today, with the rapid take-up of social networking, mobility, and transparency legislation, governments are required to “serve” more than to “rule”. Their role is slowly being redefined: to make the increasingly complex and globalised life of the citizen easier to manage, rather than to direct or to shape it. This has forced the public sector – albeit tentatively, with data privacy issues never too distant on the horizon of the public eye – to be more actively accountable to its citizens.
With the requisite means now available, public departments have started to function as depicted in diagram (C): freely exchanging ideas and solutions, and no longer bound by the intractability of having all information pass through a single node before it disseminates to the relevant others.
Where is it heading? Some governments might be dragged kicking and screaming into the era of openness, and public-private-partnerships (whether legally sanctioned or otherwise) might be willing to help where civil service momentum is weak.
At the same time, miscreants will have a greater capability of disrupting government operations thanks to the egalitarian nature of the internet: data packets are data packets, whether sent by a peasant over a mobile phone or by the President of the United States. Security may grow to be the broadest issue that encapsulates or at least comments on all other concerns within public sector discourse.
Even within the short period separating the India Forum in 2010 from the Singapore Forum in 2011, the landscape has changed tremendously: information these days is more voluminous, flows faster, comes from unpredictable sources, and flows through a multitude of qualitatively different channels.
The pyramidal and strict hierarchy of data flow within the public (and the private sector for that matter) has become decidedly flatter and less distinct, and may continue down that road. Government agencies have gained independence while becoming more interconnected: a trend that might persist to the point of ideas and processes taking supreme precedence, and the particular scope of the agency becoming less relevant, given the excess of solutions and information available.
A “distributed” model of communication might be a prescriptive design from Baran’s point of view, but it may end up as the organic, inevitable outcome of the current process of governmental change.
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Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are gaining popularly in today’s government masterplanning. This is not surprising as information, when presented on maps, becomes much more powerful and useful for situational awareness and decision making.
Therefore we often see governments striving to make their countries ‘spatially enabled’. While there is no doubt about the benefits such enablement can bring, it is also very clear that simply having the technologies is not enough for maximising GIS’s potential. So what else needs to be done?
A particular question I have asked many prominent government GIS planners is: “What does it take for a country to be spatially enabled”? And oftentimes, I ‘d get a long pause, followed by a grin, then a light chuckle – apparently, they don’t know where to start. It is, after all, quite a difficult question.
So what do we mean when we say “Spatially Enabled”?
According to prominent academics such as Dr Abbas Rajabifard of University of Melbourne, a society or a government can be considered as spatially enabled when location and spatial information are regarded as common goods made available to citizens and businesses to encourage creativity and innovation.
Basically, spatial enablement uses the concept of place and location to organise information and processes and it is now a ubiquitous part of e-Government and broader government ICT strategies.
So back to my question, “What does it take for a country to be spatially enabled”? – is it technological resource, international standards, or human resource? The list would go on, and I’m positive readers of this blog could add their take on what should be included here as well.
I was able to talk to some top-calibre public sector officials recently and they were able to share very interesting insights on what it takes to be spatially enabled – insights I’ve found quite handy in understanding the intricate workings of GIS as applied in public sector organisations.
“Spatial enablement starts with spatial literacy”
For Dr Chaowalit Silapathong, Director of the Geo-Informatics office at the Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency (GISTDA) of Thailand, spatial enablement requires a large part of its citizenry to be spatially literate.
Dr Silapathong also mentioned that a country will have to be fully convinced of NSDI (National Spatial Data Infrastructure) initiatives and would have to make full commitment of its resources in support of the NSDI development (the resources include, but are not limited to human resource, technological resource, national endowments, political and cultural resource, financial resource, etc.).
“Finally, I think, a spatially enabled country will begin to emerge when the NSDI is well underway and implemented following best practice guidelines and in accordance with the national vision and goal set out in advance to cover all sectors and all levels of the government, from national down to provincial, district, and municipalities”.
According to Dr Silapathong, if the final phase is passed, then a country should at least be at some point of being spatially enabled.
“To be a partially or fully enabled country is not easy to judge because there is still a need to come up with some reliable and acceptable means to gauge this. For some countries, barely passing the demarcation line is good enough, but to others it may need to be well beyond that line. It depends on the background of the country involved,” he said.
“A conducive environment for sharing spatial data”
For Paul Ng, Chief Land Surveyor of the Land Information Centre, Hong Kong Lands Department, it is imperative that conducive policies regarding the collection, exchange and dissemination of geospatial data are developed – such as a comprehensive Spatial Data Infrastructure and a set of standards.
Ng added that there should be sufficient resources to collect and update reliable geographic information. “To do that it requires the availability of GIS software and database software at an affordable cost,” he says.
In addition, Ng said that there is also a need for user friendly and intuitive platforms and applications for the general public to access and discover geospatial data conveniently.
“Finally, it requires investment in human capital to make use of geospatial information and to apply related GIS and IT technologies”
“There should also be good regulations and arrangement to protect the privacy of people in aspects of revealing and tracking the locations of people by individuals or by institutions, no matter public or private,” he said.
No international Geospatial standards = No spatial enablement
For Ben Searle, General Manager of the Australian Government Office of Spatial Data Management, first and foremost, it requires a key understanding on the senior level of the government of the value and benefit of spatial enablement.
“It also requires appropriate skill sets and an appropriate governance framework so that people operate within a framework established to understand where data is”.
Searle added that there’s a clear linkage between Geospatial standards and spatial enablement. “ The international geospatial standards are crucial for any spatial enablement and I don’t think you can have proper spatial enablement unless you have appropriate standards, if you don’t have standards you won’t have interoperability, you can’t share information - standards really are mechanisms by which spatial infrastructures are built,” he said.
In the mid-19th century, John Snow, a British physician plotted individual cases of cholera on a map during an outbreak of the disease in London. This enabled him to trace the source of the outbreak – a contaminated well.
Given that example, it is apparent that the use of GIS has revolutionised over the years and has now become a ubiquitous part of e-Government and broader government ICT strategies, and while it may be difficult to gauge a country’s course or stage of “spatial enablement” It has to start from somewhere right? – Well for me, the initial stage of spatial enablement starts with acknowledging its potential and acting upon it.
GIS has a lot of potential to do a lot of things – however that potential remains only an idea, a force, which is inactive and useless unless great work is done in order to stimulate it into motion.
It is not just a map, but an essential ingredient in attaining overall situational awareness critical in decision making – think of disaster preparedness, public health, urban planning, and resource management, how would these sectors fare without GIS?
Ultimately we are not making a country spatially enabled just for the sake of making it spatially enabled. It is the benefits that this enablement brings to the society as well as its individual citizens that matter.
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