Egovernance must lead to good governance

2006-09-23T15:14:00.000-07:00

The raison d'etre for egovernance is good governance. Good governance is as much about making the right laws as it is about effectively implementing them. It is also as much about framing correct developmental policies as it is about delivering the desired results. People have to stop propagating the idea that egovernance is primarily about delivering information to people through electronic means. Information delivery is no doubt a key function of the government, where information and communication technologies (ICT) could be applied easily. Egovernance, however, refers to the application ICT to the entire gamut of government functioning. Although ICT applications could create egovernment services, such services cannot be termed, ipso facto as egovernance services. To be legitimately classified as egovernance services, ICT applications must also fulfill the good governance norms.

Why is the pace of egovernance implementation so slow?

It is a fact that governments are lagging behind corporate entities considerably in the purposeful use of ICT to its full potential. The reluctance of the governments to embrace egovernance fully emanates from the same mindset that resisted economic liberalization in most countries. In India, for example the demand for telecom regulations was made in the early in the eighties. The reform blue print presented to the government then contained almost everything that Indian government is doing today, after almost 25 years. It would be unfair to take any credit away from the current Indian railway minister for the marvelous turn around that the railways have achieved under his stewardship. What cannot be denied is the fact that the suggestions that are currently being implemented were gathering dust for over 20 years. It would be a pity, if the governments failed to pay the serious attention that the egovernance policy framework deserves.

What difference can it make to countries and the world?

It is time that the governments wake up or are woken up to the urgent need for adopting full scale egovernance for, the benefits that egovernance promises are far greater and more valuable than what economic liberalization brought in. Worldwide adoption of intelligent egovernance systems could yield more prosperity than what could occur under the new international trade regimes of the World Trade Organisation. Quite easily, at least 35 per cent of the transaction costs can be eliminated by the introduction of egovernance. Civil society organizations do have a major role to play in urging the governments to adopt egovernance faster than the pace at which they liberalized economic policies. Egovernance applications can be configured to meet the long standing demands of civil society organizations efficiently.

Egovernance can ensure that every citizen adheres to the laws of the land easily but more importantly. It can also generate the inputs necessary for making better laws. It could be a valuable source of insights for shaping and targeting developmental projects more accurately. Quite obviously it could also lead to efficient project monitoring. Governments could reap the same benefits as companies do by adopting national resource planning applications. Citizens could also gain from applications similar to customer relationship and supply chain management systems.

Why do we need full-scale implementation of egovernance?

Governments have always shown a preference for making marginal changes in policy unless struck by catastrophic events or driven by strong leadership. While competition compels companies to seek knowledge and initiate changes proactively, governments are yet to break free from their conventional monopolistic moulds. As the experience of economic liberalization has proved beyond repudiation, a country benefits only when policy changes address the core. The same principle must apply to egovernance initiatives. Egovernance is a tool that can make governments lean, drastically prune compliance monitoring costs and increase the overall productivity of the entire government machinery. More importantly, it can usher in all-round good governance. There is also a whole range of economies of scale and scope to be harvested while implementing egovernance projects. The initiatives such as the setting up of state wide area networks (SWAN) for creating common data backbone in India is laudable, there is much more to be done with respect to unique identification systems and standardised classifications. These are two vital areas which need the immediate attention of governments. Data generated by egovernance applications must be amenable for aggregation and correlation. Innovative database architectures would be also needed to create a knowledgebase out of the vast amounts information gathered by egovernance applications in real time.

In order to usher in all overall efficiency improvements, egovernance solutions must provide end-to-end solutions. Building just one or two flyovers over a stretch of road with many congestion points only shifts the traffic load to the next bottleneck. Adequate attention must be paid both to terminal and feeder processes as well. It would cost the governments much more to live with dual systems.

Only full-scale implementation of egovernance could help countries to distribute the benefits of such initiatives equitably among all the citizens. Otherwise, egovernance could end up widening the digital divide. Timeliness, efficiency, security, transparency, equity, and responsibility (TESTER) are attributes that more or less sum up the current concerns about the quality of governance. Egovernance has the potential not only to enable governments to score higher on all these parameters but also help redefine the very principles of good governance. It does offer better governance processes and promise a paradigm shift in the quality of governance.

