Singapore's eGovernance Award Highlights the Need for a Federal-Level CIO

Last year while discussing the first edition of the Connectivity Scorecard, which revealed how inefficiently governments around the world were using their ICT infrastructure, Professor Leonard Waverman, told me that one big reason for that was, "there isn't a CIO (Chief Information officer) at the federal level."

According to Waverman (and other experts also), while it is a fact that there are CIOs at the agency or state levels in almost all governments, almost no government has a centralized CIO. This is true across all types of economies; whether it is a developing economy or a developed one.

Having gone into the depths of Singapore's eGovernance pursuits after the country won a recent award, I can't help but appreciate the wisdom of that observation of Waverman, a professor of economics at London Business School as well as the Dean of Haskayne School of Business at Canada's  University of Calgary. He is considered as one of the most influential men in the global telecom industry.

Indeed, Singapore has demonstrated how far and fast can a country forge ahead with its eGovernance initiatives when it is led by a federal level CIO.

In the 2009 Waseda University International e-Government Ranking, announced a few weeks back, Singapore overtook United States to the top, making it the first time that an Asian country has taken pole position in the study. In third position was Sweden, followed by the United Kingdom and Japan.

The Waseda ranking covered 34 countries. The study analyzed the development of web sites and ICT at governmental level, as well as the relationship between governments and their stakeholders.

Singapore ranked within the top three for almost all the research parameters including network preparedness, the availability of user-friendly and secure electronic services, the integration of ICT to facilitate management, the quality of the national portal, and above all, how well the role of Chief Information Officer in Government is defined and developed.

"Human resource, particularly Government Chief Information Office (GCIO) leadership has been seen to be one of the key factors to the success of Singapore's e-Government," says OBI.

Singapore realized the importance of a GCIO-led e-Government way back in 1996 when it established a GCIO wing to plan and oversee the development and integration of civil service-wide IT applications. Today the country even has a whole department called Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) that acts as GCIO.

This department provides technical advice, master-planning and project management services to Ministry of Finance, which is the country's e-Government owner, and government agencies. In addition, it identifies and conceptualizes e-Government programs and projects. And finally, it drives the development and implementation of e-Government programs and projects.

Obi says that success of Singapore's GCIO-driven eGovernance initiatives is evident from the fact that almost 98 percent of the country's public services are available online  -- a feat which few countries have achieved -- with the majority of them being transactional in nature. Citizens of Singapore do almost everything online, from filing and paying their taxes, to managing their pensions and mortgages, to registering marriage, birth, and death over the Internet.

Businesses in Singapore too have full access to the Government. They can submit tenders online, renew and apply for license or permits online, as well as file patents, trademarks, etc, online.

Singapore's GCIO-led eGovernance process also makes evolution of e-Governance easy, says IDA. For instance having achieved its objectives of focusing its e-Government initiatives at the public agency level, the Government is now shifting it focus to the citizens. From merely providing services to establishing virtual spaces, IDA is now working on allowing citizens to participate in policy-making, it says.

Commenting on general e-Government trends over the past five years, Obi says that Governments have become aware that it is not enough to introduce ICT to the existing internal processes; ICT must be used together with other e-Government initiatives.

"Moreover, e-Government is becoming increasingly important in a scenario characterized by the global financial crisis, as well as growing concerns over environmental issues. ICT can be used as tools to address these issues as governments work towards a citizen-oriented state," Obi says.