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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The FutureGov team has spent much of the last few months on the road. My colleagues have been busy travelling to Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong and mainland China - and I’ve had the good fortune to catch up with over 120 government officials in Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, The Philippines and most recently Thailand.
Part of this time was invested in recruiting journalists and researchers, to beef up FutureGov’s Country Intelligence Reports. This is an emerging area of focus for FutureGov as we look to distil the hundreds of conversations we have with senior officials in Asia Pacific in to monthly market assessments. We now have specialists covering Indonesia, The Philippines, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China - and are about to put the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle in place with the recruitment of an analyst covering Malaysia.
This has helped us really increase our bandwidth to cooperate with governments in the region - an example of which is the work we’re now doing with the Department of Communications and Informatics, the State Ministry of Research & Technology, and the National ICT Council in Indonesia, as part of our fourth annual FutureGov event in Indonesia, as well as on their data centre consolidation plans in a number of agencies. The work of Ministry of Finance, as well as the Immigration Department is particularly noteworthy - and underlines that the country’s highly decentralised bureaucracy is still capable of delivering major transformation programmes.
Despite progress on the recruitment front, the primary reason for my travels was simply to sit down and directly discuss the plans of senior officials. I’m lucky enough, after eight years with FutureGov, to have ended up with a role that satisfies my twin passions: coffee & curiosity. And as always, if you ask enough questions, patterns emerge.
I’ll be sharing more detailed assessments of individual agencies in the coming months in FutureGov’s country-by-country reports, but here’s a few observations from six weeks living out of a suitcase:
Politics is local, but… One of the reasons I’ve stayed in the region for the last 14 years is that I fell in love with the cultural diversity of Asia in general, and ASEAN in particular. So it follows that searching for commonalities between differing bureaucratic cultures would be a fool’s errand. And yet if you scratch the surface - the key countries of ASEAN are looking to create greater value from their interactions, through a mixture of information leverage and automation, with the emphasis on the former. The language of implementation reflects domestic political priorities - but what’s being done is essentially the same. Thailand may be focused on applying technology to education, flood prevention, and disaster management - whereas Indonesia is pushing ahead with consolidating government data centres and providing a common accounting platform for government. But look closer - Indonesia’s data centre consolidation is partially driven by a requirement to have disaster recovery centres established for all key agencies. Meanwhile Indonesia’s US$250 million move to a common accounting platform is intended to improve the productivity of central government spending in rural areas - which is the same driver as Thailand’s ambitious plans to overhaul education.
Central government is centralised, but…
From the outside government looks so big, but it never feels that way when you’re inside the corridors of power looking out. It is hard to underestimate the tension between departments when they are called to collaborate - which explains why collaboration remains so infrequent. I asked a Director-General of one Finance department whether he’d compared notes with his counterparts from other agencies in government, as I knew that they were approaching the same issue from a different angle. His response was that he didn’t care what other departments were doing, didn’t care what the central IT agency had recommended, and was happy to build his own team to oversee the project with minimal inputs from elsewhere. The same approach can be seen, sadly, with the growing turf war between India’s Planning Commission and the Ministry of Home Affairs over the status of the Unique ID Authority’s Aadhar card.
CIOs have been appointed, but…
There’s a big difference between someone who is nominally, as opposed to functionally, the CIO of the organisation. This has a huge impact on an agency’s ability to digest and contextualise its technology options. Those countries with a pan-government CIO have a more mature approach to ICT deployment. For now nominal CIOs with other ‘primary’ job responsibilities remain in the majority. It can be a challenge to keep these nominal CIOs engaged with longterm, technically demanding projects.
These observations will have to do for now, but if you’re looking for a bit more meat, then look out for the first of the Country Intelligence Reports I mentioned earlier - the countries we’ll be covering each month are: Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan, and The Philippines. Watch this space (as well as the weekly newsletter) for further details.
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Shared Services, simply put, is the notion of consolidating human and physical resources, uniting behind a strategy of sharing, and gaining efficiencies by acting as one. In times where the bottom line is increasingly being focused on, the demands of efficiency, reduction of waste, and accountability are key points the public sector has been responding to.
Shared Services, in theory, epitomise what governments should be: one body acting in a unified direction, with common objectives, goals and requirements. As an outcome, citizens and other external stakeholders can engage government as a single entity. Via Shared Services, all the related government entities can operate on common platforms, thus delivering consistent offerings and services to citizens.
