Volume 16, No. 2, July 2006
This is vacation time for most academics and also the time to be attending conferences, traveling around and networking. I have just been to a research conference on the practice of E-Government in South Asia organized by the Business and Economics Department of Monash University on their Caulfield Campus in Melbourne. There were about 30 attendees including researchers from all the South Asian countries. It was nice to see more academics taking interest in ICT for development issues. The department is embarking on an ambitious program of research with collaboration between their faculty and academics from other countries in the region, particularly from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India. Perhaps WG 9.4 could forge some links with the group.
The action on the ground lags considerably behind the pronouncements made in conferences. All the talk in WSIS not withstanding, the idea of an information society is progressing slowly in the developing World. India had embarked on an ambitious National e-Government program which includes the creation of a 100,000 rural Internet Kiosks. The program is making a slow progress. Similarly, the e-Lanka program has been hampered by political and administrative changes and is at least a year behind schedule. The bottleneck is almost always the internal capacity within Governments to manage the roll out of any large program.
Even as the Government apparatus moves slowly, we have some confirmation that electronic delivery of services is delivering some concrete benefits to citizens and businesses. The catch is that such projects need to be implemented successfully. The projects should be up and running without hardware/software/electricity failure and a willing workforce that adheres to hopefully robust procedures. These positive findings emerge from preliminary results of a systematic impact assessment study funded by the World Bank and IIMA in which researchers from IIMA and LSE are participating. Ten mature projects form India (Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Gujarat) and Chile are being assessed. A key part of the assessment is a survey of a reasonably large random sample of clients (citizens and businesses) that have used both the manual system and the computerized system. A comparative assessment of manual and computerized system on direct costs of accessing services, quality of service, quality of governance, indicates marginal to significant improvements. The impact will also be compared across the ten projects, as all the projects have been rated on a common set of 18 desirable attributes. The surveys were conducted by a Market Research Agency. The team hopes be able to share results by the end of October. Another part of the research study is to explain the factors that contributed to the impact.
I return to my usual crib before I sign off. We need more active participation from our readers. There has been a suggestion that we should convert the newsletter into a blog. Any supporters of the idea?