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Challenges and Issues in e-Government Project

Assessment

Government of Pakistan has felt it necessary to create a rational framework for assessing e-
Governance projects on various dimensions. E-government is still in its infancy all over the
world. The e-governance is electronic delivery of government services to the people whereas
the potential for e- governance is beyond electronic delivery, which is explained in detail in
this research paper. Government can improve the system as well as economic conditions of
our country, by focusing on e-governance. Nowadays, the wealth of a nation is not judged by
its physical assets. It is determined by the technological gaps between the 'haves' and the
'have-nots'. We can say that the e-governance would be the first step toward modernizes
governmental administrative structures. The challenge of transformation and the increasing
need to modernize administrative practices and management systems has become a major
goal to Governments Worldwide. This is more so in the last one-decade and especially the
last four years in Pakistan. The paper puts across the key issues and challenges in assessing e-
Gov projects and proposes a model which has been piloted in one of the assessment studies at
the national level in Pakistan.

Keywords
E-Government, assessment, framework, stakeholders, best practices, results, enablers.

Why e-Gov Project Assessment in Pakistan?


 To assess to what extent an e-Governance project is Delivering value to its
stakeholders.
 To build the trust and confidence of stakeholders.
 To create a bench mark for future projects.
 To learn key determinants from successful and failed projects.
 To provide guidelines for shaping future e-governance projects.

Objectives of an Assessment Framework:


To assess whether and to what extent a given e-Governance project has the characteristics of
a good e-governance project delivering "Value" to stakeholders.
To guide in funding of e-governance projects at various stages of their life-cycle (newly
Starting, roll-out, scaling up, replication).
An assessment exercise involves a tedious process, in terms of capacity, time, and resources;
if the intention is to assess an e-Gov project thoroughly. E-Gov projects
Involve a number of stakeholders, whose expectations from the project needs to be
Addressed.
There are three kinds of situations that require evaluation in e-Gov. One is the
Environment; second is evaluating the performance of an e-Gov programmer or project;
And third is the overall impact of e-Gov on general government functioning, economic
Development and citizen servicing.

The broad objectives are:


• Identify and evaluate the costs and benefits of e-governance projects among the
intended stake holders, with key focus on costs.
• Assess the impact of the project on transparency, accountability and corruption within
the scope of system.
• Identify the gaps in implementation, explore the strategies deployed for overcoming the
gaps or challenges, and provide suggestions for a sustainable impact.

A Factor Model for e-Government Success and Failure in pakistan :


This model summarizes the reasons behind success and failure of e-government projects.
Left-pointing items encourage failure; right-pointing items encourage success. The factors
are explained in more detail in the tables below.

 Internal political desire has been defined as a drive from key government official
including relevant ministers for reform and for achievement of e-government goals.
 Overall vision and strategy stands for the overall vision and master plan for good
governance and for e-government, identifying the target and viewing IT as the means
not the end, and integrating IT with broader reform objectives
 Dominance of politics/ Self interest: the change agents who will take the project
forward may have self interest and/or politically dominant situation favorable to the
project initiative.
 Strong change management which includes but not limited to leadership with a
project champion, use of incentives to create commitment to and ownership of e-
government project, and stakeholder involvement to build support and minimize
resistance.
 Effective project management includes defining clear responsibilities, having good
planning and consideration of risk, good monitoring and control system putting in
place, good organization of resources, and well-managed partnerships between public
agencies, and public-private joint initiatives.
 Competencies among the officials involve with this project is the issues of the
capacity and knowledge level among the government officials about e-government
concepts and practices.
 Adequate technological infrastructure includes computerization system, telecom
policies, ICT policies etc. Other factor, being the last, was given to list any factor that
respondents believe important but not presented as option.
 Absences of success factors are presented as the reasons for failure of e-government
projects in Pakistan. For example, lack of internal political desire was the first option
as the failure factor.
 Moreover, number and pattern of options specified as the failure factors were same as
success factor including others as the last option. Assumption here were factor which
may contribute for success may not be the main reason for failure due to its absence.
For example, political desire along may not be enough to successfully implement e-
government. However, lack of political desire may work as a high barrier to
implement e-government.
Constraints/Challenges:

Human resource loads . Human resource issues have also been a constraint to Pakistan
progress because of the massive HR requirements the project imposes. Lack of staff/skills and the
difficulties of hiring short-term staff have led to some delays.

Equipment shortage: Shortage of equipment (i.e. computers, scanners, sensors and other
related accessories) has also been a major constraint in deriving maximum benefit from this
exercise and in meeting timescales.

Political instability: Although not a current issue for NADRA, large-scale information
systems projects in Pakistan have often faced the challenge of political instability. Changes of
governments have been frequent in Pakistan. Often, one government starts a project and
when the next regime takes over, it immediately stops the project more on political than on
cost/benefit grounds.

