Next Generation Citizen Centric e-Services

From: S Moonesamy <sm+mu_at_elandsys.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2015 11:34:54 -0700

Hello,

There is an academic paper [1] about Next Generation Citizen Centric
e-Services which was written by Vikas Sharma, Diya, Guttoo and Aurobindo Ogra.

Page 4 of the paper lists the Government Online Portal, Mauritius as
one of the initiatives for "citizen inclusion" and "participatory
governance through online platforms". It is a bit surprising that
the Government Online Portal is used as an example given the
following observation from the National Audit Office [2]:

   "The usage of most of the 74 e-facilities has remained quite low, two years
    after the setting up of the new portal, while 31 of them (42 per cent) have
    not been used at all. Further, except for four e-facilities, the remaining
    facilities were minimally used and therefore, the public was still making
    applications/payments manually."

Page 8 of the paper uses the National ID Card as a "one stop shops"
case study and draws the following conclusion:

    "With the new card and system, citizens will be able to enjoy
     more secure and reliable citizen-to-government transactions,
     as well as overall increased efficiency and shorter processing
     time in using government services."

The authors do not explain how there will be increased
efficiency. It is strange that the authors state that "a new
population database" can protect citizen privacy.

Page 11 states the following:

   "As per an e-government survey conducted by the Central Informatics Bureau,
    there is a very low sharing of data among systems of government agencies
    coupled with a lack of policies to regulate sharing and information
    dissemination."

This is probably a significant problem for the Central Informatics
Bureau given the strong resistance of government agencies to share
data between themselves. During the Open Data workshop, it was
apparent that there weren't any policies regarding information
management in the public sector.

I could not find anything in the paper which "deliberates on the role
of the Mauritian Government for creating a society of the future for
citizens". What is missing in the paper is a discussion about the
critical failure factors.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

1. https://ujdigispace.uj.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10210/13037/SHARMA%202014.pdf
2. http://download.govmu.org/files/06%20VPM%20MOFED.docx
Received on Mon Oct 19 2015 - 18:36:11 PST

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