Building efficient egovernance solutions is no mean challenge. Most governance processes have evolved over time mutating through widely varying scenarios and circumstances. While some of these procedures either have become irrelevant or need significant overhaul, most still have strong logic embedded inside. The primary objective of every egovernance application therefore should be to use design frameworks, which help automate the existing processes with minimal modifications. This would be necessary not only for preserving the proven features of current governance systems but also for facilitating easy migration to egovernance with minimal transition costs.

Ensuring timeliness of government actions through egovernance

Though most of the current literature on good governance holds responsiveness as a key attribute of good governance, timeliness is a better goal to strive for. Just as post mortem investigations are not adequate to prevent accidents or violations, just being responsive would never be timely enough to prevent losses caused by both willful and inadvertent violations of law. If only the vast amounts of data collected by the multitude of regulatory compliance monitoring mechanisms could be aggregated and correlated, the government could have a veritable knowledgebase for forecasting potential trouble spots and initiating advance action. The huge amounts of information periodically collected by the government, as of now is hardly used for building the knowledgebase which it badly needs to respond promptly, if not proactively but at least in good time.

Information collected by governments through unstructured paper forms and observations written in non-parameterized text do not lend themselves for meaningful aggregation and analysis. Added to this is the use of multiplicity of overlapping classifications and entity identification codes that severely limit the scope for correlating the data. Good governance is also about keeping close watch on emerging challenges and taking corrective action well before the unforeseen events become unmanageable. Only egovernance systems could help translate all the information that is routinely collected by the government in to a reservoir of knowledge. The effectiveness with which such knowledge bases could be used to minimize the lead-time or response time would certainly depend on the quality of databases.

How would egovernance improve efficiency?

Efficiency is a measure of how well a stated goal is achieved, though how well a goal is conceived is equally important for the outcome. Assuming that the legal and policy frameworks embody the goals of governance, then it is for the administrative processes to accomplish these goals efficiently. Egovernance could help governments achieve their goals better and faster.

Efficiency implies continuous reduction in the input output ratio of any activity during its life span. Time is a precious resource that any country must use most economically and productively to accelerate progress. In most cases of governance, this principle actually translates in to enabling those involved in governance to deliver more tasks in less time.

Paper based systems are major time wasters in more ways than what are apparent on the surface and in comparison with the alternatives offered by egovernance systems. The inability of the paper documents to produce the required information on demand slows down governance processes significantly. Consequently, transaction costs go up. Only well-designed electronic databases could overcome the time costs associated with the collection, storage, and retrieval of data. Every government urgently requires software applications that convert all the information at its disposal in to knowledge bases capable of providing intelligent decision support. Only then countries and governments could achieve compounded growths in efficiency.

The advantages of egovernance systems, however, are not limited to saving on time only. There are numerous other ways in which egovernance advantages efficiency in many other spheres. By enabling the accomplishment of tasks easier, these serve as strong psychological motivators for performance improvements. Electronic data storage systems that form part of egovernance can also relieve the space hogged by record rooms and file racks and create ergonomic working conditions. Just like a healthy body nurtures a healthy mind, good ergonomics also becomes the home to efficiency. Egovernance systems thus provide the launch pad for paradigm shifts in efficiency in governments.

Egovernance applications can ill afford to skip or skirt around well-established administrative processes just because a particular brand of database or enterprise application is unable to handle these. No doubt, governments deal with complex sets of data involving also considerably long entity hierarchies. Decision making processes may not also appear as simple and streamlined as is the case with business enterprises.

Information technology certainly has the wherewithal now to deal with these challenges effectively. All it takes is an innovative data model and appropriate design of process flows. It is therefore best to resist the temptation of copying or superimposing in to egovernance, design patterns and data models that work well for enterprises. It is by addressing the unique requirements governments; egovernance applications could provide solutions that succeed.

Every improvement in efficiency also has a life cycle and a chain of effects. Longer the life cycle and the process chain, the larger .the benefits that accrue. Performance improvements of a lasting nature in core governance functions like regulatory compliance monitoring could bring about much larger gains for the society and the economy in perpetuity. It would be imperative therefore for governments to introduce egovernance in to core areas like compliance monitoring.

Can egovernance create a more secure world?

Security is a primary goal of governance. Security concerns of citizens encompass both internal and external threats to not only life and property but also political, economic, social, and cultural values. Every regulation is related directly or indirectly to the security of a country, people, and resources. A prime aim of good governance must therefore be to make people feel more secure under guaranteed rule of law.