Who should do the Assessment in Pakistan?

There is a general consensus on a third-party assessment in order to get an unbiased view.


However, the basic problem is that the outside agency is not able to devote the required time
in order to really get the assessment viewpoint.

An external agency should do the assessment in order to get an unbiased view. This agency is
primarily dependent on the project owners for all the project related information. The issue is,
why not develop a self assessment Framework? In fact, by providing a self-assessment tool
the project owners shall be in a better position to assess the projects on an on-going basis.
Moreover they have the assessment indicators and attributes as yardstick for assessing the
projects right from the project conceptualization phase; thereby developing efficient and
holistic e-Gov projects.

The Need for Assessment Frameworks:

Replication of similar kinds of projects has to be undertaken across the country, it calls for a
greater need for the assessment frameworks that help one to learn the factors resulting in the
success or a failure of a project. This also provides for a feedback to the stakeholders
involved in the project regarding the health of the project
Assessment exercise involves a tedious process if the intention is to assess an e-Government
project thoroughly, meeting the desired objectives, like: the success as defined by the extent
to which it achieved the purpose it was designed, whether the project is replicable or not,
among others. This is because each of the e-Government projects involves a number of
stakeholders from whose perspectives the project needs to be looked at, and further it
involves a number of parameters and attributes which adds to the amount of effort required in
order to make for a reasonably comprehensive assessment.
Challenges and Issues in Project Assessment in Pakistan:
The different dimensions and perspectives of e-Gov project assessment:
 Service user’s point of view, in terms of
• Cost of availing the Govt. service
• Time for delivery of service
• Convenience of availing the service
• Compliance of RTI Act
• Transparency in Govt. functioning
 Government point of view, in terms of
• ROI
• Immediate impact on service users
• Internal efficiency – process reforms
• Impact on internal employees
• Sustainability
• Long term overall impact
 Funding Agency point of view, in terms of
• ROI
• Business model
• Immediate impact on service users
 Public Private Partner (if it is a PPP model), in terms of
• Business model - ROI
• Compliance to Service Levels
• Enhancement of service and reach
 Others
• At National level from replication perspective
• Academics - in terms of understanding the patterns and see the intricate details
of assessment
Who is interested to learn from assessment?
One of the major objectives of assessment is to learn and develop on the weak areas.
However, in reality the assessment results are taken merely to showcase if the project is
found to be a good one. It is observed that if the project has not been assessed as a good
project, no one looks into the report for improvements in the project. If we have a self-
assessment framework, which will be done out of self interest, the project owners’ will
always strive to understand and strengthen the weak areas of the project.

What is the learning from assessment studies?


Assessments should identify Best Practices. This must be a key objective of assessment and
focus should be on identifying the best practices w.r.t. different aspects of e-Gov project e.g.
Business model, PPP model, Change Management strategy, technology architecture, Service
levels, etc. Presently, the assessments study the models and practices being adopted in the
specific projects and do not have an objective to bring out the best practices from them.

What should be the periodicity of assessments?


Different components of assessment can be assessed only after a certain period of
deployment of the e-Gov project. A complete assessment on all components cannot be
carried out altogether at the same time. Actually, one set of assessment as checklist would be
recommended just before the project is being implemented. Subsequently, assessment could
be done on yearly basis. This could be considered an extension to the yearly audit process,
and include it as a regular feature of work at office. Since assessment provides critical inputs
to the project owners for improvement, it can also act as a stakeholder need assessment tool.

Constraints driving assessment and assessment exercises:

 Time
 Lack of comprehensive assessment framework:
 Non-availability of base-line data
 Lack of high visibility for assessment reports
 Funds required for holistic assessment

MODELS and techniques:


 Simple Factor Rating
 Design-Reality Gap Assessment

To support such a framework the need arises for a categorization of the


various risk factors that surround e-Government projects. This part of the
paper shall introduce the main risk factors areas that will be considered
for extracting risk elements to be used in the risk assessment process.
Experience from the electronic commerce/business domain and the
relevant literature show that some have attempted to classify risks in all
sorts of high-level categories according to the nature of the risks. To name
a few, Tchankova (2002) proposed seven different classes of risks,
namely: i) physical, ii) social, iii) political, iv) operational, v) economic, vi)
legal, and vii) cognitive environment. Additionally, Liebermann (2002)
distinguished five different areas of risk in the eCommerce field, which are
the: i) financial, ii) physical, iii) psychological, iv) social, and v)
technological. Furthermore, in the ‘Integrated Risk Management
Framework’ (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat 2001 p. 9) the
following main classification of potential risks influencing an organization
are identified: i) political, ii) economic, iii) social, and iv) technological.

