Sunday, 12 February 2012
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Tax and Revenue Management: A government’s lifeblood
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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A recent SAP study confirmed that those organisations which adopt best practices in the areas of scope and adoption, process standardisation, technology and customer governance, do perform better, and do so as their best practice maturity increases.
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The advent of social media has seen governments hopping onto the bandwagon in a bid to further engage citizens.
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Central Government, Government Cloud, Technology
Singapore govt's answer to YouTube
In March this year, Singapore launched its own version of YouTube. Government agencies can now upload videos on to a site that will gives them copyright ownership, and allows uploading to be managed in a controlled environment. In an interview with FutureGov, the Infocomm Development Authority revealed how using the cloud has saved the government US$4000 a month per video.
Agencies pay for the service, which is called EnVision, according to service quality and availability.
“They can either opt for a guaranteed service which is best suited for large events which require good quality delivery. Or a best efforts service, which have slightly higher latency but lower charges that are suitable for promotional videos,” IDA’s Assistant Chief Executive Officer, Khoong Hock Yun, told FutureGov.
Both services offer a Pay-Per-Use model and agencies can scale their requirements in line with user demands. For a ten-minute video for a nationwide event aimed at 150 concurrent users, an agency would pay about seven times more if it had bought its own servers and for connectivity - and double the amount if it had used an external video-on-demand provider, Khoong said.
Unlike existing free online video hosting websites (i.e. YouTube), Envision allows the copyright owner to retain full rights of the use of videos, and to be able to manage the upload of videos in a controlled user environment, Khoong added.
To keep the platform secure, it is only available to agencies via subscription. Only authorised personnel will be given accounts to upload videos on to the site, which they can access using a username and password. In addition, EnVision encrypts videos before they go live from the cloud hosting servers, which are monitored round-the-clock to ensure smooth operations.
Khoong revealed that the next phase of the project will be to make Envision available to schools so that teachers and students can access interactive digital material. He added that the healthcare sector could also make good use for the service.
“We envisage that EnVision will be used by all users in government agencies (including healthcare professionals) to host and stream videos for a wide variety of purposes, from training and dissemination of information, to nationwide events and promotional activities. Healthcare agencies can also use EnVision to educate the public on health campaigns,” he said.
A video search on the gov.sg web site will also be rolled out soon, which will let people search for all videos created by the government.
The Media Development Authority won fame for the Singapore government in 2007 with a video promoting Singapore as a creative hub that was posted on YouTube. The video has been viewed 243,800 times.
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5 Comments
On 3 September 2010 Ang Sar Lee wrote:
This initiative looks destine to fail big time. Who will use a govt video portal? It has not generated any buzz in Singapore (at least not picked up by main stream media here) and the article has not mentioned any uptake by any agency committed to use this service. Also Khoong Hock Yun is not responsible for government policy planning and execution, it falls into another division within IDA known as GCIO.
On 3 September 2010 Robin Hicks wrote:
Thanks for your comment. A story on Envision featured in the August 18th issue of The Straits Times, which mentions the Ministry of Transport, Mindef, the Public Service Division and the IDA as agencies interested in using Envision services.
On 6 September 2010 anil wrote:
It is nice effort to put the e-governance in single umbrella. What software solution they are using to provide such services
On 12 May 2011 Marc-Alexis Remond wrote:
I would be interested in understanding what has been the pick up rate of IDA's Envision video content management service among various Government departments to date. Also, is an extension of this service to Live Video Streaming (Webcast) and Video Conferencing (Telepresence) being considered as a way to engage and collaborate with citizens (G2C), Businesses (G2B) and other Government agencies (G2G)? Thank you.
On 14 June 2011 Jay Guha wrote:
Can IDA or any of the departments who have adopted EnVision outline the benefits actually realized ?
For example, can the Transport department give a qualified and quantified understanding what changed in their services, in their financials, in their efficacy etc…and more importantly how and what advantage did the citizens realize ?