Why should it be considered?
A Shared Services model nominates an existing or new internal agency to become the service provider for other agencies. This lead agency then implements the sharing strategy on behalf of all agencies.
The potential advantages of a unified infrastructure are:
- Better security via a common security platform, which could mean common security policies that are faster to react to and easier to control
- Easier support and upgrades when using common applications
- Cheaper procurement and easier management of refresh cycles when using matching servers and other hardware
- Efficient procurement process and lower costs due to volume purchases as well as unified strategy
- Quicker and more focused implementation because of common goals: 10 people working on one project is more efficient than 10 people divided among 5 projects
- Increased career and job prospects flourish because the unified pool of resources creates new opportunities for professional development
- Consistent citizen experience via a unified platform that ensures a “single window” of engagement
Situational Overview
Today, many agencies operate as stand-alone entities. Some countries have well over 150 different divisions with as many IT departments. CIO’s run a complex array of different systems. The Canadian government, for instance, has over 100 email formats, over 300 data centres, and over 3,000 “overlapping” electronic networks.
Often, department heads have been selected because of their ability to manage autonomous organisations and develop independent strategy. One of the essential characteristics of leaders in a shared services environment is to collaborate and manage co-dependency, which by nature is the opposite of purely autonomous thinking.
This allows each entity to understand what are the on-the-ground requirements, create a strategic road-map, and implement based on available resources.
Challenges
As there are good reasons to adopt and consider the Shared Services model, there are also many possible pitfalls and issues. Many governments who have tried adopting the Shared Services model end up in failure. Western Australia, for example, ended the pursuit of Shared Services in the middle of 2011 after spending almost US$500 million since 2003 on them. Queensland, Australia, did the same, after a health care payroll failure.
Many of the common challenges are listed below:
- Compromise is required as this model leads to the critical need to rely on another party to get an agency’s work done: something the agency may not be used to
- Trust is another issue: questions will centre on if the service level is fair, and if there is going to be consistent value to each of the contributing agencies
- Integration cost is a consistently overlooked danger; the case of Western Australia combining 11 HR systems into one is a huge undertaking in resources and monetary costs
- Loss of Strategic Capacity is rarely addressed but a real concern; after all how can one progress if the ability to do so is taken away?
- Stifling of Innovation is a common issue raised as the reduced manpower and loss of skills may prove detrimental to future
- Opposition to Sharing perhaps is ingrained in each of us—the fact that if money were no object, would shared services still be considered?
- Political Clout is something else that needs to be addressed because there might be questions about whoever is yielding the control and on their motivating factors.
Shared Services Checklist
While shared services can be the ideal, there are precautions and strategic planning that need to be put in place before embarking on the ambitious (but rewarding) journey:
- Determining the right leader ensures a fair representation of the various agency needs. Just like any elected public official, the leader is the glue that holds this puzzle together.
Understanding and acting on requirements is essential.
- Realising value from the ground-up is a must. Understanding the benefits of lower costing, standardisation, and efficiencies must be derived from the agencies, and not simply driven down from a higher power (i.e. Ministry of Finance). History shows that forcing action from the top rarely ends up working for very long. In short, buy-in has to be established ahead of time.
- Empowering the agency leads is crucial to ensuring that everyone has a say on the direction and outcome. A shared services model may function as one, but must let everyone do their own job to meet their respective KPI’s. KPI’s should be adjusted to promote collaboration and collective responsibility.
- A chargeback model is essential to ensure accountability and assess consumption. In the instance of two comparably sized agencies, this ensures the pay-for-what-you-use model instills fairness because an education agency, for example, with 1,000 users may not use up as many resources as a defense agency with 1,000 users, regardless of budget.
- Location is a key consideration for new members of a shared services agency, as removing some key members may result in losing touch of the actual issues on the ground. Keeping relevant staff at their respective agencies will assure a common goal, with individual viewpoints.
The Road Ahead
There are many advocates for this model, and in many cases it has worked as intended. There are variations of hybrid models where there are mini-implementations of shared services around the world. Some countries pool together their defense strategies and IT roadmaps; some do it by region, or function. This helps mitigate risks and leverages commonalities between related agencies.
By design, shared services are much easier to implement in the private sector. Every corporation has common goals, driven by accountability, costs, efficiencies and processes. A public sector body, on the other hand, may have different objectives and very different functions.
