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EIU's latest report highlights major impediments faced by SEA governments when adopting new technology

By Wong Chung Wee - on 8 Jun 2016, 7:38pm

EIU's latest report highlights major impediments faced by SEA governments when adopting new technology

SEA governments in the EIU report are making progress in offering e-government services to their citizens.

The Economist Intelligence Unit has released a report that highlights the major impediments faced by governments in Southeast Asia, when adopting new technology. This Microsoft-backed study, titled “High aspirations, stark realities: Digitizing government in South-East Asia”, is the culmination of EIU’s research efforts that include a survey of 300 technology-sector leaders, as well as interviews with experts in industry, government, academia and the civic sector.

EIU also highlighted the efforts of respective governments, namely in their efforts to digitize their services to make them more accessible to their respective citizens. Besides the pressing need to offer e-government services that are both accessible and easy-to-use, the report also revealed that cloud computing services is seen by Southeast Asian governments (as reflected by 37% of the respondents) as the most essential and secure platform for them to roll out their e-services.

The rationaesl behind Singapore's G-Cloud are the importance of data segregation, and data security.

However, institutional barriers, which exist in each country’s government, impede the adoption of cloud computing technology. The exception in this case would be Singapore as its government has attempted to overcome such barriers with its hybrid approach. According to the Mr. Chan Chew Hoe, who is currently the Assistant Chief Executive, Government Chief Information Office / Government Digital Services at the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), said that Singapore’s G-Cloud is meant to keep sensitive data secure, while at the same time, allowing different government agencies to leverage on the inherent advantages of cloud computing services.

Some countries are deemed as more efficient than others in the adoption of new technologies, and it was surprising to witness Singapore lagging behind the other SEA countries.

As such, it appears that Singapore has always been at the forefront of digitizing government services; however, the new EIU report points to the bane of its own success as only 20% of the sample audience responded positively about Singapore’s efficiency at implementing new technologies. Indonesia had 57% of the respondents who agree that the country is efficient in this aspect. Mr. Chan of IDA said that people in Singapore are sophisticated users of e-services with high expectations, offering a plausible explanation to this anomaly. The report duly noted that such high user expectations will continue to increase and pose a challenge to the government.

Singapore is ranked third by the United Nations on its E-Government Development Index. It also underscores the uneven development and implementation of ICT in SEA.

Being at the forefront of government digitization has allowed Singapore to be ranked third by the United Nations on its E-Government Development Index. The EIU report puts the spotlight on the uneven development of ICT in each country, especially infrastructure implementation in terms of bandwidth, speed, and connectivity. The other major challenge is the ability of staff members to effectively use adopted new technologies.

The EIU report has a lot of descriptive insights, gleaned from the survey responses and in-depth interviews with key government officials. EIU does acknowledge the pitfalls of considering SEA as entire monolithic bloc; however, the report attempts to summarize its recommendations in a three-prong approach to a more successful implementation of government digitization.

  1. First, governments have to be prepared for convergence of information and communication technologies. And Singapore has taken the first steps when it announced the merger of Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) and the Media Development Authority (MDA) will merge to form the Info-communications Media Development Authority (IMDA).
     
  2. Second, there’s a need to think out-of-the-box to solve problems, for example, the report suggests using TV White Space in the wireless spectrum allocation, for wireless broadband access, especially in remote geographical locations.
     
  3. Third, make the use of e-government services by requesting less information from the user as some information can be retrieved automatically from its backend database. The adage "less is more" will definitely help improve the user experience for e-government services, and help meet rising citizens’ expectations.

(Source: EIU via Microsoft)

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