GCC eGovernment and eServices Forum continues

The fourteenth GCC eGovernment and eServices Forum continued for a third day at Al Bustan Rotana Hotel in Dubai, UAE. Organized by Datamatix Group, the event’s main sponsors are Dubai eGovernment and Xerox, the world’s leading document management technology and services enterprise. There are also several co-sponsors - Genius Soft, Crimson Logic, Solutions Middle East, Captaris, Gemalto, and Oracle are co-sponsoring.

The day’s sessions began with an address by Aziz Rabbah, anE-Gov Expert from Morocco, on eGovernment Methodology Aspects. He was followed by Mr. Nader Alyani,Director, Middle East – Gov3 Limited, who spoke on eGovernment Program and Project Management Issues.

Alyani identified the major issues as: Lack of strategic clarity; poor understanding and segmentation of user needs; lack of sustained leadership at political and senior management level; lack of effective engagement with stakeholders; too many changes implemented too quickly; lack of skills within delivery team; poor supplier management; and lack of benefits realization, and pointed out that “Strong eGovernment program management disciplines are required to manage each of these issues throughout the delivery program.”

He stated that the mission for an eGovernment Delivery Program should be to join up government services around the needs of customers; achieve long term cost savings; and improve delivery of core public policy objectives, and he went on to discuss the importance of clear governance, where a central team is established to drive forward a nation’s eGovernment program, stressing that“It is vital to do this in a way which empowers and helps individual agencies rather (than) simply introduce a bureaucratic process which adds little value.”

The third presentation of the day was given by Mr. Jorge Sebastiao, CISSP, BS7799 Lead Author, ITIL, ISP, Vice President of Secude and Secude Global Consulting, on “IT Security Planning for e-Government Projects, followed by panel discussions on “Developing the appropriate business and ICT architecture”; “Governance of shared processes and systems and policies for interoperability”; and “Sourcing and service delivery and information management policies”.

Opening the second half of the day’s sessions, Mr. Charles Watt, Senior Director e-Business, Scottish Enterprise of the World Bank, spoke about End to end Delivery of eGovernment and Project Management – Building Tomorrow’s eGovernment Team.
“Despite e-government initiatives having accumulated some admirable results over a period of 15-20 years with major successes in countries as diverse as Canada, UK, Estonia and South Korea, failure rates are still relatively high.” He said pointing out that even with standards such as Prince2, Risk Management, e-governance, and many others being implemented, failure still occurs regularly.

He discussed several areas or issues in eGovernment project management that have contributed to failures, stating that the amount of failure that still occurs is a matter for concern because, as figures from 2007 Government UK IT Summit show, “ICT is the third largest expenditure category in the public sector amounting to 7% of total government consumption expenditures in the UK, EU15 and EU25. At a time when taxes are funding in the UK a £14bn spend annually on public sector IT, equivalent to 7,000 new primary schools or 75 hospitals a year.”
He then went on to look at the need to take a holistic overview of the e-government project management process and to investigate several specific areas commonly overlooked.

Ms. Azza Al Forkani, from the Ministry of Education of Oman, followed Watt’s presentation with a Regional Case Study entitled “Transforming Education in Oman”.

Winding up the third day, the last speaker Mr. David Wilde, CIO and Head of Information and Customer Services from London Borough of Waltham Forest, discussed a Global e-Government Case Study “from Readiness to Lessons learned”.

Discussing the importance of technology to public services, he said: “Technology cannot transform public service delivery for the better on its own, but it is a key enabler towards that end if integrated with business change. For some time it has also been one of the cornerstones to the ability of a business to function and must be effective and well respected to open the door to business transformation.”

He then went on to examine how the London Borough of Waltham Forest undertook a four year journey which took it from outdated, disparate technology use, and one of the worst performing Councils, to a leader in UK public service transformation and a high performer in UK local government, by achieving major efficiency gains, establishing an award winning ICT infrastructure and service, and by moving into strategic transformation through the Access to Services Programme.
He stressed the importance of flexibility, public engagement, channel shift and understanding your local population when establishing an effective e-government program.