Cape Town, 27 May 2004
The most successful e-government projects are those where the money follows the directive, says Gartner research director Greg Kreizman.
Kreizman, who specialises in public sector research and is visiting SA, says e-government lessons learnt in the US and UK show that focusing on the portals that deliver services to citizens and the interoperability between various government departments give the best results.
"E-government projects should try and group departments and organisations with common spheres of interest, or 'clusters`, where they get a level of interoperability, rather than go for one all-encompassing portal or service," he says.
The SA government has grouped its various departments into clusters such as the "economic cluster" that incorporates the departments of communications, finance, and trade and industry.
While this country has a "flow-down" system, in that central government sets the policies for the lower levels, the US has a different system in that some autonomy is in the hands of local government structure.
"However, US government agencies have to now comply with 24 national government requirements in terms of cost-cutting, reducing overlap and duplication, security and business case studies in order to gain federal funding," Kreizman says.
The rush to get government services online has dissipated recently and Kreizman says there are no longer the time frames of ensuring that various portals are running by certain dates. "Rather, the trend in e-gov has shifted to focusing on the pain areas - that is where organisations have trouble interacting with each other."
Kreizman says there are three main aspects to e-government: operational efficiency, consolidated services and political return.
"The first two aspects e-government shares with the private sector, however, political return means what political agenda is being met with the service."
Such political agenda could mean various things, such as pension payouts, saving lives, raising levels of education and online press services.
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