Shared services can potentially be viewed as the human equivalent of cloud computing; it is scalable, flexible, cost-friendly and allows a homogeneous operating environment with individualised segments. The question remains, is Shared Services a risk that has to be taken?
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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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As 2011 draws to an end, I’ve been doing my bit of year-end reflecting, and I realised it has been a year that I’ve had my focus on education technology, cloud computing and citizen engagement.
Throughout the year, we’ve seen governments include cloud computing in their e-government strategies and write up roadmaps for cloud adoption. Hong Kong has identified a strategy for cloud computing and will be adopting a cloud computing model incrementally in progressive stages and initiatives. The government is also creating an initial SaaS Portfolio of shared Government applications and services, including electronic information management, human resources management, paper-less meetings, among others.
Australia released a cloud strategy in April, with a principles-and-risk based pathway for agencies to rationalise their ICT asset base and to adopt cloud computing where appropriate.
Both US and Singapore have planned for g-cloud tenders: the former is valued at US$2.5 billion while the latter has yet to announce the results of its open tender.
On an individual agency level, cloud has been adopted in various verticals, and not just in federal agencies—like the US General Services Administration’s email move to cloud and Taiwan’s National Police Agency’s use of a private cloud for crime-fighting data—but also in education. Educational institutes like the National University of Singapore and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia are moving alumni and student emails to the cloud in a bid to lessen workload for the internal IT team.
As I’ve reported before, Korea is also taking education to the cloud but on a much larger scale. The country is revamping its entire education system: both the curriculum and the delivery of educational material. By 2015, the country will digitise all textbooks, have them hosted on a cloud and allow education to be customised by the individual (more on that in the January 2012 print issue of FutureGov Asia Pacific).
On the citizen engagement front, governments have moved from trying to talk at citizens to talking to citizens and asking for public opinion.
Seoul has established a social media centre that acts as a single contact point for receiving communications from citizens. While preparing its sports masterplan for the next 20 years, the Singapore government turned to crowdsourcing; the Philippines, Australia, Iceland and Malaysia have all asked for citizens’ opinions on policy online.
2011 has seen great strides taken in citizen-government communication context thanks to the ‘people power’ that social media have brought about—something that governments cannot ignore especially after the Arab Spring. Governments and education have also been expressing faith in the cloud by writing up guidelines for its use and slowly adopting it in less mission critical components of the organisation (like emails). I can’t wait to see what the new year will bring on these fronts!
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I just had another fruitful trip to Taiwan last week. The hectic one week schedule was packed with 20 odd meetings (three of which were with ministers), a press conference (which we hosted jointly with Ministry of Finance and Taipei City Government) and not to forget FutureGov Forum Taiwan, which attracted CIOs from every key ministry and local government unit despite the ongoing budget season (where projects are scrutinised in terms of legislature).
Talking about budget season, the one thing I keep hearing from colleagues in Taiwan is that budgets are so hard to secure. “Getting minister’s approval is hard enough,” says a ministerial IT director. “And we also need to defend our budget before legislators, who have no idea what we are doing”.
It is true that, comparatively, Taiwan’s investment in government IT is lower than that of other sophisticated economies in the region. However, it does not mean that the government is short of money. For some of the IT leaders, budget has never been a problem.
Pan Chengwu, Director General, Information Management Centre, Directorate-General of Budgeting, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS), surprised (and possibly agitated) the audience at FutureGov Forum when he said “Money is always there, but you need to find the right way to get it”.
He is obviously at a privileged position, as DGBAS in a way acts as the country’s Controller’s office. However, that is not the reason why he seems to be able to get budget for projects he is driving.
“You need to know your superior better, even have dinner with him frequently, and try to understand what his needs are and his concerns are,” he says. “Then you can better deliver your proposal.”
One of Pan’s many responsibilities is to review IT project proposals from different ministries and departments. “Making a good proposal is easier said than done,” he says. “I have seen so many proposals from our few government IT directors which, to be honest, will not interest the decision makers at all.”
“So many of our colleagues are so pressed with their agenda and every time they meet the minister, they ask for money,” Pan adds. “What is the result of that? The minister will shy away from you.”
Pan also explains that showing some tangible results, however small they are, gives Ministers and legislators a better idea of how things will look like once developed.