People’s perceptions about security have also a strong psychological dimension. Anxiety over security is often a greater danger than actual threats to security. Citizens expect the governments not only to ensure that everyone complies with the laws of the land but also have the necessary information to track down and prosecute the offenders. They also expect that governments to take good care of the information at its disposal and make the best use of it.

Nothing shatters the confidence of people in governments more than intelligence failures and security leaks. People do feel more secure when they believe that the government has the information and intelligence to prevent and deal with any eventualities. It should be the duty of governments to acquire the required data and knowledge and also let the citizens know that they have what it takes to govern the country well.

Egovernance applications undoubtedly offer better options for making the citizens feel more secure. Egovernance does pave way for more effective administration of laws and significant deepening the intelligence and knowledge of governments. It would be no exaggeration to assume that this knowledgebase could play a more critical role in the longer term, by providing the necessary insights for preventing potential threats to security and continuously improving the laws with the objective of making them more and more result oriented.

Ensuring better compliance alone would not be adequate to make the people feel more secure. People do need reliable information about the effectiveness of compliance monitoring systems to retain their faith in the rule of law. It would do more good to people’s confidence in governance, if the governments publish their regulatory performance balance sheets regularly. Egovernance applications must therefore include provisions for generating performance reports about how well compliance monitoring is being done.

Information technology, which helps build powerful compliance monitoring systems also makes the vast amounts of data collected through such applications vulnerable to unauthorized access and use. It is also therefore necessary for such systems to safeguard the information more effectively and ensure that the privacy of the citizens is not violated.

How would egovernance improve transparency?

It is unrealistic to expect transparency where the laws are opaque. The first priority of any egovernance system therefore, should be to make the laws and rules transparent. In order to accomplish transparency in governance it is also important to make the laws effectively administrable and easily compliable. The full implications all the legal provisions and procedures will need to be made clear and predictable to those who have to comply with these. Egovernance applications can create greater transparency in governance in many ways.

Amplification of laws with objective assessment parameters: Legal provisions that are open to subjective interpretations always give rise to disputes, litigations, and delays in decision-making. It is therefore more important to make the laws and rules transparent, first, to those who administer them. What need to be made clear are the objective conditions based on which decisions could be taken; compliance could be verified or the degree of violation could be assessed? Equally important would be to predefine and standardize such objective parameters and make them universally applicable. This would be very necessary to prevent differing interpretations and uneven applications of laws. In fact, it is only well conceived egovernance systems that can provide some of the critical services such as advance rulings, which would help avoid the huge cost of post mortem investigations, litigations, and liquidation.
Provision of decision support information and guidelines: What often leads to delays or deviations in compliance is the lack of efficient decision support systems. Difficulties in tracing back files or finding the relevant precedents from the piles of paper always impede the process of taking correct decisions. A good egovernance system can also share with the citizens the same historical knowledgebase that clarifies what would be right or wrong legally under different circumstances.
Transparent communication of legal provisions and decisions: The old dictum, which says that ignorance is no excuse before law might be a good argument for winning legal battles, but can never hold good in the good governance context. Clearer the laws, better the chances of compliance. Good governance should therefore focus on enabling compliance first by publicizing the criteria for assessing compliance in simple terms.

Even where non-compliance is observed, the grounds on which violations are recorded also must be clearly stated and communicated. If violation tracking were done scientifically, it would be possible to assign the specific reasons behind such declaration of violation also. There is certainly a strong case for making the regulations and violation declarations more intelligible than black boxes.

Can governance be made more equitable through egovernance? .

In regulatory compliance monitoring systems, equity largely translates in to even handed application of laws and regulations. While transparency and accountability frameworks would address some of the basic issues that result in iniquitous enforcement of laws, governments could go a step further by universalizing and standardizing governance practices and tools.

Egovernance is certainly more equitable for it offers no preferential access to any one invisibly. Nor does it discriminate between different users. More importantly, it democratizes information and has the capacity to reach the citizens faster than any medium. With the rapid growth in information and communication, technologies and the concurrent reductions in costs egovernance would also be economic for governments.

Digital divide is a challenge, but it is not a bigger challenge than the conventional divide that already exists. Egovernance kiosks certainly would help bridge the divide more easily. The missing link is in the area of applications. Only web services are amenable for successful delivery of governance services through kiosks. Secondly, egovernance applications could also use distributed database architecture to universalize egovernance services without having to wait for the availability of bandwidth.

