Sunday, 12 February 2012
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IT has provided the opportunities for governments to remodel the entire process of tax collection over the last decade. It is, however, a continuously evolving process and governments the world over need to constantly upgrade their tax systems to optimise their revenue workflows.
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Government Data Management, Policy
Govts should release more data for innovation’s sake
The research director behind a 12-country study on ‘generation Y’ has suggested that governments in Asia should cede more control of information to citizens in the name of innovation.
Virginia Cha, Senior Programme Director, Executive Education & IT Management Research at the National University of Singapore’s Institute of Systems Science, said that Asian governments should make more of their data available for citizens to use – because citizens are better at using it to innovate.
“Governments should begin to rethink their role. Instead of being the provider of everything, they should think more seriously about engaging outside parties,” said Cha. “The reality is that citizens are better at innovating with data to create better services.”
Cha pointed to successful applications tested and used by citizens through ‘mass collaboration’ in the consumer space.
“If governments were more willing to unleash certain types of information on the community through an open API [Application Programming Interface], they might be pleasantly surprised by the results,” she said.
Her conclusions were based on a study of people born between 1977 and 1997 – known as generation Y – in China, Japan, India, the US, the UK, Canada, Russia, Brazil, Germany, France, Spain and Mexico.
Young Asians lead the way in online banking and making purchases using a mobile phone, while China is home to the most frequent bloggers, followed by Japan and India.
Only Asian generation Yers say they would rather be permanently connected to the internet than be able to log-off whenever they wanted to.
“Increasingly, the generation Y agenda – and internet culture - is going to be set in Asia rather than the West,” noted Cha. “Fifty-two per cent of the population is under 25 years old in India, but only 35 per cent in the US.”
She said that the integration of mobile technology with the internet is also happening faster in countries such as Japan, South Korea and Singapore. Which has important implications for government when this generation grows up.
Asian governments still have plenty of work to do to improve their e-government capabilities, however. Young citizens were not shy in making unprompted remarks about government e-services in the survey, noted Cha.
One respondent complained about a lack of freedom of speech on government sites, saying that honest comments get “snuffed out when thing get too hot.”
One respondent suggested that e-services should be fast and fuss-free, and a one-stop shop approach is preferable to multiple services.
Another generation Yer suggested that Web 2.0 technologies should not be used “just for the sake of using the latest and greatest.”
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