One of Pan’s successes was the comprehensive Chinese National Standard Code, which included more than 100,000 Chinese characters. He started small, ran a pilot in 1999 with cost of only NTD100,000 and created a simple database, which helped him secure the next investment of NTD500,000, then NTD4 million… To date, almost NTD200 million have been invested in the system.
The database has been widely applied in education, household registration, land registration, justice and many other areas, such that it has become very difficult to calculate the value it has created. “But there is a consensus that the value is huge,” says Pan.
Chen Shou-Chiang, Director of Information Management Office, Directorate General of Highways, plans to consolidate all vehicle data and driver data onto the cloud. He budgeted NTD2 billion for the project, and found a way to convince the Minister and legislators that such investment is necessary.
“If you tell people that the system is efficient or green, few are able to internalise the message,” Su explains. “But if you do the calculation and tell them that how many hours of productivity this will save taxpayers, and how much can these savings been translated into productivity, many more may be willing to sit down and ask you to tell them more.”
The calculation he did showed that by consolidating all these services online, it would save approximately 30 million days of productivity annually. “If these 30 million days are dedicated to work, how much value can be created? If these 30 million days are invested in travel, how much GDP will the service industry generate?” he says. “Few decision makers can resist such a temptation.”
Su Chun-jung, Director General, Financial Data Centre, Ministry of Finance, is taking a similar approach. Among the many projects he runs is the automatic e-calculation & e-deduction of salary tax. He also used detailed figures of productivity savings to demonstrate the tangible benefits. Besides, the project received strong backing from citizens, who are saved from the hassle of going back and forth with the tax system.
I remember years ago Jack Dangermond, CEO of ESRI, the world’s largest geospatial system company, told me about a case in the US where he was challenged in congress. A home delivery company spent US$3 million on a GIS routing and fleet management system using government data. The result? The company achieved US$43 million in cost savings through more efficient routing. Some legislators exclaimed “they are making all that money out of us” as the government had spent US$200 million over a 10 year period to build the system. (Remember, back then, the notion of open government was not even in its infancy).
Dangermond was smart – all he did was showing the figures: the government was already compensated by the additional corporate tax the home delivery company paid. And the sum was US$180 million over 10 years.
At the end of FutureGov Forum Taiwan, Ho Jung-tsun, Deputy Director General of National Immigration Agency, shared his experience and perspective as both a business leader and an IT functional head, which gave the attending IT directors a very nice summary of what is needed to get decision-maker buy-in.
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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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Last Friday I was fortunate enough to be invited to host a discussion on social media at GovCamp in Singapore. The event, organised by Microsoft, brought together civil servants, bloggers and social activists to discuss the challenges and opportunities afforded by social media.
The session was interesting to me for a couple of reasons: participants spoke in their capacity as civil servants, media professionals, but also as active citizens - there were a refreshing range of opinions represented in the room; the participants were also sufficiently engaged with the discussion to stay with me until 7.45pm on a Friday.
The topics thrown up throughout this relaxed “unconference” discussion were illuminating. Do government agencies know what they are using social media for? If they’ve taken our feedback from social media, why aren’t they responding to our feedback on social media itself? How much failure from governments can we accommodate?
While these questions sound confrontational, the actual tone of the discussion was much more collegiate. Everyone agreed that it is okay for governments to make mistakes in social media, provided they learn from them.
On the topic of strategies, and agencies needing to know what they want to use social media for, the Singapore Police Force was brought up as a role model that knew exactly what they wanted to use the social platforms for—information sharing and recruitment—and used it well.
“You must set the right expectations for people. They must know what they can expect from you if they were to follow you on Twitter/Facebook,” one participant shared.
At the end of the evening, what I took away from the session was that citizens are generally pretty forgiving of their governments. There is an underlying sense of trust that agencies are tapping into social media for a good reason, and there is an understanding that leeway needs to be given in order for agencies to learn and improve.
This echoes what New York’s State CIO, Daniel Chan, said to me in May this year: “Taxpayers have been fair and understand tech pretty well. Its about demonstrating to them that we’re doing our due diligence, we’re transparent and understand the value proposition. Show them our processes and that we are using their money as our own money. Taxpayers will understand.”
