Our E-Bureaucracy Is Wrapped in Red Tape
 Dr. Juan F. Rada, right, senior vice president, Industries, Oracle Europe, Middle East and Africa, advised that e-government is not about reproducing the past electronically. | |
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RIYADH, 21 February 2006 — It is always good to have an international expert come to town to take a look around, especially if that individual is willing to speak his mind on what he sees. That is exactly what happened last week when Dr. Juan F. Rada, senior vice president, Industries, Oracle Europe, Middle East and Africa, was in Riyadh to make a presentation at the Saudi CIO Summit 2006.
On Tuesday after his presentation, Rada had quite a few thoughts on issues critical to progress in the Kingdom. While he had been at the CIO Summit to show how e-government in other nations is being implemented successfully and bringing good returns, Rada observed that there are difficulties with the ways in which Saudi Arabia is approaching the e-enablement of its government. Rada also believes that large chasms are about to open up in the so-called “digital divide” and he advised that urgent action must be taken by those in authority in Saudi Arabia to stave off a crisis in this regard.
Rada began by explaining that many governments around the world, including the Saudi government, are in the process of enabling electronic services for citizens. This is because electronic systems allow ministries and government agencies to be available around the clock for citizen services. This makes citizens happy and can increase efficiencies for all.
“What is e-government all about? Rada queried. “The No. 1 issue is services, because the government is in a sense a service industry. Secondly, it is about savings and effectiveness and thirdly it is about security and safety. The third point has nothing to do with the political context. It has to do with the fact that the transactions that a person does online will be legally binding. The government will manage a huge amount of information and it must have safety and security. For example you wouldn’t want people to be able to use false identities in such transactions. You cannot have a true e-government infrastructure that does not guarantee to both the citizens and the government that it is safe and secure.”
Setting up e-government can be a very methodical process. This is happening in some places such as Dubai where the whole government is on the same platform and there is a central shared system.
“Dubai is an example of what is possible when there is a central authority,” said Rada. “It is an e-government system that works. For instance, the entire procurement system for the government is done electronically. This has reduced waste and increased transparency. The suppliers of the government have been obliged to become e-enabled as well and that has brought many small- and medium-sized companies in Dubai onto the Internet.”
While the e-government system in Dubai is working, the e-government effort in Saudi Arabia leaves something to be desired. Rada pointed out that the current fragmented approach to installing IT solutions in various ministries, agencies and municipalities across the Kingdom does not bode well for a unified e-government system in Saudi Arabia.
“If I look at the successful e-government implementations, in my view one of the challenges Saudi Arabia has is that the institutional framework to implement e-government (is lacking),” Rada said. “If you look at the more successful e-government implementations there always has been some form of very strong central coordination. You cannot give the power to one minister to coordinate this. Historically, we have all the figures, so my comments are based on fact. In one government where the Minister of Finance was given the task to oversee e-government, the implementation was only ever done in the Ministry of Finance. Other ministers found 325,000 reasons not to do it. The model that I have seen, that is most successful, is one that is very close to the head of state. In Saudi Arabia that would be the king and the king’s office. Plus, the individual in charge of the e-government effort must have the rank of minister. This person must ensure that there are similar standards and be responsible for coordination and the interoperability of the e-government systems. It is very hard for a government to become interoperational in the back office.”
If back office functions are not interoperational then ministries can’t share information with each other easily, files can’t be automatically exchanged and any issue that involves several steps and probably several ministries or agencies to resolve, can’t be handled effectively online.
“One typical example of what I am saying is that if you want to have this coordination in the back office, so the file that you put in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs goes automatically to the Ministry of Interior to complete a specific process — rather than having to be moved manually from office to office — for that you need to have an infrastructure that will link the systems,” Rada explained. “That requires a highly safe and secure dedicated government network. The problem when this network does not exist is that somewhere there will be a weak link and other government ministries and departments will be very reluctant to share or exchange their information with that weak link. That’s when the e-government process will halt. Right now this network does not exist in Saudi Arabia and no one has the responsibility to create it.”
Another issue involves electronic identity and electronic signatures. Just exactly how can a Saudi citizen prove who he or she is online in order to make a transaction or document created through e-government legally binding? Without legislation to solve this problem and e-enable the government, all that’s happening now is that ministries are trying to reproduce the past electronically. Who should be introducing such legislation the Kingdom? Rada stated that no one he spoke with was certain whose responsibility that legislation was. Rada also felt that the missteps with e-government in the Kingdom are not because Saudi Arabia is a developing country.
“On the issue of e-government there are not developed and developing countries,” Rada said. “Some so-called developing countries are far ahead of developed nations in the area of e-government. The application of the technology varies depending mostly on if there is a driver for the nation’s e-government effort or not.”
Just because the Kingdom is not winning the e-government race does not mean we should consider the effort lost.
“In regards to e-government you can have significant systems and processes up and running in 12-24 months,” Rada commented. “The question now in Saudi Arabia is how institutional orchestration of the effort can be achieved? If the ministries are not joined, then the effort is diminished. There has been a situation in Europe with some governments, that citizens can do all sorts of things with e-government on the Internet, but then on the back of that, the civil servants print out the documents and move them around. An e-government is that you have a transaction, which from the origin to the end, is electronic.”
E-government initiatives will never be successful of course unless citizens are willing to utilize the electronic systems being made available. This is all part of conquering the “digital divide,” that afflicts the Kingdom and other developing nations. There is no silver bullet to solve this problem. There have to be programs of education and awareness. Rada gave as an example, the efforts in Chile, his homeland.
“First computers and broadband connections were introduced into all the schools,” he explained. “Then on certain afternoons, the children taught their parents to use computers at school. It is essential to come up with new ways to bridge the digital divide. One thing about computing is that the learning is different generationally. Children teach the parents and not the other way around. The technological change has been so fast, that even the middle aged generation never had it in their basic training. This means that programs aimed at certifying e-literacy must also be promoted so that employers can choose to hire someone who has computer skills over someone who does not. This encourages adults to take courses and become e-literate.”
The bottom line is that the government and the society here must implement many different strategies simultaneously in order to quickly close the digital divide. But simply having access to a computer and acquiring e-literacy skills may not be enough. Rada advised that technology is moving quickly and the digital divide is about to become much wider.
“This year, the major vendors will introduce broadband operating systems conceived for the broadband environment and this will shift the web over the next two to three years to a broadband environment in the developed world,” Rada said. “The effect will be that there will be great difficulty for those still in a narrow band environment. Trying to squeeze broadband content into a format for a narrow band environment would make it less interesting and interactive.”
He continued, “What will happen is that the digital divide will no longer be a divide just between people who have computers and those who don’t have computers. It will grow to become those who have broadband and those who are limited to narrow band. The shift to broadband needs to be immediately considered in Saudi government policies. I believe if the government is informed at the highest levels of the critical nature of this situation, directives will be given to the telecoms to make the appropriate moves immediately. In this situation much can be done quickly and essential moves must be made now.”
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