Thursday, 9 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.
Unlocking Public Value
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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E-Government, Green Government, Policy
Korea e-govt helps cut emissions by 10%
The Korean government aims to reduce carbon emissions by 10 percent by 2012. Young-il Kwon, Director, Green IT Department, National Information Society Agency (NIA) revealed to FutureGov how the public sector will lead the way by greening its IT system.
Ecological ICT infrastructure is one of four areas the Korean government is working on to achieve the ten per cent carbon reduction. The three projects that fall under this scheme include life cycle management of IT systems, the integration of government servers and web sites, and greening the government data centre (see interview with the National Computing and Information Agency).
The Korean government is developing ecological life cycle management guidelines for IT systems. Targeted to be released within the next six months, public sector agencies will be required to follow policies around procurement, use and disposal of IT devices. It will detail electricity consumption or carbon emissions of office products such as personal computers and printers; and procurers must then choose the most ecologically-sound product fit for its agency’s use.
“The absence of guidelines at the moment means decisions are left to each government department. Many departments end up buying too many printers or personal computers,” observed Kwon. “To reduce over-provisioning, the new guidelines will state the ratio of printers needed for each government department.”
Instead of disposing with IT equipment, the new guidelines will specify more environmentally-friendly options such as refurbishing old government computers for less advantaged organisations, such as orphanages, which do not have access to computers. “As a by-product, we are bridging the digital divide,” added Kwon.
Korea has invested heavily in e-government projects over the last ten years. Each agency has been individually purchasing IT systems. Today, the government has consolidated the IT systems of 40 central government ministries into two national government data centres.
“However, it is merely a co-location of IT systems. The 4687 servers will be further consolidated to reduce hardware by 46 per cent to 2535 servers by 2012,” he said. The government expects major savings in electricity use, operating and maintenance cost.
Similarly, ministries are working to consolidate government web sites by integrating some and shutting down redundant ones. According to Kwon, Korea will reduce the number of government web sites by 58 per cent. “Central government alone has 1637 web sites and we aim to cut that to 682 by the end of this year.”
The other area which will require Korean civil servants to change the way they work is what Kwon termed ‘Green Government’. It involves transforming public sector offices and buildings into eco-friendly environments which are energy efficient.
With the aim of being a paperless government, the digitisation of business processes has begun. In the back office, the government has implemented systems for e-Procurement, e-Patent, and the National Finance System.
Citizen-facing processes are migrated to the web to reduce paper and commuting. The ‘Government for Citizens’, or G4C system, is an online portal allowing citizens to make electronic payment. “The previous paper system required more time for documents to travel across departments, more paper copies and more work for officials in storing and documenting. G4C reduces paper work, increase operational efficiency by making searching easier, and cuts storage space,” said Kwon.
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