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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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While hosting an Interactive Discussion Table (IDT) on digital inclusion with Mr Abul Rizvi, Deputy Secretary of Digital Economy and Services, Department of Broadband, Communications, and Digital Economy of Australia, and my colleague Clarice Africa, I realised that one particular issue surfaced again and again. It was common to all economies, and in case of the larger countries—no matter how developed—it seemed particularly intractable.
The problem was of building a sound business case in partnership with telecom companies so that infrastructure for broadband would include all citizens, especially those in the remote areas. Rizvi agreed that this has been an issue within Australia as well.
With the United Nations pushing for broadband to be declared a “human right” in the same way that the right to own property or the right to access clean water and food are, countries are scrambling to reach out in whatever ways possible to the remotest regions of their lands and connect their citizens there. But what is the reason for this? What does it matter if a few citizens remain unconnected?
Adding to this issue, Rizvi disclosed another bewildering fact: a part of Australia’s population has chosen not to connect to the Internet, even when it is able to access it. This stems, according to Rizvi, either from worries about security, lack of confidence in ICT skills, or a simple lack of relevance to everyday life. What is the reason for many of the governments pushing to get all their citizens connected, in spite of some of the prohibitive costs associated with last-mile delivery? The discussion at the IDT threw up some fascinating insights.
Broadband penetration has provided the opportunity for net-savvy individuals all over the world to transcend national boundaries and optimise their time. Because of this, access to knowledge (and skills, for the autodidacts) is no longer the biggest impediment to local progress: it’s fast becoming an even playing field, and the only limits will eventually be native abilities.
So when governments invest in mobile and broadband infrastructure, they are aware that they are not only investing in inclusion and engagement, but also in healthcare, in education, in tax and revenue management and in just about every sector of public administration that deals with an increase in quality of life.
What seemed clear from the discussions was that technology and its applications are no longer isolated tools to be wielded in instances where they may seem obviously relevant; they now form an integral part of a nation’s ecosystem, not unlike the public transport system or the waste disposal framework. If one aspect fails, all others are paralysed.
That is why South Korea’s plan for putting textbooks on the cloud and outlining a definite green strategy is bold, but not risky: they are simply doing now what others will need to do only later. And in the process, the government is trusting the residual effects of its investments to play a major role in pushing its competitiveness in unexpected ways.
Nobody can predict the future, and technology in particular seems to have penchant for humbling those who make bold assertions about its future. But if you start dropping a dollar into your piggy bank every day, there’s a good chance you could use the several thousand in cash three decades later in ways you can’t even imagine.
In a conversation with Dr Ashish Lall, Associate Professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, it came up that McKinsey had released a report about the measurable value of Internet search. The number came up to US$780 billion in 2009, of which US$540 billion contributed directly to GDP. Quite simply, connecting more people might be a sure and simple—albeit sometimes expensive—way of pushing the economy ahead. The residual benefits of connectivity are, I suspect, far larger than merely the measurable ones.
One of the strangest and most heartening examples of technology being used in unexpected ways was when a man in a small cash-strapped village in India used scrap parts from used motorcycles to devise a petrol-operated pulley that pumped water out of wells and irrigated the surrounding farmland. The set-up cost was zero, and the operational cost was negligible. One can only imagine what he might have done with spare parts from an abandoned aircraft factory.
Investment in technology, then, clearly can pay rich dividends, and the broader the scope of this technology, the more unexpected its rewards.
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The challenges governments are facing now are not only unprecedented but also unexpected. Numerous events recently happened in the many parts of the world (I do not have to name them, do I?) have shown that the trend is only accelerating. Crowdsourcing and how to involve the citizens have been a topic on which many have shared their experiences and pain points in FutureGov magazine.
That’s why when Microsoft reached out to FutureGov for our input while developing the programme of GovCamp Singapore, we happily said ‘yes’. And in addition to that, our editors and researchers will be on site to help with the conversations.
The event will be held on November 18 at The Rock Auditorium, Level 3, Suntec City.
Having been to our annual FutureGov Summit a number of times, Microsoft’s MD for Global Public Sector, Rodrigo Becerra, has been a friend for years. And as early as in 2009, he sold me the idea of GovCamps by sharing about the events he had facilitated in Mexico and in Berlin.
I find GovCamps interesting because of two reasons: they are inclusive – anyone can participate, and they do not have a fixed agenda.
