Unless governments tap into the multi-channel communication platforms, citizens' expectations will continue mounting service delivery pressure.
This is a view expressed by Ziad Elkhalid, account team unit lead for Bahrain and Oman at Microsoft Gulf, speaking yesterday at the Microsoft Dynamic Africa 2014 Conference in Kempton Park.
Elkhalid also noted that transparency and accountability should be at the heart of governments' adoption of new solutions or building of existing ones.
"Citizens are demanding governments to act faster and adopt a more personalised services approach; they expect that whenever they share information, the same effort should come from the government's side," explained Elkhalid.
"Therefore, any government that's looking to be efficient cannot ignore the scale of data at their disposal, the business intelligence, growth in mobile adoption and new devices, the bringing your own device trend, cloud computing and the ever-expanding social media landscape."
According to Elkhalid, the use of these multi-channel platforms will not only help governments determine what services should be prioritised, but will enable them to better reach, engage, serve and maintain relationships with citizens.
"This will see governments' responsiveness and decision-making improve; it makes them more accessible and assists them in understanding the full lifecycle of their interaction with citizens - where, for example, if complains are raised, the process is tracked through to the complaint being attended to and feedback sent back to the citizen," he said.
"In this way, if a similar complaint is received again, it goes into an already existing knowledge-base, ensuring quick service delivery turnaround time and a personalised service to the citizen."
Additionally, Elkhalid stated that a huge percentage of government budget is spent on legacy modernasation, with this being another critical area where IT has an immense role to play.
"Governments cannot just decide on new systems and do away with ones that have been in place for years at a moment's notice; the best strategy must always encompass legacy records that may be stored on a variety of media - including paper - in a variety of formats to make modernisation more affordable and less disruptive, this is where technologies like cloud computing come to the fore," he said.
Elkhalid pointed out that although public administrations globally are committed to making user-centred, personalised, multi-platform e-government services a widespread reality in the short-term, the level of deployment is still clearly below expected goals, and there is strong evidence that lack of awareness is one of the main barriers to a wider take-up.
"Initial efforts undertaken with respect to e-government were mostly focused on the short-term, on getting isolated services online, and publishing information without providing for regular updates."
He concluded that trends now point in the direction of an integrated unified model, contributing to more efficient and effective public services, as governments are providing more and more support to open-data initiatives and Web 2.0 channels as a means for engaging citizens.
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