An e-government master plan that should change the way the government runs and make it a more efficient and transparent system, was launched, yesterday.
The master plan, launched by the prime minister, Tshering Tobgay, and information and communications minister, DN Dhungyel, will provide a road map for how the government and private sector adopt and utilise ICT towards creating a knowledge based society.
Two components of the master plan, an e-government management system, that will place all government ICT professionals under the department of information technology and telecom (DITT), and an e-GIF (electronic government interoperability framework), that should essentially allow information sharing between government agencies, were also launched alongside.
Lyonchhoen Tshering Tobgay pointed out that the master plan and systems being launched are very important towards achieving good governance. He said that the master plan is about how to utilise ICT for the present and future.
There are three desired outcomes of the master plan: ICT for good governance, for a Bhutanese information society, and as a key enabler for sustainable economic development. Some of the strategies are to build ICT capability through education, leverage it in government service delivery, deliver electronic services, promote adoption and enhance ICT capability in the government, development of the ICT industry, and promote its adoption in the private sector, among others.
The master plan lists 50 projects or initiatives, costing a total of Nu 4.9B, to be carried out in the next five years.
Of these, the two launched yesterday are within the good governance aspect.
On the two systems being launched, the prime minister said that the systems would address existing shortcomings. He said it would bring about uniformity in management of ICT professionals and the incompatible application systems being used by the various government agencies. “If we are to achieve our national goal through ICT, we must think as one,” he said.
Information and communications secretary, Dasho Kinley Dorji, explained that hundreds of ICT initiatives and projects are taking place in the country today, however, in isolation of one another. Therefore, the master plan would serve as a road map of what the government wants ICT to do for Bhutan.
For the government, the master plan is to guide it towards operating efficiently and transparently, by changing the way people work, in terms of both mindset and technology, he pointed out.
Dasho Kinley Dorji explained that the e-government management system will allow DITT to treat and use the 350 ICT professionals in the civil service as a team.
Currently, each ministry or government agency maintains its ICT professionals independently. As a result, usage, capability, training, and promotion of the ICT professionals can be determined by non-standardised factors, sometimes even by their relationship with their superiors.
Dasho Kinley Dorji said that it has been found that ICT professionals are found to be “misplaced” in divisions that are not ICT related, and that their training opportunities and promotions can be determined by their relationships with their superiors.
The e-government management system is expected to address this shortcoming, as DITT will become responsible for their training and promotions. The department will also manage the placing of ICT professionals on a skill and time basis. This means a particular ICT professional will be placed somewhere only for the skills possessed and required by the agency, and for the time required to carry out the needed activity.
Similarly, the e-GIF system is expected to address the problem of the government ministries and agencies developing and operating application systems independently or in isolation. This results in these systems and applications being incompatible with one another inadvertently barring the sharing of information within some government agencies.
For instance, it was pointed out that four agencies that required biometric systems developed them independently of one another. Dasho Kinley Dorji said that the home and foreign ministries, the police, and the election commission had each purchased their own systems. He pointed out that development is expensive. He also pointed out that one of the agencies had even sent some of its personnel to remote areas to acquire biometric information, when it was all available in the home ministry’s data base.
Similarly, the land commission, Bhutan Post, and Thimphu thromde, had developed a geological information system independently of one another, when they could have simply shared the information collected.
He pointed out that the e-GIF would allow agencies requiring the same information to “talk” to each other. For instance, when it comes to service delivery, the foreign ministry should be able to access the home ministry’s database to verify all required information of a citizen when applying for a passport, instead of having the applicant physically go to other agencies to acquire documents and bring them to the foreign ministry. Such a system would allow service delivery to be significantly faster, according to Dasho Kinley Dorji.
Source: Kuensel
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