e-Governance: How it helps Sri Lanka

The very first e-Governance Centre of Excellence in Sri Lanka will be launched in June with Oracle leading the initiative. And with it, one of the initiatives of the e-Sri Lanka roadmap will become a reality.

"Sri Lanka is the fourth country in the Asia Pacific region to become a part of Oracle's e-Governance COE network," says Samina Rizwan, Regional Manager, South Asia Growth Economies (West), Oracle Corporation.

"e-Governance is all about using information technology to deliver faster, better and more efficient governance and making the lives of the citizen easier and happier. It is also about helping Governments do better fiscal management, because better governance leads to better citizen services and therefore happier citizens."

Rizwan states that e-Governance is definitely not about deployment of computers and information technology infrastructure in government departments.

"At best, that is the first step towards organizing vital information in a manner in which it can be easily retrieved and processed further. e-Governance is about making citizen to Government interaction simple.

It is about simplifying delivery of citizen services so that the citizen, the individual or the corporate, does not have to spend more than a minimum amount of time in processing applications, complaints, inquiries, bills, information requests with any government department."

The success of e-Governance in any country depends on the presence of knowledge workers who can use IT to automate and therefore optimise efficiencies within the government machinery, efficient intra-department and inter-department work flow management and effective citizen-government interaction resulting from the previous factors.

Commenting on Oracle's partnership with various stakeholders within the e-Governance projects in a number of countries, Rizwan says, "Oracle started out from a government project over a quarter-century ago and today enjoys the longest continuous working relationship with the public sector. Our knowledge and experience in the area of designing, implementing and supporting technologies and services for use by governments remains unrivalled in the industry. More than 2,000 governments around the world at all levels today run Oracle.

As a longtime partner of governments worldwide, Oracle has developed an extensive array of solutions to assist government agencies, and these range from law enforcement to public administration to national defence.

In Sri Lanka, too we are lending our expertise towards giving that vital new technology with integrated service delivery which can connect citizens to governments, businesses and employees."

Administrative tasks are fast becoming self-service oriented and as government outlook is expanding from being mostly local to an increasingly regional or global view, Rizwan says that Governments want solutions that offer the highest levels of scalability, reliability and security at the foundation for their e-government infrastructure.

Rizwan details some examples of successful e-Governance projects at work. "One of the best demonstrations of a successful e-Governance project is LEADERS, which is the acronym for the 'Lightweight Epidemiology Advanced Detection and Emergency Response System'.

Designed by Oracle and its partners, when 9/11 happened, some 290 hospitals in and around New York City were able to log into the LEADERS network, which tracked information on causalities and performed 'load balancing' to ensure that all injured persons received medical attention as quickly as possible, helping to save thousands of lives.

" The Internal Revenue Service in Chile is another example. "Until recently, the agency had relied on a traditional paper-based collection and administration process. When they shifted to an Oracle based online transaction method, the Chilean Internal Revenue Service found that the average transaction processing time now took just 12 hours, a massive reduction from the 25 days it used to take with the paper-based system."

Closer to home, India has been a feather in the cap for e-Governance success. A number of projects have taken off the ground and the State and Federal Governments seeing tangible results. Rizwan says that Andhra Pradesh's eSeva project is a shining example of how e-Governance has permeated every rung of citizen service.

"Many people are already paying their utility bills through the eSeva project. Oracle is involved in over 100 government projects in India and this project is yet another example which we are proud to be in partnership with the Andhra Pradesh government.

Actually, almost all 28 States in India have announced plans or are already implementing projects to automate citizen services and to streamline their procedures using latest technologies in order to become more efficient and responsive to their citizens."

e-Governance is not just about little servers and PCs thrown in with a few applications. E-Governance is first about a Government's capacity using modern information technology to bring about a better civil administration and judicial system for citizens and better and more optimal use of national resources.

With the launch of the e-Governance Centre of Excellence in Sri Lanka, despite having grappled at a slow pace to become IT savvy, the country is moving in the right direction.

This initiative will propel the country towards developing communities to build the social and economic capacities and build partnerships wherein organisational groupings will be created to achieve economic and social objectives.