In that fashion and for the purposes of this research programmed this
paper proposes the following high level classification of risk factors that
surround e-Government projects:

FRAMES – A Framework for Risk Assessment and Modeling in


Government Services
As explained in the introduction, the Framework for Risk Assessment & Modeling in e-
Government Services aims at the provision of a methodology for efficient qualitative risk
assessment in e-Government services.
Within that context FRAMES provides a way of implementing risk assessment in e-Services.
As such, any e-Government transaction service project is seen (Figure 2) as an STS that
comprises of three main socio-technical subsystems that interconnect four main modules of
the transaction service project. These four main modules are: i) the customers, ii) the e-
Service, iii) the organizational level, and iv) the intra-organizational service.

Risk assessment stages


FRAMES adopt from the BS-6079-3 Standard the risk assessment sub-process. Therefore,
the risk assessment process within FRAMES will consist of the following stages
i) context establishment,
ii) risk identification,
iii) risk analysis, and
iv) risk evaluation.
Context Establishment – The first stage of FRAMES is responsible for establishing the broad
context within which risk assessment will be done. This stage mainly (but not limited to)
includes knowledge acquisition, which will eventually set the measures of the various risks’
impact. The knowledge acquisition stage defines the long term (strategic) goals of the
system/organization, as well as the medium term (organizational) goals and the short term
(management) goals. Then the risk assessor has to define the threats to these goals.
Furthermore, another part of the ‘context establishment’ stage is to develop various criteria,
such as to decide on the key actors/stakeholders. The final phase of this stage is to decide on
the structure, which will tackle the issue of choosing what sort of qualitative risk assessment
approach /approaches is more suitable, as well as the initial presentation of the risk
assessment area to the stakeholders.
Risk Identification – Here lies the process of identifying the risks, as well as how, what or
why incidents may occur. To achieve risk identification various methods can be used each of
them having their own advantages and disadvantages. FRAMES will employ risk
identification techniques that enable qualitative risk assessment. Some of them may be the
following: i) semi-structured interviews, ii) brainstorming, iii) Nominal Group Technique, iv)
Delphi method, and v) checklists. Of course other suitable qualitative techniques can be used
in FRAMES. Risk Analysis – It is a stage, where an estimation of both the probability of the
occurrence of a risk and the magnitude of the consequences of the risk happens.
Risk Evaluation – During this process the consequences of the risks are leveled after their
impact/magnitude

Recommendations

 Successful e-government projects require resource commitments:


 This means commitments of money, staff and equipment that must be present to
sustain not merely project implementation, but also ongoing project operation.
Sustainability of projects requires sustainable supply of resources. This applies
equally to the resource of political support. Key stakeholders must support the e-
government project both internally and externally, and must continue to support it
throughout its life.
 Where personal data is involved, security and privacy issues must be
addressed :
 Projects like e.gov are taking on a great responsibility: centralizing a large set of
personal data (about individuals' health, criminal record, etc.), making that data
accessible online, and transferring large amounts of that data via networks. Such
projects must give a high priority to issues of data security and data privacy: setting in
place encryption, passwords, firewalls, and personnel policies that minimize the risk
of data being corrupted or accessed illegally; and setting out a clear policy about
ownership, responsibility, access and use for all data items.
 Stakeholder skills and awareness often need rising:
 In setting up a central e-government facility, care must be taken to attend also to the
skills and awareness of other stakeholders involved. Users within government must be
trained: not just to use the new technologies, but also to understand and manipulate
the data they are accessing. Citizens, too, must understand more about data and more
about ICTs if they are to be true stakeholders in such e-government projects, rather
than merely passive observers.

Concluding Remarks
Coming up with effective assessment methods for e-Government projects in the presence of
practical constraints is of great importance and is also a need of the hour. We explain various
meta-theoretic considerations that one must keep in mind while thinking of the assessment
methodologies in this paper. Given the challenges and issues for assessment as explained in
this paper, identification of the broad parameters of evaluation must be done with a definite
goal in mind. Our effort is towards locating that definiteness with the idea of “what is
achieved” or Results and “what is done to achieve” or Enablers. We feel that this is a
reasonable approach to form a base for comprehensive assessments frameworks in the future.

The Electronic Government phenomenon is gaining momentum at a quick pace. Worldwide,


public administrations seem to invest heavily on that trend. Unfortunately though, together
with its expected dynamic potential this concept surely entails some risks, which can become
threats (if not taken care of); or exploitable opportunities, if systematic risk assessment
methods are put in place. This paper introduced the reader to the e-Government risk and
provided a high-level risk factors classification termed STEPS. Furthermore, this article
introduced and described a novel qualitative multi-perspective risk assessment framework for
e-Services in the public administration, which is called FRAMES. Potentially, such risk
assessment framework may find applicability in areas like planning or qualification for
eServices in the public sector.

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