The organisers put the profile of participants as including “thought leaders, citizens, students, government officials, developers, public servants, web 2.0 advocates, bloggers and community members concerned with technology, open data and open government”.
In another word, it means ‘everyone’.
The forum allows every citizen, regardless which sector he or she is coming from, to discuss about improving government operations and services through technology.
This rhymes well with what James Kang, Singapore’s Government CIO, told Rahul and myself in a three hour long dialogue session earlier this year. He said that the complexity of the contemporary world was forcing the government to admit that it did not know everything; instead, it needed to engage the citizens, who had the knowledge which complements government’s knowhow, to ‘co-create’ policies, processes, systems, and services.
Those who came from an IT background would be familiar with the process of “User Acceptance Testing”. Many conferences with fixed agendas often have the precise problem of User Acceptance Testing – you tick the boxes without fully understanding or addressing the needs and issues of the attendees.
Realisation of this was one of the reasons why FutureGov conferences adopted the Interactive Discussion Tables format two years back, and have seen tremendous success in fostering dialogues and creating memorable experiences among the region’s public sector officials.
More radical (and also because of a different participant profile), GovCamp uses a format where discussion topics are voted (in or out) by the participants, who had submitted their proposed topics before hand, and who would then proceed to discuss on the issues they voted for.
Judging from past GovCamps’ results, the Singapore event is bound to be exciting.
My editorial colleagues at FutureGov and I look forward to the conversations on the 18th of November.
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Earlier this year when I first heard of South Korea’s plans to turn all textbooks digital and cloud-based from my friends at Korea Education and Research Information Service (KERIS), I remember being awed by the ambition in the project.
Moreover, I was a bit sceptical—at FutureGov, we have witnessed many ambitious projects which fail to achieve their ambitions because of the huge challenges they constantly face.
For the past few weeks I’ve been in regular contact with KERIS on their SMART Education strategy—where the cloud plans stem from—and it seems like South Korea is at the top of its education game.
While there have been initiatives to use certain technologies in a better way, these projects are often silo-ed in schools, faculties or classrooms. By creating a nationwide strategy after looking at the best practices worldwide, Korea is not only harnessing international knowledge, the country is also making sure that no one gets left out.
Lacking the right infrastructure to use cloud in classrooms? Teachers aren’t ICT-inclined? Not sure how to convert your teaching and learning materials to a digital platform? The strategy has identified all these challenges and drawn measures to tackle each of them: teachers will be trained; guidelines around textbooks will be formed; created learning material will be shared; and network infrastructure in all schools will be bumped up for the cloud starting next year.
All these require investments from the government, but judging from Korea’s past commitment to creating an information society, I am quite optimistic about their plans.
Not only that, pedagogy itself will see a shift: the ‘smart’ in SMART Education stands for self-directed, motivated, adaptive, resource-free and technology-embedded.
It is interesting to see such direction given on a uniform and national level while uneven developments remain a challenge for schools, faculties and classrooms in many countries around the region. Covering developments of education transformation in the region, I’ve heard a lot about getting learning management systems up and running, but equally on transforming education with engaging devices such as the smartphones that many students now carry.
Each country has visions and masterplans for education—but perhaps facing the great technological shift, it is time for government to be bolder, and more radical.
I’ll be following up with KERIS on the strategy—while being envious about what Korean students will be having in 2015 (which I did not have when I was a student 5 years ago)! So please expect fuller coverage of how Korea plans to make this strategy work and how much they have spent on it in an upcoming issue of FutureGov Asia Pacific. There will surely be some lessons that you will find useful.
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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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There’s certainly no doubt about it—a single entity cannot address the digital divide in isolation.
While it is the government’s responsibility to set policies and formulate strategies, create a positive legislative environment and fund digital inclusion programmes, the active participation of all stakeholders is greatly needed in order to achieve an inclusive and people oriented information society.
Public and private sector partnerships are needed to address the digital divide in Asia’s emerging economies, especially in terms of bringing broadband services to rural and under-served regions. The private entities also bring innovations and make ICT tools available to the masses. Meanwhile, the participation of the civil society is to bring long-term sustainability.
The importance of building a strategic coalition to narrow the digital divide was also pointed out by Professor Craig Smith, the Director of Digital Divide Institute (DDI), a non-profit based in Chulalongkorn University’s Center for Ethics in Science and Technology in Thailand in our recent conversation.