How egovernance can make governments more responsible?

Assuming total responsibility for its acts of omission and commission befits good governments more than mere accountability. Responsibility implies not only pinpointing errors but also making good the losses caused by such errors. In order for the governments to be responsible, it is important to create proper accountability systems and liability regimes. More often, the governments escape the burden of responsibility, simply because of the absence of well-defined accountability frameworks.

Implementing accountability frameworks indeed becomes a difficult proposition particularly where the decision making process gets complex. The longer the administrative hierarchy, the larger the amount of data that is necessary to delineate the role, which each one plays in the outcome. Although placing the blame entirely on the final decision making authority is a convenient legal option, it would be hardly of any use for identifying the gaps or faults in the system that leave room for wrong decisions.

Accountability frameworks also grow in complexity when responsibilities are to be fixed for acts of both commission and omission. In fact, identifying inaction is bigger challenge. Though the right to information law makes it obligatory for the government to part with the information necessary for making its actions transparent, accountability could be traced only if the right type of information exists in official records. In order to facilitate fix accountabilities fairly, egovernance applications would need to build in a few key features.

Unique identification of functional roles and actions: Accountability can be established only when the ownership of each action is clearly identifiable, even when people play multiple roles within a given organizational unit. Egovernance systems must assign and maintain independent identification codes for every user, each functional role, and the organisational entity. Every data entered must carry full identification of its author with reference to every action.

Preservation of original and modified records with time stamps: Maintenance of adequate and unassailable records about the sequence of events leading up to a decision or action is another key requirement for proper identification of accountability. Every data must be stored with time stamps. The sanctity of official records must be also preserved. Once an official record is created, deletions must not be permitted and safeguards must be provided against tampering. Whenever the owner or any other competent person who has the authority to do so modifies a record, the original record should be archived. The archived data should also be always available for future reference and analysis.

Use of standardized assessment forms and procedures: Egovernance applications must use standardized forms with predefined fields and specific instructions with respect to each uniquely identified regulation. This would make it easy to track down deviations as also negligence.

Where are the core egovernance applications?

However, hardly any egovernance applications fully address the needs of core egovernance needs. It is also equally difficult to find enough academic or technical literature that deal specifically with the protocols, standards and implementation frameworks, which should be adopted while developing software applications for regulatory compliance monitoring. Although, there has been a surge of studies in recent times on the pre-requisites of good governance, yet very little is written about translating these key requirements in to software applications.

Most of the technical literature on egovernance also suffers from a basic anomaly of not making the required distinction between egovernance applications and straightforward adoptions of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Replacing typewriters with computer-based word processors would no doubt improve the efficiency of document creation in government offices but still cannot be categorized as egovernance. In order to be legitimately grouped under egovernance, ICT applications must actually perform well on the good governance scale. Egovernance applications can be only as good as the extent to which they help good governance besides bringing about improvements in efficiency.

Egovernance applications required for automating the core functions of the government are not easy to conceive or implement for, its mandates are very different from enterprise applications that most of us are familiar with. Technology is no more a barrier for building effective egovernance solutions. The challenge lays in creating application frameworks and data models that are capable of handling the complex data sets and creating a knowledgebase out of the vast information collected through the compliance monitoring process. Egovernance databases do need a comprehensively different architecture for gathering both quantitative and qualitative information and making in depth analyses possible. Standardization of classifications, unique identification codes for all entities and parameterization of input values on a national scale would be of paramount importance for designing good egovernance systems

Enterprise applications that essentially focus on number crunching fail to provide the implementation framework for regulatory compliance monitoring. This fact is more than amply borne out by the fact that there is hardly any worthwhile regulatory compliance monitoring software applications available in the world. A query fired on Google with - regulatory compliance monitoring system - as keywords resulted in bringing up a brief write up on the Indian Mine Safety Information System (IMSIS) posted on the web site of Ministry of Information Technology of the Government of India. A repeat query on Google with - regulatory compliance monitoring software - as keywords did not return any vendors offering such software. The results fetched by Google pertained to mostly enterprise solutions

The above discussion is based on the features of a regulatory compliance monitoring application running at the Directorate General of Mines Safety, Government of India. More information can be had from me. This software application does provide a replicable framework for a variety of core egovernance functions

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Egovernance must lead to good governance