Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Rethinking eGovernance
CeTIT 2010
Chennai, July 27 2010
Gurumurthy K, IT for Change
www.ITforChange.net
www.PublicSoftware.in
www.PublicSoftwareCentre.org
http://www.itforchange.net/component/content/article/165guru.html
● 5 years in Management Consulting at KPMG Consulting
●12 years in IT – Software products and services development and
deployment at Oracle Financial Services
● 6 years in Development Sector at IT for Change
●How ICTs can support development
●IT and governance, social policy, gender and equity
Origin of IT in the business world
● 1980's software applications on larger commercial basis
● Began with Financial Accounting and Payroll
● Driven by the CIOs
● Line departments passive
● Easy to computerise, no real benefits
● Focus on technology aspects (connectivity, application, hardware)
● Line departments took charge over time
● MRP, ERP, Global Finance
● Real value to business
● CIO as a enabler, not driver
● Focus on business and not technology
Similar story with eGovernance
EGovernance 1.0 → last decade (2000 to 2010) a lost decade
Largely Technology driven
Applications and hardware 'gizmos'
Focus on software processes and business models
Less focus on social and political processes
Less linkages to the concerns of governance
Primacy to Government + Vendors
(little role for civil society/ community other than as 'users')
Time has come to mature
from eGovernance 1.0 to eGovernance 2.0
Public Community
Technologies + Informatics
ICTs critical role in governance
EGovernance 2.0 ?
● Public Technologies = Public Software + Public Content
+ Public Connectivity
+
● Community Informatics = Ownership and participation of
community in ICT design and deployment
●ICT as a critical and necessary service
● As much as education or health or livelihoods
● Needs to be looked at from social and political perspective
Development perspective on eGovernance – to
address critical governance issues
Look at eGovernance from the perspective of development, equity
and social justice (concerns of governance)
●Decentralisation from central through state, district, block levels
●Empower the government extension worker
●Community participation in local government (social
audit/NREGA)
●Right to Information
Benefits of 'Public Technologies'
Public ownership allows sharing across governments and public
●
institutions
Similar applications in a wide variety of areas can be commonly
●
developed and maintained
Costs of maintenance and support fractional, more importantly the
●
public control over the application development is retained
Public Standards (DIT Open Standards for eGovernance)
●
Standards, software, fonts, protocols, formats all digital resources
●
used in government need to be publicly owned for universal access
Implications of private control/ownership
●NREGA in Andhra Pradesh a case of issues with privatisation of
software used for public good
●The real 'expertise' is the domain understanding
●Yet ownership of this 'IP' with private party (technology vendor)
●Negative consequences for sharing/dissemination of the application
●Costs and development cycles prohibitive
Many such cases of vendor lockin – costly, inefficient and affects
●
deployment on wider basis
Imagine – Government school system entirely under private control
●
Benefits of Public Software
Government and community benefits
●Benefits at citizen/community level from existing public software
●RTI implemented at no additional cost to citizen
●easy to install and use, single installation for hundreds of tools
●secure/safe environment
●free to share, free to modify/enhance and share back
IIM A study computes Rs 20,000 crores savings annually for India
on license fees for proprietary software, if public software adopted
Tamil Nadu Government a leader in public software adoption
Challenges
Reasons for software development largely in private sector
● Pace of change of technology, innovation
● Availability of skills
● Structural issues with governments
Issues of support and training/capacity building
● Limited awareness of potential of ICT in government and community
Need for hybrid models
● Collaborative production (NIC + Technology vendors)
● Outright purchase / larger scale
● Greater ownership and participation by the line department
● More scope as domains mature
● Private sector freed of public system accountability requirements
Public Software Centre
●Public Software Centre support public software adoption
●Awareness > appreciation > adoption > promotion approach
●User awareness and orientation, training, installation and support
●Virtual repository for public software – for sharing across institutions
●Support and collaboration with government and non governmental
agencies, civil society, FOSS communities and enterprises and academic
institutions to create and sustain public software ecosystem
●Centre in India with support from Government of Kerala and UNESCO
●Brazil Public Software Centre
●South American Public Software Centre
Public Software Policy
● Guiding Principles for Public Software – Bangalore and Kochi workshops
●Public ownership
●Public repositories
●New structures of government – public ICT institutions,
collaborations with private sector, FOSS enterprises and FOSS
communities
●Kerala public software policy
●Brazil public software policy
●Tamil Nadu leadership to create a Public Software Policy
● TN GO on UNICODE adoption in eGovernance a good starting
point