Smith told me the model for broadband deployment should not just be a mere government “policy” but a framework for mobilising all sectors in a country – governmental, commercial, academic, NGOs, and media.
“The small countries need to come together in ways that will pull their efforts to attract broadband investments. I think the smaller countries need to form a coalition to pull their populations together into more of a solution that is attractive to the investors and to the companies.”
DDI recommend policies and practices that show how governmental, corporate and academic sectors could innovate to bring “meaningful broadband” to their mass populations. By saying meaningful, Smith means usable, affordable and empowering.
The institute has developed framework for Meaningful Broadband deployment in Thailand and Indonesia and their works is now being extended to other Asian countries as well.
Smith said the big problem with governments is how to share the cost and risk of bringing broadband to everyone. He added that most governments lack political will to step forward and help the private sector with the capital investment cost.
The government, he said, should encourage the higher education sector to develop applications and find a way to work on lowering the cost of smart devices.
“They (governments) can’t just sit back and regulate and let the private sector try to bring broadband to everyone. It won’t work. “
The importance of PPP in narrowing the digital divide was also brought up during the FutureGov Summit last year in a panel discussion on bringing ICT to rural and remote regions; leading government officials from The Philippines, Canada and India said that alliances with the private sector would create more sustainable programmes.
Ministry of Government Services CIO for Ontario, Canada, David Nicholl, said that governments should focus on regulatory work and “private-public coalition building”, but added that the private sector must be allowed to have operational control in partnerships with the public sector.
Nicholl said the Ministry’s focus is on having a government policy, to encourage partnerships between municipalities and the private sector with some seed money from both.
“It’s a little bit of competition to come up with the most efficient business schemes that would drive economic development or will drive some kind of community participation. It’s what I called private-public collision, plus it’s more about allowing the private sector to just do what they have to in order to mandate some operational control.”
In the drive to bridge the digital divide, it is therefore important to establish meaningful strategic alliances to leverage existing resources and capitalise on the knowledge and experience of each other.
This unique combination of perspectives, experience, skills and resources through private-public sector strategic partnerships and collaboration with the civil society would bring the optimal benefits of the digital inclusion programmes to the masses.
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If you’re sore about missing out on the presentations and interactive discussion tables (IDTs) happening at FutureGov Congress Australia 2011 in Canberra right now, fret not for Twitter is here with interesting snippets.
Day one of the conference opened well, with each IDT filled with 12 delegates to a table, and the newly introduced voting system proved to be an engaging feature.
As David Eade, Product Manager of Objective, tweeted early this morning: “Looking forward to hearing from @KateLundy and @DirDigEng at #FGCAus11 today…and then three more IDTs—exciting!”
While sitting in the Singapore office, I get real-time updates of what is happening at the conference to the minute. Thanks to Pia Waugh, Tech Advisor to Senator Kate Lundy, I know that two hours ago, Andrew Stott from the UK Transparency Board gave case studies on open data efforts and that one of them included savings in government procurement.
Waugh has also kindly shared an image of a graph Stott presented, showing the number of data sets UK has opened up to date; and I’ve already seen pictures of this morning’s panel discussion—no need to wait for the professional shots to arrive!
@davidjeade: panel discussion image - members from US, AU, UK and Austria. Great insight.
Apart from being a tool for information dissemination, Twitter at FutureGov Congress Australia 2011 also let delegates network and collaborate better. Like how Chris Moore, Chief Information Officer at the City of Edmonton, US, caught up with Waugh after Lundy’s talk this morning.
FutureGov has also managed to take in feedback—that Moore has met “incredible global Gov 2.0 leaders here in Australia at FutureGov Australia Congress”, that Lundy seemed “impressed with @FutureGovMag’s room layout”, and that Australia’s Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) found the speaker line-up interesting.
While praise is always nice to hear, we’ve also taken in the negative feedback. Starting with the next FutureGov event, we’ll be setting a common hashtag so the bytes of information floating on Twitter can be aggregated for everyone’s ease.
For FutureGov Congress Australia, please use #FGCAus11.
Other interesting tweets include:
@Chrisj_moore: “‘Australia is at the forefront of Global Trends in Gov 2.0 @katelundy @futuregovmag’ I agree - they are leaders in our world #GOC”
@davidjeade: “Brenda Cooper—shared services pain has been business change management not technology. Required more people than thought.”
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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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